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DOE OSTI2015

Performance of an RPM based on Gd-lined plastic scintillator for neutron and gamma detection [ANIMMA--2015-IO-372]

A Radiation Portal Monitor (RPM) was developed by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and Ansaldo Nucleare (ANN) within the FP7 SCINTILLA European project. The system was designed to detect both gamma and neutron radiation with a single technology. It is conceived to monitor vehicle and cargo containers in transits across borders or ports, to find radioactive elements and to avoid illegal trafficking of strategic nuclear materials. The system is based on a {sup 3}He-free neutron detection technology using plastic scintillators coupled to Gadolinium to detect and discriminate gamma from neutron signals. During the 3 years of the SCINTILLA project the construction and test of the first two prototypes drove the definition of the final layout of a full RPM system consisting of two twin pillars as a portal for vehicle and cargo container scan. A custom System Control Software (SCS) manages the electronics of the RPM, the ancillary devices and the data analysis. The combination of the detector layout and of the software functionalities enables both to distinguish neutrons and gammas and to identify the energy range of a detected gamma source. The system was initially characterized via static tests with gamma and neutron sources in the INFN laboratory. These measurements were used to calibrate the detector, evaluate the response of the single pillars as well as of the full system, and optimize the RPM configuration and discrimination algorithm. During this phase, specific tests were performed to study the stability over time of the system, monitoring the measured the neutron and gamma count rates over periods of several weeks. The results allow us to demonstrate the reliability and robustness of the RPM. In a second time the RPM performance was studied via dynamic tests performed during the SCINTILLA test and benchmark campaigns. These measurements took place in the JRC ITRAP+10 facility at Ispra (Varese-Italy). The laboratory is equipped with an experimental set-up for dynamic tests of multiple systems according to international standards. The performed measurements utilized radioactive sources with activities selected according to ANSI and IEC standards to test the detector alarm performances in terms of gamma and neutron response, sensitivity to high gamma fields, sensitivity to moderated neutron sources as well as false alarm rates (FAR). In addition, the RPM was tested in challenging configurations exceeding the requirements set by international standards to determine the real limits of the system. The results obtained during these campaigns demonstrated that the system detection efficiency is not only compliant to international standards for its category, but often exceeds them, demonstrating the validity of the chosen technology and of the implemented layout. The positive performance also showed the effectiveness of the SCS and of its functionalities. To further demonstrate the system capabilities, a test in a real-life environment of the RPM is planned to happen in a near future by installing the detectors in a seaport. In this presentation I will give an overview of the RPM characteristics, of its performances as determined in the test campaign mentioned above and of future plans, to demonstrate how this technology can be an effective choice for the realization of {sup 3}He-free RPM detectors. (authors)

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

DOE OSTI2023

Stabilizing a strongly nonlinear structure through shaker dynamics in fixed frequency voltage control tests

Bifurcations are commonly encountered during force controlled swept and stepped sine testing of nonlinear structures, which generally leads to the so-called jump-down or jump-up phenomena between stable solutions. There are various experimental closed-loop control algorithms, such as control-based continuation and phase-locked loop, to stabilize dynamical systems through these bifurcations, but they generally rely on specialized control algorithms that are not readily available with many commercial data acquisition software packages. A recent method was developed to experimentally apply sequential continuation using the shaker voltage that can be readily deployed using commercially available software. By utilizing the stabilizing effects of electrodynamic shakers and the force dropout phenomena in fixed frequency voltage control sine tests, this approach has been demonstrated to stabilize the unstable branch of a nonlinear system with three branches, allowing for three multivalued solutions to be identified within a specific frequency bandwidth near resonance. Recent testing on a strongly nonlinear system with vibro-impact nonlinearity has revealed jumping behavior when performing sequential continuation along the voltage parameter, like the jump phenomena seen during more traditional force controlled swept and stepped sine testing. Here, this paper investigates the stabilizing effects of an electrodynamic shaker on strongly nonlinear structures in fixed frequency voltage control tests using both numerical and experimental methods. The harmonic balance method is applied to the coupled shaker-structure system with an electromechanical model to simulate the fixed voltage control tests and predict the stabilization for different parameters of the model. The simulated results are leveraged to inform the design of a set of experiments to demonstrate the stabilization characteristics on a fixture-pylon assembly with a vibro-impact nonlinearity. Through numerical simulation and experimental testing on two different strongly nonlinear systems, the various parameters that influence the stability of the coupled shaker-structure are revealed to better understand the performance of fixed frequency voltage control tests.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2016

