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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 1,045 records · Page 58
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

Numerical Optimization of Spray-Guided Spark Assistance for Cold Idle Operation in a Heavy-Duty Gasoline Compression Ignition Engine

This article describes the results of a response surface model (RSM)-based numerical optimization campaign for spray-guided spark assistance at cold operations in a heavy-duty gasoline compression ignition (GCI) engine. On the basis of an earlier work on spark-assisted GCI cold combustion, a space-filling design of experiments (DoE) method was first undertaken to investigate a multitude of hardware design variables and engine operating parameters. The main design variables included the number of injector nozzles, fuel split quantities and injection timings, and spark timing. The objective variables were engine combustion efficiency (ŋ c ), maximum pressure rise rate (MPRR), and engine-out nitrogen oxide (NO x ) emissions. A total of 150 design candidates were automatically generated using the Sobol sequence method provided by the commercial software package, CAESES. Then, closed-cycle computational fluid dynamic (CFD) spark-assisted GCI simulations under cold idling operations were performed. The outcomes from the CFD-DoE design campaign were utilized to construct high-fidelity RSMs that allowed for further design optimization of the spark plug- and fuel injector-related design variables, along with fuel injection strategy parameters. A merit function with respect to objective variables was formulated with an appropriate weight assignment on each objective variable. Finally, the best design candidate was identified from the RSM-based optimization process and further validated in the CFD analysis. The best design candidate showed the potential to significantly improve combustion efficiency (ŋ c > 90%) over the baseline at cold idle while satisfying MPRR and NOx emissions constraints (MPRR < 5 bar/CAD and NO x < 4.5 g/kWh).

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Commercial Building Energy Saver, API

The CBES API provides Application Programming Interface to a suite of functions to improve energy efficiency of buildings, including building energy benchmarking, preliminary retrofit analysis using a pre-simulation database DEEP, and detailed retrofit analysis using energy modeling with the EnergyPlus simulation engine. The CBES API is used to power the LBNL CBES Web App. It can be adopted by third party developers and vendors into their software tools and platforms.

Hong, Tianzhen↗
DOE OSTI2022

In-Water Data Acquisition Tool Supports Four Marine Energy Projects

The NREL-developed Modular Ocean Data Acquisition (MODAQ) system is built from open-source hardware and software. The tool can both collect and store data and even share curated information through the cloud. Marine energy developers can work with NREL's engineers to design their own customized MODAQ and capture high-quality field data to help monitor and improve their technology designs. For example, users could assess how much power their device produces at sea, analyze the durability of a specific device component, or even control their device from a desk halfway around the world.

data acquisition↗
DOE OSTI2022

System Analysis Modeling and Intermodal Transportation for Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has long term goals to develop solutions for managing the nation’s spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level waste (HLW) inventory. The Integrated Waste Management (IWM) program under the DOE office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) is employing system-level engineering and analysis principles to inform potential future waste management system architectures. Managing the spent nuclear waste requires the use of system-level analysis software that takes various aspects of the fuel cycle into account like waste generation, on-site/centralized storage, transportation infrastructure, and long-term disposal. The Next Generation System Analysis Model (NGSAM) is an agent-based model that was developed to simulate the transportation and storage of SNF and HLW. As an agent-based model, NGSAM has the capability to detail the interaction and movement of individual components and groups, such as rail cars and casks. The SNF inventory from commercial nuclear reactors is currently in temporary storage at multiple locations spread across the United States. Shipping of SNF from these locations relies on one of three transportation modes: rail, heavy-haul truck, or barge. Out of the three modes identified, rail is generally the most preferred due to the size of the canisters and casks the SNF would be shipped in. However, under some scenarios, a direct rail route might not be readily available to a reactor site or improving the rail infrastructure at shutdown sites might be too cost-prohibitive for utilities to opt for a direct rail transfer. Under such scenarios, using a barge or heavy haul truck to de-inventory the site and transfer the SNF to a nearby intermodal transfer site with adequate rail infrastructure where the payload could be transferred to a rail car might prove to be an attractive option. This work initially presents the various intermodal transportation options that could be used to transfer SNF from reactor sites to rail cars. This is followed by exploring the operational steps in each of these modes to move the SNF from a reactor site and transfer it to a rail car. This work also presents the procedure of implementing the intermodal transfer methodology in NGSAM using various Java methods. Finally, the process times for accomplishing each of the individual steps are furnished. The implementation ideology, assumptions, and future steps are presented in this work.

