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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 1,207 records · Page 67
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

Business models to assure availability of advanced superconductors for the accelerator sector and promote stewardship of superconducting magnet technology for the US economy

Stakeholders representing concerns of national and global leadership, industries that use superconducting magnets in products, manufacturers of superconducting wires and tapes that supply to industries, and innovation generators from small businesses and universities came together to address stewardship of superconducting magnet technology and assurance of supply of advanced superconductors to the accelerator sector. This report outlines potential public-private partnerships that develop and enhance domestic capabilities to meet the needs of science facilities in the accelerator systems sector and in the broader commercial ecosystem.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Developing a Facile Technology for Converting Domestic US Coal into High-Value Graphene

Universal Matter Ltd. was formed in July 2019 to scale-up and commercialize a breakthrough process, Flash Joule Heating (FJH), to transform different coal grades, into high-quality graphene. This graphene is made using a high-voltage electric discharge that brings the carbon source to temperatures higher than 3,000 K in less than 10 milliseconds. The short burst of electricity breaks all chemical bonds in the feedstock and reorders the carbon atoms into exceptionally thin layers of a special type of graphene, at an estimated $100 per ton in electricity cost. This process is capable of producing 1-5 layer-thick high-quality graphene (with defects of <0.05% and purity of >99%) in a green, practical, and cost-effective process. The graphene produced in the FJH process is a very special kind of graphene called “turbostratic graphene” (TG). TG offers superior physical properties compared to other graphene structures on a similar weight basis. Unlike graphene made from graphite using traditional techniques, the graphene layers in TG stack in an irregular pattern that allows the graphene powder to be exfoliated more easily and blend more evenly within other materials. The TG produced using our FJH technology is the most economical graphene product that opens up significant large volume markets for end-use applications; it would allow the use of TG made from coal for commercial applications in several market segments including energy storage, sensors, hyper-lubricants, reinforced plastics, and building materials such as concrete.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2023

Clean Energy Technology Applications on US Mine Land: Technical Analysis

As the United States transitions toward a clean energy economy, an opportunity exists for redeveloping the more than 17,000 mine land sites located across the nation with clean energy technologies, which have a combined potential for generating more than 85 GW of clean electricity. This report provides an overview of the potential of demonstrating and deploying clean energy projects on current and former mine land. Clean energy project refers to a project that demonstrates one or more of the following technologies: solar; microgrids; geothermal; direct air capture; fossil-fueled electricity generation with carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration; energy storage, including pumped storage hydropower and compressed air energy storage; and advanced nuclear technologies. The report discusses the following technologies and their potential for creating jobs and generating tax revenue that would result in direct and indirect benefits to the local economy: Solar photovoltaics (PV) is being developed on current and former mine land in various parts of the world, including the United States. This approach is attractive because it requires limited infrastructure investment and would utilize the bare surfaces of mines and tailing ponds. Solar resource availability may be greater in the southern regions, including the Interior and Appalachian Basins and the southwestern United States. However, since some mine land sites include areas of significant change in elevation, the deployment of PV on mine land may require sophisticated planning to account for shading and irradiance, or may require regrading of the areas. PV does not create significant environmental risks and generally does not face public resistance; Geothermal systems are often spatially and genetically associated with ore deposits, and in some cases, they have been discovered while in search for epithermal mineral resources. Numerous diverse geothermal applications have been employed at mine land around the world, including power generation, mineral extraction from geothermal brines, process heating, direct use for other mining operations, and direct use for non-mining operations and subsurface energy storage, including geothermal heat pumps. Case studies highlighting these applications provide key lessons relating to identifying drivers and barriers to geothermal resource deployment and can be used to create screening tools for identifying the types and locations of mine land most amenable to utilizing geothermal resources; Carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration technologies include direct air capture (DAC) and enhanced weathering. DAC technologies include air contactors, regeneration systems, and CO 2 compression systems. Captured CO 2 can be converted to valuable feedstocks or possibly injected into abandoned subsurface mines where it would be absorbed by alkaline rock waste and mine tailings or by the porous minerals along the walls of the mine. DAC systems can be coupled with energy sources such as wind, solar, grid, or geothermal. Many DAC systems require a source of water or steam; however, some are expected to be net producers of water. Local impacts of DAC systems are expected to be low, and are related to land footprint, material disposal, and upstream impacts of energy and material production; Compressed air energy storage is an established energy storage technology in salt caverns. It has the potential for implementation in underground mines by pressurizing and storing a large amount of air using electrical compressors when excess electricity is available. When a need for discharge emerges, the air is used to spin turbines and produce the necessary volume of electricity. Abandoned or unused mine openings, including shafts, adits, access tunnels, and mined workings of any orientation, offer potential for vast amounts of compressed air energy storage if the site characteristics meet operational requirements; Pumped hydropower storage can be implemented in surface and subsurface mines. In surface mine applications, both reservoirs may be located in a mine pit or artificial reservoirs made of excavated materials. In subsurface mines, the lower reservoir may be implemented by waterproofing and flooding mine shafts and tunnels. The water is then pumped from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir during periods of low load and high production, and it is discharged through the turbines during periods of peak demand. The potential environmental damages associated with acidity of mine water or the presence of toxic chemicals incentivizes the development of closed-loop technologies, in which water circulates inside the pumped hydropower facility without being discharged into the external water basins; Advanced nuclear energy technologies include small modular reactors, which can be deployed locally to produce electricity and heat. Such units require seismic stability and a supply of cooling water, but population constraints may exist in some areas. Therefore, remote mine land could represent an optimal location for siting advanced nuclear energy technologies.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2023