Partial defect verification of spent fuel assemblies by PDET: Principle and field testing in Interim Spent fuel Storage Facility (CLAB) in Sweden

Here, the need for the development of a credible method and instrument for partial defect verification of spent fuel has been emphasized over a few decades in the safeguards communities as the diverted spent fuel pins can be the source of nuclear terrorism or devices. The need is increasingly more important and even urgent as many countries have started to transfer spent fuel to so called "difficult-to-access" areas such as dry storage casks, reprocessing or geological repositories. Partial defect verification is required by IAEA before spent fuel is placed into "difficult-to-access" areas. Earlier, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has reported the successful development of a new, credible partial defect verification method for pressurized water reactor (PWR) spent fuel assemblies without use of operator data, and further reported the validation experiments using commercial spent fuel assemblies with some missing fuel pins. The method was found to be robust as the method is relatively invariant to the characteristic variations of spent fuel assemblies such as initial fuel enrichment, cooling time, and burn-up. Since then, the PDET system has been designed and prototyped for 17×17 PWR spent fuel assemblies, complete with data acquisition software and acquisition electronics. In this paper, a summary description of the PDET development followed by results of the first successful field testing using the integrated PDET system and actual spent fuel assemblies performed in a commercial spent fuel storage site, known as Central Interim Spent fuel Storage Facility (CLAB) in Sweden will be presented. In addition to partial defect detection initial studies have determined that the tool can be used to verify the operator declared average burnup of the assembly as well as intra-assembly bunrup levels.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2023

TDCOSMO. X. Automated modeling of nine strongly lensed quasars and comparison between lens-modeling software

When strong gravitational lenses are to be used as an astrophysical or cosmological probe, models of their mass distributions are often needed. We present a new, time-efficient automation code for the uniform modeling of strongly lensed quasars with GLEE, a lens-modeling software for multiband data. By using the observed positions of the lensed quasars and the spatially extended surface brightness distribution of the host galaxy of the lensed quasar, we obtain a model of the mass distribution of the lens galaxy. We applied this uniform modeling pipeline to a sample of nine strongly lensed quasars for which images were obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 of the Hubble Space Telescope. The models show well-reconstructed light components and a good alignment between mass and light centroids in most cases. We find that the automated modeling code significantly reduces the input time during the modeling process for the user. The time for preparing the required input files is reduced by a factor of 3 from ~3 h to about one hour. The active input time during the modeling process for the user is reduced by a factor of 10 from ~ 10 h to about one hour per lens system. This automated uniform modeling pipeline can efficiently produce uniform models of extensive lens-system samples that can be used for further cosmological analysis. A blind test that compared our results with those of an independent automated modeling pipeline based on the modeling software Lenstronomy revealed important lessons. Quantities such as Einstein radius, astrometry, mass flattening, and position angle are generally robustly determined. Other quantities, such as the radial slope of the mass density profile and predicted time delays, depend crucially on the quality of the data and on the accuracy with which the point spread function is reconstructed. Better data and/or a more detailed analysis are necessary to elevate our automated models to cosmography grade. Nevertheless, our pipeline enables the quick selection of lenses for follow-up and further modeling, which significantly speeds up the construction of cosmography-grade models. This important step forward will help us to take advantage of the increase in the number of lenses that is expected in the coming decade, which is an increase of several orders of magnitude.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2025

Yeast Transformation on Hamilton Vantage (YT Vantage) v1

Our software program is designed for the Hamilton Vantage liquid handling robot, automating the Build step in the Design-Build-Test-Learn (DBTL) cycle for Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This program minimizes human intervention, enabling rapid identification of pathway bottlenecks and genes that enhance verazine production. The program takes competent yeast and plasmid DNA as input and generates an output library of engineered strains compatible with automated colony picking, high-throughput culturing, and chemical extraction for downstream LC-MS analysis. A user-friendly interface, developed using the Hamilton Method Editor software, allows for on-demand parameter customization. By automating this process, our program streamlines the construction of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, reducing manual labor and increasing efficiency. While the manual process is well-documented, integration with robotic automation is less common, making our program a valuable tool for researchers. With this software, we achieved 2-5 fold increases in verazine production, demonstrating its potential to accelerate research in this field.