Gadey, Harish Reddy↗
DOE OSTI2016

NECP-Cypress: Development and Benchmarking of a 3D PWR Core-Analysis Code

As one of the key components of nuclear reactor design and safety analysis software for Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR), the advance of the core-analysis code indicates the nuclear power development of the corresponding country. Hence, Nuclear Engineering Computational Physics Lab. (NECP) developed a PWR core-analysis code NECP-Cypress. Currently, it contains several modules including a generalized cross section module, a diffusion module using the Variational Nodal Method (VNM), a depletion-calculation using the traditional macroscopic module, a thermal-hydraulics module solving the single channel heat transfer equation and 1D heat conduction equation. With the VNM employed, NECP-Cypress can eliminate the control rod cusping effect and provide a better pin power reconstruction. In this paper, we firstly introduce the modules of the code NECP-Cypress. Secondly, two large-scale PWR core benchmarks were employed to demonstrate the ability of the code by comparing with SIMULATE-3, including the BEAVRS problem and a pseudo CAP1400 reactor core problem. (authors)

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Diversity and defense-in-depth analysis for I and C systems of research reactors: A case study on two research reactors - 376

This paper provides the analysis results of the diversity and defense-in-depth (D3) applied to two research reactors designed by the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. The D3 assessments for instrumentation and control (I and C) systems of two research reactors are performed according to the guidelines documented in NUREG/CR-6303. The I and C systems are classified into four echelons of defense: control echelon, reactor trip echelon, engineered safety feature (ESF) actuation echelon, and monitoring and indication echelon. The diversity between the echelons of defense is assessed to determine that a single software common cause failure (CCF) does not impair the functions of multiple echelons of defense. In addition, the effects of a software CCF of the reactor protection system on the design basis events of the research reactors are analyzed by assuming that the automated reactor trip and ESF actuation functions of the reactor protection system are inoperable due to the software CCF. From the D3 analyses for the research reactors, it is verified that (1) adequate diversity has been provided, (2) adequate defense-in-depth has been provided, and (3) the displays and manual controls for critical safety functions initiated by operator action are diverse from digital systems used in the automatic portion of the protection system. (authors)

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Videoshare

SAND2023-05132O Videoshare is an application that allows users to communicate in a variety of ways, including voice, video, and text, over a local network without having to use a central server or an internet connection. The software features: • Screen-sharing and connecting to external IP cameras. • Ability to hold group calls on computers running the same software and network. • Ability to connect to other computers running the same software. • Curating potential connections and manually adding IP addresses to available connections. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

McIlraith, Aiden↗
DOE OSTI2013

Automated Cache Performance Analysis And Optimization

While there is no lack of performance counter tools for coarse-grained measurement of cache activity, there is a critical lack of tools for relating data layout to cache behavior to application performance. Generally, any nontrivial optimizations are either not done at all, or are done ”by hand” requiring significant time and expertise. To the best of our knowledge no tool available to users measures the latency of memory reference instructions for particular addresses and makes this information available to users in an easy-to-use and intuitive way. In this project, we worked to enable the Open|SpeedShop performance analysis tool to gather memory reference latency information for specific instructions and memory addresses, and to gather and display this information in an easy-to-use and intuitive way to aid performance analysts in identifying problematic data structures in their codes. This tool was primarily designed for use in the supercomputer domain as well as grid, cluster, cloud-based parallel e-commerce, and engineering systems and middleware. Ultimately, we envision a tool to automate optimization of application cache layout and utilization in the Open|SpeedShop performance analysis tool. To commercialize this software, we worked to develop core capabilities for gathering enhanced memory usage performance data from applications and create and apply novel methods for automatic data structure layout optimizations, tailoring the overall approach to support existing supercomputer and cluster programming models and constraints. In this Phase I project, we focused on infrastructure necessary to gather performance data and present it in an intuitive way to users. With the advent of enhanced Precise Event-Based Sampling (PEBS) counters on recent Intel processor architectures and equivalent technology on AMD processors, we are now in a position to access memory reference information for particular addresses. Prior to the introduction of PEBS counters, cache behavior could only be measured reliably in the aggregate across tens or hundreds of thousands of instructions. With the newest iteration of PEBS technology, cache events can be tied to a tuple of instruction pointer, target address (for both loads and stores), memory hierarchy, and observed latency. With this information we can now begin asking questions regarding the efficiency of not only regions of code, but how these regions interact with particular data structures and how these interactions evolve over time. In the short term, this information will be vital for performance analysts understanding and optimizing the behavior of their codes for the memory hierarchy. In the future, we can begin to ask how data layouts might be changed to improve performance and, for a particular application, what the theoretical optimal performance might be. The overall benefit to be produced by this effort was a commercial quality easy-to- use and scalable performance tool that will allow both beginner and experienced parallel programmers to automatically tune their applications for optimal cache usage. Effective use of such a tool can literally save weeks of performance tuning effort. Easy to use. With the proposed innovations, finding and fixing memory performance issues would be more automated and hide most to all of the performance engineer expertise ”under the hood” of the Open|SpeedShop performance tool. One of the biggest public benefits from the proposed innovations is that it makes performance analysis more usable to a larger group of application developers. Intuitive reporting of results. The Open|SpeedShop performance analysis tool has a rich set of intuitive, yet detailed reports for presenting performance results to application developers. Our goal was to leverage this existing technology to present the results from our memory performance addition to Open|SpeedShop. Suitable for experts as well as novices. Application performance is getting more difficult to measure as the hardware platforms they run on become more complicated. This makes life difficult for the application developer, in that they need to know more about the hardware platform, including the memory system hierarchy, in order to understand the performance of their application. Some application developers are comfortable in that sceario, while others want to do their scientific research and not have to understand all the nuances in the hardware platform they are running their application on. Our proposed innovations were aimed to support both experts and novice performance analysts. Useful in many markets. The enhancement to Open|SpeedShop would appeal to a broader market space, as it will be useful in scientific, commercial, and cloud computing environments. Our goal was to use technology developed initially at the and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory combined with the development and commercial software experience of the Argo Navis Technologies, LLC (ANT) to form a powerful combination to delivery these objectives.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