How numerical tracers and water isotope ratios help us better understand the hydrological cycle and its representation in Earth system models [Slides]

Outline: Water isotope ratios and fractionation; Isotope tracers in Earth system models; Generalized "process-oriented" water tracers in Earth system models; Opportunities in E3SM. Water isotope ratio data are rapidly becoming more available, providing a critical link between models and observations, as well as providing new opportunities to improve process representations (e.g., T/ET partitioning, cloud processes, partitioning of streamflow, coastal or urban impacts on hydrology, etc.)

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

US Nuclear Testing: Health Consequences and Policy Decisions

With the approval of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to begin the research on a nuclear bomb in 1941 to the last test conducted by the U.S. in 1992, the fifty-year history of the nuclear weapons testing program has been an expansive topic of research. The program's growth is credited to the race to build the first atomic weapon for war. The termination of the Soviet Union and many other factors, including concerns about the adverse health effects of radioactive fallout, influenced the decline of the need for the program. The discovery of the negative health effects caused by low-level radiation and the subsequent studies influenced sitting U.S. presidents in passing policies that significantly impacted the nuclear weapons testing program.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2023

An Inventory of AI-ready Benchmark Data for US Fires, Heatwaves, and Droughts

Extreme weather events, including fires, heatwaves, and droughts, have significant impacts on earth, environmental, and energy systems. Mechanistic and predictive understanding, as well as probabilistic risk assessment of these extreme weather events, are crucial for detecting, planning for, and responding to these extremes. Records of extreme weather events provide an important data source for understanding present and future extremes, but the existing data needs preprocessing before it can be used for analysis. Moreover, there are many nonstandard metrics defining the levels of severity or impacts of extremes. In this study, we compile a comprehensive benchmark data inventory of extreme weather events, including fires, heatwaves, and droughts. The dataset covers the period from 2001 to 2020 with a daily temporal resolution and a spatial resolution of 0.5°×0.5° (~55km×55km) over the continental United States (CONUS), and a spatial resolution of 1km × 1km over the Pacific Northwest (PNW) region, together with the co-located and relevant meteorological variables. By exploring and summarizing the spatial and temporal patterns of these extremes in various forms of marginal, conditional, and joint probability distributions, we gain a better understanding of the characteristics of climate extremes. The resulting AI/ML-ready data products can be readily applied to ML-based research, fostering and encouraging AI/ML research in the field of extreme weather. This study can contribute significantly to the advancement of extreme weather research, aiding researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in developing improved preparedness and response strategies to protect communities and ecosystems from the adverse impacts of extreme weather events.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

How a Large-Scale Deployment of Grid-Forming Inverters May Impact Inter-Area Oscillation Modes: An Investigation in the US Western Interconnection

