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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 1,297 records · Page 72
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Understanding failure in austenitic steels: Key considerations for molten salt storage in CSP applications

Owing to their excellent properties, austenitic stainless steels are extensively used in boilers, furnaces, molten salt tanks, and other applications that are subjected to extreme mechanical loads and high-temperature conditions. Their high corrosion and creep resistance make them suitable for high-temperature operating environments. Additionally, good fatigue resistance and favorable mechanical and visual properties are essential. However, the premature failure of several components at elevated temperatures has been previously reported. Although the failure analysis of components in service is complex, processes such as cold work and welding have been identified as contributing factors to the performance degradation of these steels. This study aims to analyze the various documented failure modes and mechanisms in austenitic steels, including creep, cracking, stress relaxation cracking, and fatigue, to better understand the multi-objective design requirements for these alloys as structural materials for high-temperature molten salt tanks in Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants. Stabilized austenitic grades, such as AISI 347H, demonstrate superior resistance to creep and corrosion-related degradation when compared to non-stabilized grades like AISI 316L at temperatures relevant to concentrated solar power (CSP) applications. In contrast, nickel-based alloys offer enhanced corrosion resistance, albeit at a higher cost. This review underscores that creep, stress relaxation cracking, and thermo-mechanical fatigue are the predominant long-term failure risks in CSP hot tanks.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Perspectives on Microfluidics for the Study of Asphaltenes in Upstream Hydrocarbon Production: A Minireview

The utilization of microfluidics has generated deep insights into asphaltene precipitation mechanisms and oil–water emulsion stabilization. Agglomeration and precipitation of asphaltenes can cause flow assurance problems during the extraction and transportation of crude oil. Change in temperature, pressure, reservoir conditions, and solvents can change the local environment, leading to asphaltene precipitation. Understanding asphaltene properties and precipitation pathways becomes critical in devising mitigation methods, demulsifiers, and suitable conditions during hydrocarbon processing. Microfluidics has helped in high throughput measurement studies, understanding critical processing conditions, fast demulsifier screening, and the effect of solvent concentration on deposition, generating useful information for utilization at the point of resource extraction facilitating improved resource management. It has become possible to capture the porous, complex nature of reservoir formations and the interaction of chemicals during precipitation through integrated analytics and visualization studies available only through microfluidics. The use of droplet microfluidics, with optical microscopy and high-speed imaging to study the oil–water interface, has resulted in greater understanding of the role of asphaltenes in interfacial properties and emulsion stabilization. Here, this minireview highlights the crucial aspects of microfluidics that have been used to understand physicochemical behavior and dynamics of asphaltene deposition. Some of the unique devices have been presented focusing on the key elements of microfluidics design, fabrication, and analysis, as the insight obtained from microfluidics strongly depends on the device design and the controllability of the experimental parameters. Successful implementation of microfluidics for efficient and controlled experiments, short analysis time scales and rapid screening, and generation of high-quality, reliable data that convey asphaltene deposition issues and interface behavior in emulsions shows the importance of microsystems for advancing knowledge in hydrocarbon production and processing.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2017

ACME Priority Metrics (A-PRIME)

A-PRIME, is a collection of scripts designed to provide Accelerated Climate Model for Energy (ACME) model developers and analysts with a variety of analysis of the model needed to determine if the model is producing the desired results, depending on the goals of the simulation. The software is csh scripts based at the top level to enable scientist to provide the input parameters. Within the scripts, the csh scripts calls code to perform the postprocessing of the raw data analysis and create plots for visual assessment.

Evans, KatherineJ.↗
DOE OSTI2023

Probing Ultrafast Electron (De)localization Dynamics in Mixed Valence Complexes Using Femtosecond X-ray Spectroscopy (Final Report)

The central goal of this proposal was to directly visualize and quantify how electronic correlations, vibronic couplings, and local solute-solvent interactions control intramolecular electron motion on the femtosecond time scale. The proposed research program focused on solvated Ruthenium (Ru) based mixed-valence complexes, a prototypical class of transition-metal complexes, which are of significant interest for their potential applications in photochemical energy conversion. Electron movements following photochemical excitation are closely coupled with atomic/vibrational and solvent motion. To disentangle these various components requires tools designed to directly probe electron correlations and vibronic coupling (coherently coupled motions of electronic and vibrational coordinates) on the timescale of electron motion in the solution phase.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2021