Louie, Randy [Lawrence Berkeley National Laborator↗

DOE OSTI2019

Hardening of A6111-T4 Aluminum Alloy at Large Strains and Its Effect on Sheet Forming Operations

In a number of sheet metal stamping and joining processes, the material undergoes large plastic deformation exceeding the range of plastic strain achievable in a standard tensile test prior to material plastic instability. In order to extend the range of effective strains, the multistep rolling process was employed which enabled prestraining of aluminum sheet above 2.0 of true strain. Tensile testing of rolled samples was used to identify the flow stress corresponding to the level of prestrain: By varying the prestrain level, several data points were obtained for the studied flow curve. The numerical simulation using Abaqus software for the cold rolling process of aluminum strips confirmed that majority of the strip is deformed in plane strain compression condition. Performed simulation of the LDH test determined that earlier fracture might occur if the curve obtained via rolling–tensile testing approach is used versus traditional power law approximation and Voce law approximation. The results of simulation for the multistep drawing of a cylindrical cup revealed possible wrinkling in the die entry area during redrawing stage of the process if the rolling–tensile testing flow curve is employed.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2017

Development of a modular test system for the silicon sensor R&D of the ATLAS Upgrade

High Voltage CMOS sensors are a promising technology for tracking detectors in collider experiments. Extensive R&D studies are being carried out by the ATLAS Collaboration for a possible use of HV-CMOS in the High Luminosity LHC upgrade of the Inner Tracker detector. CaRIBOu (Control and Readout Itk BOard) is a modular test system developed to test Silicon based detectors. It currently includes five custom designed boards, a Xilinx ZC706 development board, FELIX (Front-End LInk eXchange) PCIe card and a host computer. A software program has been developed in Python to control the CaRIBOu hardware. CaRIBOu has been used in the testbeam of the HV-CMOS sensor AMS180v4 at CERN. Preliminary results have shown that the test system is very versatile. In conclusion, further development is ongoing to adapt to different sensors, and to make it available to various lab test stands.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

DOE OSTI2023

Post Access Report: Initial testing of wave energy powered UV-C LED anti-biofouling system

In the experiment entitled “Initial Testing of Wave Energy Powered UV-C LED Anti-Biofouling System,” a UV-C LED was used to treat platinum-coated titanium coupons emulating CTD electrode material. An additional control set of coupons were exposed to seawater without the LED treatment. The experimental setup was deployed in seawater tanks at PNNL-Sequim’s Marine and Coastal Research Laboratory (MCRL) for the duration of six months. Tank seawater temperature data were collected for the duration of the experimental campaign. At two-month intervals triplicate sets of coupons were removed from both treatment and control test chambers and weighed to characterize biomass accumulation. After weighing, the coupons were photographed in initial condition, with a stain applied to highlight biofouling growth, and after rinsing off excess stain. These photographs were analyzed using PNNL’s Biofouling Growth Index (BGI) software and with a calculation of percentage dark pixels after conversion to grayscale. Additionally, at the final 6-month datapoint triplicate sets of control and test coupons were sent to PNNL-Richland’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) for scanning electron microscopy. All data organization and collection methods are described in further detail in the document “TEAMER_3newable_Data_Guide.pdf.” Biomass accumulation increased over time on both sets of coupons, and percent area biofouled demonstrated a similar trend. Analysis of the collected data resulted in the findings that treatment method has an impact on biofouling growth, though to a much less significant extent than time does. Additionally, qualitative findings included the presence of advanced life forms such as worms in the control test chamber, but not in the treated test chamber.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

DOE OSTI2025

Advanced System Thermal Fluids Solver Development for SAM

This work summarizes a feasibility study on testing numerical algorithms that are suitable and efficient for advanced system analysis code development under the mutli-physics framework, MOOSE. The key is the implementation of a high-order one-dimensional staggered-grid finite volume method (SG-FVM), and its direct interaction with the linear/nonlinear solver, PETSc. Leveraging the existing capabilities of the SAM code, significant code coverages were established in the finite volume method code. This in turn allows for a suite of test problems with different problem sizes and levels of complexity to be used to quantify the performance improvement of the finite volume method code. As evidently shown in this study, the implemented SG-FVM demonstrated superior performance improvement against a direct finite element method implementation through MOOSE for the wide range of selected problems. On two computer systems, the speedup was observed to be significant, with at least one order of magnitude of solving time reduction. In addition, for a complex reactor model, transient simulation was performed using the finite volume method code, the results of which agree very well with the reference results from the finite element method code. Overall, this study demonstrates a successful feasibility study on the proposed numerical algorithms and software structure to support advanced system analysis tool development. In this work, short-term priority development and testing items were identified, and long-term code adoption and integration plans were made for the eventual deployment of the finite volume method in the SAM code.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2014