System Integration for Remote Systems at DOE Hanford Nuclear Site - 18712

The deployment of remotely operated technology that functions in environments too hazardous for worker entry are often needed at the Hanford Site to perform functions like infrastructure inspection; decommissioning and decontamination; characterization; environmental sampling; and nuclear waste sampling, mobilization, and retrieval. The development and production of Hanford remote systems typically requires the integration of robotic components and sensor technologies that have been engineered or adapted to meet function and performance requirements. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has led the engineering and integration of robotic and sensor/manipulator technology for several remote system deployments at Hanford and for national security sponsors. This paper describes the system integration process for ensuring that the mechanical, electrical, and software aspects of each component are successfully brought together to produce a remote system that meets function and performance requirements under extreme environments and limited-access operational demands. A brief summary of previous and current remote system projects is also provided. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2013

NREL Software Aids Offshore Wind Turbine Designs (Fact Sheet)

NREL researchers are supporting offshore wind power development with computer models that allow detailed analyses of both fixed and floating offshore wind turbines. While existing computer-aided engineering (CAE) models can simulate the conditions and stresses that a land-based wind turbine experiences over its lifetime, offshore turbines require the additional considerations of variations in water depth, soil type, and wind and wave severity, which also necessitate the use of a variety of support-structure types. NREL's core wind CAE tool, FAST, models the additional effects of incident waves, sea currents, and the foundation dynamics of the support structures.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2013

Progress of the Computer-Aided Engineering of Electric Drive Vehicle Batteries (CAEBAT) (Presentation)

This presentation, Progress of Computer-Aided Engineering of Electric Drive Vehicle Batteries (CAEBAT) is about simulation and computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools that are widely used to speed up the research and development cycle and reduce the number of build-and-break steps, particularly in the automotive industry. Realizing this, DOE?s Vehicle Technologies Program initiated the CAEBAT project in April 2010 to develop a suite of software tools for designing batteries.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2026

Resilience Through Data-Driven, Intelligent Designed Control: A Formal Methods Approach

The PNNL and GTRI team developed a strategy to integrate temporal logic rule specification for detection of cyber-intrusion in the source code and control algorithms of CPS using advanced cyber-data. The GTRI team utilized its capabilities in rule synthesis and temporal logic specifications for software assurance and verification to detect and predict impact of cyber-intrusions and malware in the computational and control algorithms of cyber-physical systems. The team also developed a testing and verification approach that could be used to validate the suggested approach against a realistic use-case CPS showcasing improvements in system impact prediction performance. Temporal logic offers a compact expression of events in absolute and relative time and has a formalized translation to state machines. As such, temporal logic rules can feasibly be synthesized to any system as a rule engine, with the process being formally verified to be correct. The goal here is to utilize temporal logic rules to detect cyber-attacks and manipulations in the computational algorithms and provide real-time software assurance and verification guarantees.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2012

PNNL Technical Support to The Implementation of EMTA and EMTA-NLA Models in Autodesk ® Moldflow ® Packages