SoDaH: the SOils DAta Harmonization database, an open-source synthesis of soil data from research networks, version 1.0

Data collected from research networks present opportunities to test theories and develop models about factors responsible for the long-term persistence and vulnerability of soil organic matter (SOM). Synthesizing datasets collected by different research networks presents opportunities to expand the ecological gradients and scientific breadth of information available for inquiry. Synthesizing these data is challenging, especially considering the legacy of soil data that have already been collected and an expansion of new network science initiatives. To facilitate this effort, here we present the SOils DAta Harmonization database (SoDaH; https://lter.github.io/som-website, last access: 22 December 2020), a flexible database designed to harmonize diverse SOM datasets from multiple research networks. SoDaH is built on several network science efforts in the United States, but the tools built for SoDaH aim to provide an open-access resource to facilitate synthesis of soil carbon data. Moreover, SoDaH allows for individual locations to contribute results from experimental manipulations, repeated measurements from long-term studies, and local- to regional-scale gradients across ecosystems or landscapes. Finally, we also provide data visualization and analysis tools that can be used to query and analyze the aggregated database. The SoDaH v1.0 dataset is archived and available at https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/9733f6b6d2ffd12bf126dc36a763e0b4 (Wieder et al., 2020).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2014

Monte Carlo study for designing a dedicated “D”-shaped collimator used in the external beam radiotherapy of retinoblastoma patients

Purpose: Retinoblastoma is the most common intraocular malignancy in the early childhood. Patients treated with external beam radiotherapy respond very well to the treatment. However, owing to the genotype of children suffering hereditary retinoblastoma, the risk of secondary radio-induced malignancies is high. The University Hospital of Essen has successfully treated these patients on a daily basis during nearly 30 years using a dedicated “D”-shaped collimator. The use of this collimator that delivers a highly conformed small radiation field, gives very good results in the control of the primary tumor as well as in preserving visual function, while it avoids the devastating side effects of deformation of midface bones. The purpose of the present paper is to propose a modified version of the “D”-shaped collimator that reduces even further the irradiation field with the scope to reduce as well the risk of radio-induced secondary malignancies. Concurrently, the new dedicated “D”-shaped collimator must be easier to build and at the same time produces dose distributions that only differ on the field size with respect to the dose distributions obtained by the current collimator in use. The scope of the former requirement is to facilitate the employment of the authors' irradiation technique both at the authors' and at other hospitals. The fulfillment of the latter allows the authors to continue using the clinical experience gained in more than 30 years. Methods: The Monte Carlo codePENELOPE was used to study the effect that the different structural elements of the dedicated “D”-shaped collimator have on the absorbed dose distribution. To perform this study, the radiation transport through a Varian Clinac 2100 C/D operating at 6 MV was simulated in order to tally phase-space files which were then used as radiation sources to simulate the considered collimators and the subsequent dose distributions. With the knowledge gained in that study, a new, simpler, “D”-shaped collimator is proposed. Results: The proposed collimator delivers a dose distribution which is 2.4 cm wide along the inferior-superior direction of the eyeball. This width is 0.3 cm narrower than that of the dose distribution obtained with the collimator currently in clinical use. The other relevant characteristics of the dose distribution obtained with the new collimator, namely, depth doses at clinically relevant positions, penumbrae width, and shape of the lateral profiles, are statistically compatible with the results obtained for the collimator currently in use. Conclusions: The smaller field size delivered by the proposed collimator still fully covers the planning target volume with at least 95% of the maximum dose at a depth of 2 cm and provides a safety margin of 0.2 cm, so ensuring an adequate treatment while reducing the irradiated volume.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2017

Comparing Velocity Profiles Along the Rod Length of a Helical Coil Steam Generator Model