The Expanded Capabilities Of The Cementitious Barriers Partnership Software Toolbox Version 2.0 - 14331

The Cementitious Barriers Partnership (CBP) Project is a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (US DOE) Office of Tank Waste Management. The CBP program has developed a set of integrated tools (based on state-of-the-art models and leaching test methods) that help improve understanding and predictions of the long-term structural, hydraulic and chemical performance of cementitious barriers used in nuclear applications. The CBP Software Toolbox – “Version 1.0” was released early in FY2013 and was used to support DOE-EM performance assessments in evaluating various degradation mechanisms that included sulfate attack, carbonation and constituent leaching. The sulfate attack analysis predicted the extent and damage that sulfate ingress will have on concrete vaults over extended time (i.e., > 1000 years) and the carbonation analysis provided concrete degradation predictions from rebar corrosion. The new release “Version 2.0” includes upgraded carbonation software and a new software module to evaluate degradation due to chloride attack. Also included in the newer version are a dual regime module allowing evaluation of contaminant release in two regimes – both fractured and un-fractured. The integrated software package has also been upgraded with new plotting capabilities and many other features that increase the “user-friendliness” of the package. Experimental work has been generated to provide data to calibrate the models to improve the credibility of the analysis and reduce the uncertainty. Tools selected for and developed under this program have been used to evaluate and predict the behavior of cementitious barriers used in near-surface engineered waste disposal systems for periods of performance up to or longer than 100 years for operating facilities and longer than 1000 years for waste disposal. The CBP Software Toolbox is and will continue to produce tangible benefits to the working DOE Performance Assessment (PA) community.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

DOE OSTI2018

Implementation of metal-friendly EAM/FS-type semi-empirical potentials in HOOMD-blue: A GPU-accelerated molecular dynamics software

We present an implementation of EAM and FS interatomic potentials, which are widely used in simulating metallic systems, in HOOMD-blue, a software designed to perform classical molecular dynamics simulations using GPU accelerations. We first discuss the details of our implementation and then report extensive benchmark tests. We demonstrate that single-precision floating point operations efficiently implemented on GPUs can produce sufficient accuracy when compared against double-precision codes, as demonstrated in test simulations of calculations of the glass-transition temperature of Cu 64.5 Zr 35.5 , and pair correlation function of liquid Ni 3 Al. Our code scales well with the size of the simulating system on NVIDIA Tesla M40 and P100 GPUs. Compared with another popular software LAMMPS running on 32 cores of AMD Opteron 6220 processors, the GPU/CPU performance ratio can reach as high as 4.6. In conclusion, the source code can be accessed through the HOOMD-blue web page for free by any interested user.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2018

Ambient occlusion – A powerful algorithm to segment shell and skeletal intrapores in computed tomography data

During the last decades, X-ray (micro-)computed tomography has gained increasing attention for the description of porous skeletal and shell structures of various organism groups. However, their quantitative analysis is often hampered by the difficulty to discriminate cavities and pores within the object from the surrounding region.Herein, we test the ambient occlusion (AO) algorithm and newly implemented optimisations for the segmentation of cavities (implemented in the software Amira). The segmentation accuracy is evaluated as a function of (i) changes in the ray length input variable, and (ii) the usage of AO (scalar) field and other AO-derived (scalar) fields. The results clearly indicate that the AO field itself outperforms all other AO-derived fields in terms of segmentation accuracy and robustness against variations in the ray length input variable. The newly implemented optimisations improved the AO field-based segmentation only slightly, while the segmentations based on the AO-derived fields improved considerably.Additionally, we evaluated the potential of the AO field and AO-derived fields for the separation and classification of cavities as well as skeletal structures by comparing them with commonly used distance-map-based segmentations. For this, we tested the zooid separation within a bryozoan colony, the stereom classification of an ophiuroid tooth, the separation of bioerosion traces within a marble block and the calice (central cavity)-pore separation within a dendrophyllid coral. The obtained results clearly indicate that the ideal input field depends on the three-dimensional morphology of the object of interest The segmentations based on the AO-derived fields often provided cavity separations and skeleton classifications that at were superior to or impossible to obtain with commonly used distance-map-based segmentations. The combined usage of various AO-derived fields by supervisd or unsupervised segmentation algorithms might provide a promising target for future research to further improve the results for this kind of high-end data segmentation and classification. Furthermore, the application of the developed segmentation algorithm is not restricted to X-ray (micro-)computed tomographic data but may potentially be useful for the segmentation of 3D volume data from other sources.

