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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Recycling Wind Energy Systems in the United States Part 1: Providing a Baseline for America's Wind Energy Recycling Infrastructure for Wind Turbines and Systems

The U.S. investments in building this new wind energy capacity will not only mobilize millions of tons of raw and processed materials in existing supply chains, some of which are critical materials, but also create new types and large volumes of end-of-life (EOL) waste streams. Building efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally responsible EOL management infrastructure of wind energy system components is pivotal in diverting upcoming volumes of waste stream from landfills, recovery of critical materials and reducing life cycle emissions from production of primary commodity materials . The primary goal of this report is to organize and communicate findings from this assessment on how alternate materials, designs and manufacturing processes could enable more efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally responsible disassembly and resource recovery from wind energy technologies. The findings of this assessment could inform prioritization of RD&D investment spending to meet Energy Act of 2020 directions. This assessment focused on key RD&D recommendations for three main temporal phases: Short-term (2023-2026), medium-term (2026 through 2035) and long-term (beyond 2035).

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Economically Viable Intermediate to Long Duration Hydrogen Energy Storage Solutions for Fossil Fueled Assets

This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management of U.S. Department of Energy under Funding Opportunity Announcement Number DE-FOA-0002332 “Energy Storage for Fossil Power Generation”. The work aimed to explore and advance an innovative hydrogen energy storage system – the synergistically integrated hydrogen energy storage system (SIHES) – that has the following characteristics: • Compatible with existing or new coal and gas fuel electricity generation units, • best suited for intermediate to long duration energy storage, from 12 hours to weeks even months, and • capable of storing energy at the utility scale – hundreds of MWh to GWh energy storage with power output level in tens to hundreds of MW. Preliminary front-end engineering design (Pre-FEED) studies was carried out to develop and refine a site-specific SIHES as peaking power generation units (so named as HyPeaker) as the first market entry point, to demonstrate both the technical feasibility and the economic viability to integrate the HyPeaker “within the fence” of a fossil power plant. This specific site was TVA’s Johnsonville Combustion Turbine Plant. The HyPeaker was designed and engineered to integrate with a 60MW aeroderivative gas turbine unit already available at TVA’s Johnsonville site. This site-specific HyPeaker consists of an alkaline electrolyzer to produce hydrogen from CO 2 free electricity sources, an innovative low-cost high-pressure hydrogen storage system (Big-Ton) and the aero gas turbine to generate electricity using blend of hydrogen and natural gas. A holistic system level technoeconomic analysis tool specific to HyPeaker was developed to optimize the engineering design of the Johnsonville site-specific HyPeaker for cost and performance. The optimal design and specification of the Johnsonville site-specific HyPeaker are the following: • Alkaline electrolyzer: 3MW • Big-Ton storage vessel: 11,000kg H 2 at 3000psi. • 4-stage diaphragm hydrogen compressor: 55kg-H 2 /hr from 150psi to 3000psi. The HyPeaker is designed to provide sufficient hydrogen for 90% continuous operation of the HyPeaker. All major components have design life of 30 years. The capex of HyPeaker is estimated at $\$$7.1M. This included $\$$1.5M for the electrolyzer, $\$$5.6M for the storage vessel and compressor. The cost of aero gas turbine was included as it is already available at the site. Key findings are: • HyPeaker can be designed, manufactured, installed and integrated with the fossil power plants, with sub-systems and components commercially available on the market today, even when it is scaled up to an order of magnitude larger than the one at the Johnsonville site. HyPeaker is a technologically viable solution to cover a wide range of energy storage duration needs, from daily peaking operation to seasonal shifting for fossil fueled assets. • The cost advantage of SCCV based Big-Ton H 2 storage vessel made it possible to “oversize” the H 2 storage subsystem to achieve overall system level cost optimization. The benefits are two-fold. First, it allows to significantly reduce the capacity and cost of electrolyzer by spreading H 2 production over a much longer period of time when the fuel cost for electricity production is low. Second, it allows to balance the hydrogen production and usage shift over weeks to months to meet the peak demands. As such, the capital cost of HyPeaker system using the Big-Ton was less than half of the cost of a system with today’s steel tube based H 2 storage system. The HyPeaker has even better cost advantage Li-ion battery based energy storage system. The estimated capital cost of Li-Ion battery system would be at $\$$38M, under the same projected 20-year electricity generation profile of the Johnsonville site. This is over 5 times more expensive than the HyPeaker system. • Since industry scale energy storage systems do not have 100% energy conversion and storage efficiency, energy storage systems using fossil fuel generated electricity would increase the CO 2 emission. This is particularly the case for HyPeaker due to its low round trip efficiency. Therefore, a more sensible solution would be to the excessive or curtailed electricity from CO 2 emission free sources such as solar farms, wind farms or nuclear power plants, to produce hydrogen, and integrate them with the HyPeaker. Electricity from TVA’s nuclear power plants was used for the Johnsonville HyPeaker. • The economic viability of HyPeaker is expected to be further improved when global supply chains are taken into consideration. For the same Johnsonville site specific HyPeaker, the capex would be reduced to ~$\$$3.6M from ~$\$$7.1M, and the added LCOE is reduced to ~$\$$85/MWh. With the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the cost of domestically produced HyPeaker sub-systems would be at the level of today’s global suppliers. Since the peaking units generally operate at peak usage period, thereby demanding higher price, the projected $\$$85/MWh LCOE would be within the realm of financial viability for utility operators.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2021