A model of a specific type of tube and shell heat exchanger, the helical coil steam generator (HCSG), was designed and constructed to study multiple fluidic properties that attribute to the efficiency of the heat transfer it provides. Tube and shell heat exchangers are currently used throughout industry in chemical, power and petroleum engineering. Most commonly, a primary flow is circulated through a shell, while the secondary flow is run through several small tubes that are bundled together. Methods to increase the heat transfer between the two flows include adding baffles to force shell side flow over more tubes, fins added in-between layers of tubes and passing tubes multiple times through the shell to increase heat exchanger effectiveness. The HCSG incorporates many of the proposed methods but also relies on a complex geometry to increase the heat transfer between tube and shell side flow. In an area where cost effectiveness is favorable, such as inside a nuclear reactor, helically banked steam generators makes extensive use of the room with no sharp tube bends. This increases the pressure loss on the secondary flow and can solve potential temperature manufacturing issues at the welds of junctions. Additionally, they have exhibited pure cross flow behaviors with high heat transfer coefficients and axial temperature profiles that correspond to pure counter-flow with high mean temperature differences. Early work showed that helical banks can have a significant increase of 16 to 43% higher heat transfer coefficient than straight pipe heat exchangers. While many previous studies have looked at the heat transfer, pressure drop and flow fields of a tube and shell heat exchanger, they all focus on tube bundles that are either in-line or staggered. The early flow visualization studies on these types of bundle arrangements reported that attached eddies were formed alternatively behind each of the rods and were occasionally dragged into the main stream of shell side flow. Later studies suggested that observable periodic vortex shedding was dependent on geometry. Experimental data taken using techniques such as laser Doppler anemometry (LDV) by Simonin and Barcouda (1986) as mentioned in Hassan (2002), hot-wire anemometry with Tsuchida (1982) and particle image velocimetry (PIV) conducted by researchers as late as 2007 have been used to characterize turbulent flow and distinguish flow field structures within in-line and staggered tube bundles. By studying these flow field structures, their contribution to fluidic properties such as heat transfer efficiency and pressure drop can be characterized effectively. Literature review lead to a design that incorporated five layers of coils wrapped around one another. The outermost and middle layers of tubes coiled at a specific pitch in a clockwise direction while the other two layers coiled counterclockwise. The proposed design incorporates a constantly changing lateral pitch ratio, a, between adjacent rods. The constructed test section isolates a single interface between two adjacent coiling rod bundles of twelve rods. Three distinct cross sectional planes along the rod bundles were looked at to study the effect of the local geometry to flow fields, Section A, B and C. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) frames of 896 x 848 pixels were captured at each section across a specific height. Profiles of mean velocity fields for each section are compared and discussed as possible features of the changing lateral pitch ratio.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Visual Analytics of Crosstalk in Quantum Hardware

Crosstalk remains a major obstacle to building scalable and fault-tolerant quantum computers. Conventional diagnostic techniques-often based on numerical simulation or statistical modeling-struggle to scale with hardware complexity and offer limited interpretability. In this work, we present a visual analytics framework for diagnosing qubit crosstalk using lightweight, circuit-based models integrated with an interactive user interface. Our approach quantifies correlations between active and idle qubits under parameterized single- and twoqubit operations, enabling detection of both spatial and gateinduced crosstalk. The system incorporates qubit topology and gate performance data to support sector-based exploration and correlation mapping. This tool assists users in identifying correlated error sources, informing qubit placement strategies, and guiding noise-aware circuit design.

Chae, Junghoon [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000206016746)↗
DOE OSTI2016

Coronary artery analysis: Computer-assisted selection of best-quality segments in multiple-phase coronary CT angiography