This report describes work performed to evaluate the impact of high grid-forming (GFM) inverter penetration on the inter-area oscillation mode characteristics of the Western Interconnection. Using simulations, this work analyzes how: a) replacing fossil-fuel-based synchronous generators by GFM inverters will impact properties of the North-South mode, and b) replacing the Colstrip power plant by grid-following (GFL) and GFM inverters will change the characteristics of the Montana mode. Results obtained indicate that high penetration of GFM inverters will significantly alter inter-area oscillation characteristics in interconnections. Low frequency oscillations in the 0.11 Hz range will be predominantly driven by remaining synchronous machines, and hence their relative distribution in the interconnection will impact mode characteristics and observability.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Inventory of Public Key Cryptography in US Electric Vehicle Charging

Electric vehicles (EVs) and charging infrastructure are networked systems, which employ high-level communications in support of charging and grid service decisions. Public key cryptography (PKC) underlies much of the security and privacy protections of the information exchange. We are entering a new epoch where quantum computing threats must be seriously considered. A sufficiently large quantum computer, so named Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (QRQC), will be able to perform the mathematical operations to efficiently attack the underpinnings of traditional PKC, thus jeopardizing the digital foundations for trust, communications security, and data security. Estimates suggest a QRQC can break public key encryption and digital signatures in the manner of tens to hundreds of hours, compared to traditional computing that would demand more than 10 18 years in a brute force-style attack. A consensus belief of quantum theorists, quantum experimenters, and cryptographers suggest that the quantum threat will be likely realized in the next twenty years. To address the threat, post-quantum cryptography, which is cryptosystems that are designed to be secure against both traditional and quantum computing threats, must be adopted. Migration from traditional PKC to quantum-resilient cryptography is a global undertaking and likely represents the largest transition in computing history. The nascent state of EV public key infrastructure, combined with limited adoption of the vehicle secure charging features, presents an opportunity to establish a preference for quantum-resistant cryptography as a step on the migration path. Delays will stunt the efforts as rapidly accelerating EVs sales and huge infrastructure investments will create large growing bases of long-lived vehicles and infrastructure. Migration preparations can commence while NIST continues the process to standardize post-quantum cryptography (PQC), which are quantum-resilient algorithms designed to be secure against traditional and quantum computing threats. The first step in preparing EV charging is to identify the presence of traditional public key cryptography algorithms and applications. With this objective in mind, this report is intended to advise the vehicle manufacturers, charging station manufacturers, charging station operators, charge network providers and other EV charging stakeholders with information on traditional PKC application and the potential risks when PKC becomes insecure. This report, the first in a series of reports discussing the topics existing at the confluence of post-quantum cryptography adoption and EV charging, identifies traditional public key applications employed and identifies potential consequences of leaving EV charging infrastructure vulnerable to quantum computing. The focus remains squarely on the of EV charging and infrastructure with respect to PKC and is believed by the authors to complement the NIST SP 1800-38 Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography. While the report is centered on infrastructure, there are implications to vehicles.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2024

US Perspectives on the Conventional/Nuclear Interactions and the Impacts on Nuclear Escalation Risks and Future Arms Control Prospects

This short paper is organized around a few discrete questions. How have U.S. perspectives on conventional and nuclear interactions evolved in recent years? How have these changing perspectives shaped U.S. thinking on perceived nuclear escalation risks with Russia, both long standing and newly emerged? And finally, what do these U.S. perceptions of interactions and risks mean for future potential arms control either in the conventional or nuclear arena? The answers to these questions appear to show some promise for future work in this area. Conventional and nuclear interactions are increasing, and thus the two domains cannot be kept as deliberately or artificially separated as in the past. There is a growing mutual recognition regarding the interplay between conventional and nuclear capabilities in the strategic stability equation. There is also an increasingly shared recognition in the United States and Russia that nuclear escalation risks are likely to originate in conventional crises or conflict, placing an imperative on some form of conflict prevention procedures at the lower end of the spectrum. This requirement suggests some potential areas for risk reduction measures outside of those traditionally considered in conventional and nuclear arms control over the past several decades.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