Computed tomography, Micro-computed tomography, Po↗

DOE OSTI2021

Hardware-in-the-Loop Evaluation of an Advanced Distributed Energy Resource Management Algorithm

This paper presents the laboratory performance evaluation of voltage regulation under a new distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) algorithm via an advanced hardware-in-tbe-loop (HIL) platform. The HIL platform provides realistic testing in a laboratory environment, including the accurate modeling of a full-scale real-world distribution system from a utility partner, the DERMS software controller, and power hardware photovoltaic (PV) inverters. The new DERMS algorithm is developed based on online multiobjective optimization (OMOO) algorithms that perform fast dispatch of distributed solar PV simulated in a real-time digital simulator and real physical hardware devices. Experimental tests confirm the correct functioning of the HIL platform for evaluating controller algorithms and satisfactory voltage regulation performance of the developed OMOO algorithms.

41 EE - Solar Energy Technologies Office (EE-4S)↗

DOE OSTI2023

HamLib: A Library of Hamiltonians for Benchmarking Quantum Algorithms and Hardware

For a considerable time, large datasets containing problem instances have proven valuable for analyzing computer hardware, software, and algorithms. One notable example of the value of large datasets is ImageNet [1], a vast repository of images that has been instrumental in testing numerous deep learning packages. Similarly, in the domain of computational chemistry and materials science, the availability of extensive datasets such as the Protein Data Bank [2], the Materials Project [3], and QM9 [4] has greatly facilitated the evaluation of new algorithms and software approaches, while also promoting standardization within the field. These well-defined datasets and problem instances, in turn, serve as the foundation for creating benchmarking suites like MLPerf [5] and LINPACK [6], [7]. These suites enable fair and rigorous comparisons of different methodologies and solutions, fostering continuous advancements in various areas of computer science and beyond.

Sawaya, Nicolas PD↗

DOE OSTI2021

Hardware-in-the-Loop Evaluation of an Advanced Distributed Energy Resource Management Algorithm: Preprint

41 EE - Solar Energy Technologies Office (EE-4S)↗

DOE OSTI2020

Oak Ridge Spoofing and Interference Test Battery (OAKBAT) - Pure Tones

This dataset contains the pure 1.57542 GHz (L1) pure tone recordings provided to allow characterization of the recording equipment used to digitize the OAKBAT scenarios. The equipment includes the cable, two LNAs, and the software-defined radio. The files are binary data in the format described in the paper: Albright, A., Powers, S. Bonior, J., and Combs, F., A Tool for Furthering GNSS Security Research: The Oak Ridge Spoofing and Interference Test Battery (OAKBAT), in Proceedings of ION GNSS+ 2020, 2020. The metadata, equipment documentation and configuration files, collection procedures and more materials that allow the independent reproduction of the OAKBAT data are https://github.com/oakbat/. Additionally, this site includes a complete listing of all the RF data files, not just this series, available as part of OAKBAT.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2021

From NWChem to NWChemEx: Evolving with the Computational Chemistry Landscape

Since the advent of the first computers, chemists have been at the forefront of using computers to understand and solve complex chemical problems. As the hardware and software have evolved, so have the theoretical and computational chemistry methods and algorithms. Parallel computers clearly changed the common computing paradigm in the late 1970s and 80s, and the field has again seen a paradigm shift with the advent of graphical processing units. This review explores the challenges and some of the solutions in transforming software from the terascale to the petascale and now to the upcoming exascale computers. While discussing the field in general, NWChem and its redesign, NWChemEx, will be highlighted as one of the early codesign projects to take advantage of massively parallel computers and emerging software standards to enable large scientific challenges to be tackled.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

DOE OSTI2021

A multi-agent approach to distribution system fault section estimation in smart grid environment

We report that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are seen from different areas as one of the paramount trends for the next generation of power systems. Numerous published studies about MAS discuss its utilization in power distribution networks but none focuses on the prior step to restoration and self-healing that is fault section estimation. This paper aims to show how MAS can improve the utilities’ reliability indexes and consumer satisfaction by overcoming the multiple fault section estimation problem. In order to do this, the authors considered using MAS as a means of communication between smart meters. The purpose of smart meters usage is to employ devices that are already present in smart grids, mainly because of their reading and saving data capacity. The proposed method was tested on a radial feeder generated by the authors. The network was built on HYPERSIM, a software platform of OPAL-RT Technologies. The simulation results show that this MAS provides speed, efficiency, and automation for the process of fault section estimation.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