Purpose: The authors are developing an automated method to identify the best-quality coronary arterial segment from multiple-phase coronary CT angiography (cCTA) acquisitions, which may be used by either interpreting physicians or computer-aided detection systems to optimally and efficiently utilize the diagnostic information available in multiple-phase cCTA for the detection of coronary artery disease. Methods: After initialization with a manually identified seed point, each coronary artery tree is automatically extracted from multiple cCTA phases using our multiscale coronary artery response enhancement and 3D rolling balloon region growing vessel segmentation and tracking method. The coronary artery trees from multiple phases are then aligned by a global registration using an affine transformation with quadratic terms and nonlinear simplex optimization, followed by a local registration using a cubic B-spline method with fast localized optimization. The corresponding coronary arteries among the available phases are identified using a recursive coronary segment matching method. Each of the identified vessel segments is transformed by the curved planar reformation (CPR) method. Four features are extracted from each corresponding segment as quality indicators in the original computed tomography volume and the straightened CPR volume, and each quality indicator is used as a voting classifier for the arterial segment. A weighted voting ensemble (WVE) classifier is designed to combine the votes of the four voting classifiers for each corresponding segment. The segment with the highest WVE vote is then selected as the best-quality segment. In this study, the training and test sets consisted of 6 and 20 cCTA cases, respectively, each with 6 phases, containing a total of 156 cCTA volumes and 312 coronary artery trees. An observer preference study was also conducted with one expert cardiothoracic radiologist and four nonradiologist readers to visually rank vessel segment quality. The performance of our automated method was evaluated by comparing the automatically identified best-quality segments identified by the computer to those selected by the observers. Results: For the 20 test cases, 254 groups of corresponding vessel segments were identified after multiple phase registration and recursive matching. The AI-BQ segments agreed with the radiologist’s top 2 ranked segments in 78.3% of the 254 groups (Cohen’s kappa 0.60), and with the 4 nonradiologist observers in 76.8%, 84.3%, 83.9%, and 85.8% of the 254 groups. In addition, 89.4% of the AI-BQ segments agreed with at least two observers’ top 2 rankings, and 96.5% agreed with at least one observer’s top 2 rankings. In comparison, agreement between the four observers’ top ranked segment and the radiologist’s top 2 ranked segments were 79.9%, 80.7%, 82.3%, and 76.8%, respectively, with kappa values ranging from 0.56 to 0.68. Conclusions: The performance of our automated method for selecting the best-quality coronary segments from a multiple-phase cCTA acquisition was comparable to the selection made by human observers. This study demonstrates the potential usefulness of the automated method in clinical practice, enabling interpreting physicians to fully utilize the best available information in cCTA for diagnosis of coronary disease, without requiring manual search through the multiple phases and minimizing the variability in image phase selection for evaluation of coronary artery segments across the diversity of human readers with variations in expertise.

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗
DOE OSTI2013

Investigation of Gas Solid Fluidized Bed Dynamics with Non-Spherical Particles

One of the largest challenges for 21st century is to fulfill global energy demand while also reducing detrimental impacts of energy generation and use on the environment. Gasification is a promising technology to meet the requirement of reduced emissions without compromising performance. Coal gasification is not an incinerating process; rather than burning coal completely a partial combustion takes place in the presence of steam and limited amounts of oxygen. In this controlled environment, a chemical reaction takes place to produce a mixture of clean synthetic gas. Gas-solid fluidized bed is one such type of gasification technology. During gasification, the mixing behavior of solid (coal) and gas and their flow patterns can be very complicated to understand. Many attempts have taken place in laboratory scale to understand bed hydrodynamics with spherical particles though in actual applications with coal, the particles are non-spherical. This issue drove the documented attempt presented here to investigate fluidized bed behavior using different ranges of non-spherical particles, as well as spherical. For this investigation, various parameters are controlled that included particle size, bed height, bed diameter and particle shape. Particles ranged from 355 µm to 1180 µm, bed diameter varied from 2 cm to 7 cm, two fluidized beds with diameters of 3.4 cm and 12.4 cm, for the spherical and non-spherical shaped particles that were taken into consideration. Pressure drop was measured with increasing superficial gas velocity. The velocity required in order to start to fluidize the particle is called the minimum fluidization velocity, which is one of the most important parameters to design and optimize within a gas-solid fluidized bed. This minimum fluidization velocity was monitored during investigation while observing variables factors and their effect on this velocity. From our investigation, it has been found that minimum fluidization velocity is independent of bed height for both spherical and non-spherical particles. Further, it decrease with decreasing particle size and decreases with decreasing bed diameter. Shadow sizing, a non-intrusive imaging and diagnostic technology, was also used to visualize flow fields inside fluidized beds for both spherical and non- spherical particles and to detect the particle sizes.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Curation and Computational Design of Bioenergy-Related Metabolic Pathways