Under the Predictive Engineering effort, PNNL developed linear and nonlinear property prediction models for long-fiber thermoplastics (LFTs). These models were implemented in PNNL’s EMTA and EMTA-NLA codes. While EMTA is a standalone software for the computation of the composites thermoelastic properties, EMTA-NLA presents a series of nonlinear models implemented in ABAQUS ® via user subroutines for structural analyses. In all these models, it is assumed that the fibers are linear elastic while the matrix material can exhibit a linear or typical nonlinear behavior depending on the loading prescribed to the composite. The key idea is to model the constitutive behavior of the matrix material and then to use an Eshelby-Mori-Tanaka approach (EMTA) combined with numerical techniques for fiber length and orientation distributions to determine the behavior of the as-formed composite. The basic property prediction models of EMTA and EMTA-NLA have been subject for implementation in the Autodesk ® Moldflow ® software packages. These models are the elastic stiffness model accounting for fiber length and orientation distributions, the fiber/matrix interface debonding model, and the elastic-plastic models. The PNNL elastic-plastic models for LFTs describes the composite nonlinear stress-strain response up to failure by an elastic-plastic formulation associated with either a micromechanical criterion to predict failure or a continuum damage mechanics formulation coupling damage to plasticity. All the models account for fiber length and orientation distributions as well as fiber/matrix debonding that can occur at any stage of loading. In an effort to transfer the technologies developed under the Predictive Engineering project to the American automotive and plastics industries, PNNL has obtained the approval of the DOE Office of Vehicle Technologies to provide Autodesk, Inc. with the technical support for the implementation of the basic property prediction models of EMTA and EMTA-NLA in the Autodesk ® Moldflow ® packages. This report summarizes the recent results from Autodesk Simulation Moldlow Insight (ASMI) analyses using the EMTA models and EMTA-NLA/ABAQUS ® analyses for further assessment of the EMTA-NLA models to support their implementation in Autodesk Moldflow Structural Alliance (AMSA). PNNL’s technical support to Autodesk, Inc. included (i) providing the theoretical property prediction models as described in published journal articles and reports, (ii) providing explanations of these models and computational procedure, (iii) providing the necessary LFT data for process simulations and property predictions, and (iv) performing ABAQUS/EMTA-NLA analyses to further assess and illustrate the models for selected LFT materials.

damage analysis↗
DOE OSTI2024

Modular Subsurface Sensors and Integrated Software for Advanced Subsurface Characterization and Monitoring using Unoccupied Vehicles

The advent and subsequent proliferation of autonomous airborne, waterborne, and groundbased vehicles (i.e., “drones”) promises to broadly transform the geosciences and associated industries, including fossil energy exploration and development, mineral resource exploration and development, water-resource management, and environmental remediation. For geophysical characterization and monitoring, the prospect of programming highly repeatable and low-cost drone missions for subsurface imaging will allow for deployments in hazardous and previously inaccessible areas. Coupled with autonomous workflows for data processing, management, and visualization, drone-based geophysical characterization and monitoring will enable unprecedented, real-time insight into diverse subsurface properties and processes of scientific and engineering importance. Toward this end, the objectives of this Lab Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project were to develop new (1) instrumentation for dronebased electromagnetic induction (EMI) geophysical imaging, including separated transmitter and receivers and associated electronics, (2) software for real-time data telemetry, processing, management, and visualization. Although EMI has been previously deployed using unoccupied aerial systems (UASs), these applications failed to capitalize on the game-changing capabilities of drone platforms. Whereas drone-based data acquisition allows for collection of rich, three-dimensional (3D) multi-offset/multi-angle configurations between transmitters and receivers, past efforts have relied on conventional instrumentation that was designed for ground-based data collection with the transmitter and a single receiver housed in the same unit; nor did these previous applications demonstrate real-time delivery of results to support rapid management decisions in the field. In this 1-year project, we (1) designed and constructed new lightweight independent transmitter and receiver antenna platforms that communicate with a laptop computer; (2) developed software to control data acquisition, manage/transfer data, and visualize data as its collected; and (3) demonstrated the operation of the new hardware and software systems in a ground-based field test. Our work entails major technological advances for EMI and established a foundation on which to build a new drone-based, real-time geophysical EMI imaging capability to support diverse challenges facing the nation.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Hydrogen Risk Assessment Models (HyRAM) (V.3.1) (Technical Reference Manual)

The HyRAM software toolkit provides a basis for conducting quantitative risk assessment and consequence modeling for hydrogen infrastructure and transportation systems. HyRAM is designed to facilitate the use of state-of-the-art science and engineering models to conduct robust, repeatable assessments of hydrogen safety, hazards, and risk. HyRAM includes generic probabilities for hydrogen equipment failures, probabilistic models for the impact of heat flux on humans and structures, and experimentally validated first-order models of hydrogen release and flame physics. HyRAM integrates deterministic and probabilistic models for quantifying accident scenarios, predicting physical effects, and characterizing hydrogen hazards (thermal effects from jet res, overpressure effects from deflagrations), and assessing impact on people and structures. HyRAM is developed at Sandia National Laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy to increase access to technical data about hydrogen safety and to enable the use of that data to support development and revision of national and international codes and standards. HyRAM is a research software in active development and thus the models and data may change. This report will be updated at appropriate developmental intervals. This document provides a description of the methodology and models contained in HyRAM version 3.1. There have been several impactful updates since version 3.0. HyRAM 3.1 contains a correction to use the volume fraction for two-phase speed of sound calculations; this only affects cryogenic releases in which two-phase ow (vapor and liquid) is predicted in the orifice. Other changes include clarifications that inputs for tank pressure should be given in absolute pressure, not gauge pressure. Additionally, the interface now rejects invalid inputs to probability distributions, and the less accurate single-point radiative source model selection was removed from the interface.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2026

MFC 5.0: An exascale many-physics flow solver

Many problems of interest in engineering, medicine, and the fundamental sciences rely on high-fidelity flow simulation, making performant computational fluid dynamics solvers a mainstay of the open-source software community. Previous work MFC 3.0 was made a published, documented, and open-source solver via Bryngelson et al. Comp. Phys. Comm. (2021) with numerous physical features, numerical methods, and scalable infrastructure. MFC 5.0 is a significant update to MFC 3.0, featuring a broad set of well-established and novel physical models and numerical methods, as well as the introduction of GPU and APU (or superchip) acceleration. Here, we exhibit state-of-the-art performance and ideal scaling on the first two exascale supercomputers, OLCF Frontier and LLNL El Capitan. Combined with MFC’s single-accelerator performance, MFC achieves exascale computation in practice, and achieved the largest-to-date public CFD simulation at 200 trillion grid points as a 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist. New physical features include the immersed boundary method, N-fluid phase change, Euler–Euler and Euler–Lagrange sub-grid bubble models, fluid-structure interaction, hypo- and hyper-elastic materials, chemically reacting flow, two-material surface tension, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), and more. Numerical techniques now represent the current state-of-the-art, including general relaxation characteristic boundary conditions, WENO variants, Strang splitting for stiff sub-grid flow features, and low Mach number treatments. Weak scaling to tens of thousands of GPUs on OLCF Summit and Frontier and LLNL El Capitan achieves efficiencies within 5% of ideal to over 90% of their respective system sizes. Strong scaling results for a 16-times increase in device count show parallel efficiencies over 90% on OLCF Frontier. MFC’s software stack has undergone further improvements, including continuous integration, which ensures code resilience and correctness through over 300 regression tests; metaprogramming, which reduces code length while maintaining performance portability; and code generation for computing chemical reactions

Computational fluid dynamics↗
DOE OSTI2017

A scalable nonlinear fluid–structure interaction solver based on a Schwarz preconditioner with isogeometric unstructured coarse spaces in 3D

Nonlinear fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems on unstructured meshes in 3D appear many applications in science and engineering, such as vibration analysis of aircrafts and patient-specific diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. In this work, we develop a highly scalable, parallel algorithmic and software framework for FSI problems consisting of a nonlinear fluid system and a nonlinear solid system, that are coupled monolithically. The FSI system is discretized by a stabilized finite element method in space and a fully implicit backward difference scheme in time. To solve the large, sparse system of nonlinear algebraic equations at each time step, we propose an inexact Newton-Krylov method together with a multilevel, smoothed Schwarz preconditioner with isogeometric coarse meshes generated by a geometry preserving coarsening algorithm. Here ''geometry'' includes the boundary of the computational domain and the wet interface between the fluid and the solid. We show numerically that the proposed algorithm and implementation are highly scalable in terms of the number of linear and nonlinear iterations and the total compute time on a supercomputer with more than 10,000 processor cores for several problems with hundreds of millions of unknowns.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2023

Boost Converter Loss Analysis v0.1

This software helps the user mathematically determine the losses in a boost converter they are designing. They can enter the component parasitic values from their component datasheets, and the software will calculate exactly where the losses are coming from. This can help the designer target and reduce specific sources of loss. It also helps system engineers compare the losses between AC and DC versions of the boost converter. Finally, it establishes a set of mathematical equations to help academics study loss theoretically.

Gerber, Daniel↗