Closing the Loop on Automotive Carbon Fiber Prepreg Manufacturing Scrap

The project demonstrated how to “close the loop” on carbon fiber by integrating industrial carbon fiber scrap into new functional components in an automotive lightweighting application. The project serves as a validation of discontinuous recycled carbon fiber in a commercial context, while generating comprehensive material data throughout the production chain. To this end, the project exhibited increasing complexity as material evaluation progressed from benchtop to commercial scale through full-scale part production, with key material properties thoroughly characterized throughout the process. Of particular focus was the form of the fiber that was fed into compounding, as recycled fiber has historically been problematic to feed at commercial-scale. Carbon fiber is energy-intensive to manufacture, so reuse of existing fiber material can reduce costs and increase sustainability. Additionally, by integrating recovered short fiber into a thermoplastic, regrind processes can be used to provide feedstock for later generations of product. While regrind plastics are not “infinitely recyclable”, reusing the manufacturing scrap over several generations of products can greatly increase material sustainability and lower the fractional embodied energy of each successive product. As such, this project supports the IACMI technical goals of (1) 25% lower carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) cost, (2) 50% reduction in CFRP embodied energy, and (3) 80% composite recyclability into useful products. The initial stage of the project involved down selecting surface treatment (sizing) chemistries. Sizing evaluations were performed on Vartega’s chemically recycled intermediate modulus fiber along with standard modulus dry scrap which was oversized with sizing provided by Michelman. More dramatic improvements from sizing were found on the standard rather than the intermediate modulus fibers. The strength of the chemically recycled individual fibers were evaluated by Michelman and ORNL through single fiber testing and found to be comparable to similarly evaluated virgin fibers. UDRI’s mechanical testing on injection molded test specimens identified similar mechanical properties and fiber distribution relative to benchmark specimens. Additional surface chemistry tests and visualizations were performed by the Colorado School of Mines to confirm close conformance between the benchmark and recycled-fiber specimens. As the mechanical test results exceeded the 80% threshold established as the go/no-go(GNG), the project scale was increased to use commercial-scale equipment that would both better characterize the manufacturing utility of the target product format and allow qualitative assessment of a complex commercial part. An upscaled compounding evaluation was performed with a 27 mm twin-screw compounding extruding using oversized standard modulus fibers that were formatted to improve bulk solids transfer. The project team anticipated that milestone mechanical benchmarks could be achieved given the favorable performance of the sized standard modulus material identified in the initial micro-compounding trials. While the mechanical performance did meet the milestone target for that phase of the project, mechanical properties for this standard modulus-based compound were still less than those of the Ford specification. To compare the performance, the project team oversized intermediate modulus dry fibers and compounded them with the project resin at BASF using a 40 mm compounder. Test specimen mechanical performance exceeded the targets laid out in both the project milestone and the Ford specification. A series of prototype parts were successfully molded, albeit with instances of short shot components due to the high thermal conductivity of the carbon fiber compared to glass fiber for which the prototype tool was designed for. The project demonstrated that recycled carbon fiber is a viable option in fiber reinforced compound, providing greatly increased strength and modulus for applications that require them. The “agglomerated” format that facilitated effective bulk solids transfer of recovered fiber showed promise for industrial application.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