Pathway Tools is a systems-biology software package written by SRI International (SRI) that produces Pathway/Genome Databases (PGDBs) for organisms with a sequenced genome. Pathway Tools also provides a wide range of capabilities for analyzing predicted metabolic networks and user-generated omics data. More than 5,000 academic, industrial, and government groups have licensed Pathway Tools. This user community includes researchers at all three DOE bioenergy centers, as well as academic and industrial metabolic engineering (ME) groups. An integral part of the Pathway Tools software is MetaCyc, a large, multiorganism database of metabolic pathways and enzymes that SRI and its academic collaborators manually curate. This project included two main goals: I. Enhance the MetaCyc content of bioenergy-related enzymes and pathways. II. Develop computational tools for engineering metabolic pathways that satisfy specified design goals, in particular for bioenergy-related pathways. In part I, SRI proposed to significantly expand the coverage of bioenergy-related metabolic information in MetaCyc, followed by the generation of organism-specific PGDBs for all energy-relevant organisms sequenced at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI). Part I objectives included: 1: Expand the content of MetaCyc to include bioenergy-related enzymes and pathways. 2: Enhance the Pathway Tools software to enable display of complex polymer degradation processes. 3: Create new PGDBs for the energy-related organisms sequenced by JGI, update existing PGDBs with new MetaCyc content, and make these data available to JBEI via the BioCyc website. In part II, SRI proposed to develop an efficient computational tool for the engineering of metabolic pathways. Part II objectives included: 4: Develop computational tools for generating metabolic pathways that satisfy specified design goals, enabling users to specify parameters such as starting and ending compounds, and preferred or disallowed intermediate compounds. The pathways were to be generated using metabolic reactions from a reference database (DB). 5: Develop computational tools for ranking the pathways generated in objective (4) according to their optimality. The ranking criteria include stoichiometric yield, the number and cost of additional inputs and the cofactor compounds required by the pathway, pathway length, and pathway energetics. 6: Develop tools for visualizing generated pathways to facilitate the evaluation of a large space of generated pathways.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Neutron imaging of diabatic two-phase flows relevant to air conditioning

The design of the evaporator of an air conditioning system relies heavily on heat transfer coefficients and pressure drop correlations that predominantly involve an estimate of the changing void fraction and the underlying two-phase flow regime. These correlations dictate whether the resulting heat exchanger is oversized or not and the amount of refrigerant charge necessary to operate. The latter is particularly important when dealing with flammable or high GWP refrigerants. Traditional techniques to measure the void fraction and visualize the flow are either invasive to the flow or occur downstream of the evaporator, where some of the flow distribution will have changed. Neutron imaging has the potential to visualize two-phase flow in-situ where an aluminium heat exchanger structure becomes essentially transparent to the penetrating neutrons. The subatomic particles are attenuated by the passing refrigerant flow. The resulting image may be directly related to the void fraction and the overall picture provides a clear insight into the flow regime present. This work presents neutron images of the refrigerant Isopentane as it passes through the flow channels of an aluminium evaporator at flowrates relevant to air conditioning. The flow in a 4mm square macro channel is compared to that in a 250 m by 750 m rectangular microchannel in terms of void fraction and regime. All neutron imaging experiments were conducted at the High Flux Isotope Reactor, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility

Geoghegan, Patrick J↗
DOE OSTI2017

Quantitative Reflection Imaging for the Morphology and Dynamics of Live Aplysia californica Pedal Ganglion Neurons Cultured on Nanostructured Plasmonic Crystals

We describe a reflection imaging system that consists of a plasmonic crystal, a common laboratory microscope, and band-pass filters for use in the quantitative imaging and in situ monitoring of live cells and their substrate interactions. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) provides a highly sensitive method to monitor changes in physicochemical properties occurring at metal-dielectric interfaces. Polyelectrolyte thin films deposited using the layer-by-layer (LBL) self-assembly method provide a reference system for calibrating the reflection contrast changes that occur when the polyelectrolyte film thickness changes and provide insight into the optical responses that originate from the multiple plasmonic features supported by this imaging system. Finitedifference time-domain (FDTD) simulations of the optical responses measured experimentally from the polyelectrolyte reference system are used to provide a calibration of the optical system for subsequent use in quantitative studies investigating live cell dynamics in cultures supported on a plasmonic crystal substrate. Live Aplysia californica pedal ganglion neurons cultured in artificial seawater were used as a model system through which to explore the utility of this plasmonic imaging technique. Here, the morphology of cellular peripheral structures ≲80 nm in thickness were quantitatively analyzed, and the dynamics of their trypsin-induced surface detachment were visualized. These results illustrate the capacities of this system for use in investigations of the dynamics of ultrathin cellular structures within complex bioanalytical environments.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Design of a graphical user interface for few-shot machine learning classification of electron microscopy data

The recent growth in data generation by modern electron microscopes requires rapid, scalable, and flexible approaches to image segmentation and analysis. Few-shot machine learning, which can richly classify images from a handful of user-provided examples, is a promising route to high-throughput analysis. However, current command-line implementations of such approaches can be slow and unintuitive to use, lacking the real-time feedback necessary to perform effective classification. Here we report on the development of a Python-based graphical user interface that enables end users to easily conduct and visualize the output of few-shot learning models. This interface is portable and can be hosted locally or on the web, providing the opportunity to reproducibly conduct, share, and crowd-source few-shot analyses.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

Individual Component Map of Rotatory Strength and Rotatory Strength Density Plots As Analysis Tools of Circular Dichroism Spectra of Complex Systems

We introduce Individual Component Maps of Rotatory Strength (ICM-RS) and Rotatory Strength Density (RSD) plots as analysis tools of chiro-optical linear response spectra deriving from time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) simulations. ICM-RS and RSD allow one to visualize the origin of chiral response in momentum or real space, including signed contributions and therefore highlighting cancellation terms that are ubiquitous in chiral phenomena, and should be especially useful in analyzing the spectra of complex systems. As test cases, we use ICM-RS and RSD to analyze circular dicroism spectra of selected (Ag-Au)30(SR)18 monolayer-protected metal nanoclusters, showing the potential of the proposed tools to derive insight and understanding, and eventually rational design, in chiro-optical studies of complex systems.

Chang, Le↗
DOE OSTI2025

Volumetric imaging of the 3D orientation of cellular structures with a polarized fluorescence light-sheet microscope

Polarized fluorescence microscopy is a valuable tool for measuring molecular orientations in biological samples, but techniques for recovering three-dimensional orientations and positions of fluorescent ensembles are limited. We report a polarized dual-view light-sheet system for determining the diffraction-limited three-dimensional distribution of the orientations and positions of ensembles of fluorescent dipoles that label biological structures. We share a set of visualization, histogram, and profiling tools for interpreting these positions and orientations. We model the distributions based on the polarization-dependent efficiency of excitation and detection of emitted fluorescence, using coarse-grained representations we call orientation distribution functions (ODFs). We apply ODFs to create physics-informed models of image formation with spatio-angular point-spread and transfer functions. We use theory and experiment to conclude that light-sheet tilting is a necessary part of our design for recovering all three-dimensional orientations. We use our system to extend known two-dimensional results to three dimensions in FM1-43-labeled giant unilamellar vesicles, fast-scarlet-labeled cellulose in xylem cells, and phalloidin-labeled actin in U2OS cells. Additionally, we observe phalloidin-labeled actin in mouse fibroblasts grown on grids of labeled nanowires and identify correlations between local actin alignment and global cell-scale orientation, indicating cellular coordination across length scales.

Science & Technology - Other Topics↗
DOE OSTI2021

Streamlining the Coupling of BISON and Dakota Through the NEAMS Workbench

Metallic nuclear fuels for use in advanced reactors are an active area of research and development. Robust, accurate metallic fuel performance models are necessary for the design, analysis, and licensing of such reactors. However, metallic fuel performance models require additional development; they are not as mature as uranium dioxide fuel performance models. To support further metallic fuel development, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Florida have streamlined the coupling of the BISON fuel performance code with Design Analysis Kit for Optimization and Terascale Applications (Dakota) statistical analysis tool through the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) Workbench. This work included performing three different sensitivity analyses on metallic nuclear fuel models in BISON. The analyses examined were a general model of the IFR-1 experiment, the X430 experiment T654 pin, and the X430 experiment T651 pin. The results suggest that BISON and Dakota can be integrated through NEAMS Workbench to perform sensitivity and uncertainty analyses and visualize the results.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Microgrid Hardening Design Toolkit User Guide: Software v0.29

Microgrid Hardening Design Toolkit helps microgrid stakeholders assess community-specific natural hazard risks to microgrid components and provides mitigation strategies to reduce those risks. Using census tract location inputs and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Risk Index dataset, the tool provides a ranked list of the highest risk hazards for a selected community and hazard-specific mitigation options for microgrid components. It also provides risk twin communities with similar hazard risk profiles and includes a radar-chart to visually compare risk profiles across communities. The toolkit is expected to help users quickly understand community-specific hazard risks and make decisions for microgrid hardening.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