Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “consumer”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,351 records · Page 75
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2013

Building Toward a Small Wind Turbine Site Assessor Credential (Presentation)

Proper site assessment is integral to the development of a successful small wind project. Without a small wind site assessor certification program, consumers, including state incentive program managers, lack a benchmark for differentiating between qualified and nonqualified site assessors. A small wind site assessor best practice manual is being developed as a resource for consumers until a credential program becomes available. This presentation describes the purpose, proposed content, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's approach to the development of such a manual.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2013

Cognitive Radio will revolutionize American transportation

Cognitive Radio will revolutionize American transportation. Through smart technology, it will anticipate user needs; detect available bandwidths and frequencies then seamlessly connect vehicles, infrastructures, and consumer devices; and it will support the Department of Transportation IntelliDrive Program, helping researchers, auto manufacturers, and Federal and State officials advance the connectivity of US transportation systems for improved safety, mobility, and environmental conditions. Using cognitive radio, a commercial vehicle will know its driver, onboard freight and destination route. Drivers will save time and resources communicating with automatic toll booths and know ahead of time whether to stop at a weigh station or keep rolling. At accident scenes, cognitive radio sensors on freight and transportation modes can alert emergency personnel and measure on-site, real-time conditions such as a chemical leak. The sensors will connect freight to industry, relaying shipment conditions and new delivery schedules. For industry or military purposes, cognitive radio will enable real-time freight tracking around the globe and its sensory technology can help prevent cargo theft or tampering by alerting shipper and receiver if freight is tampered with while en route. For the average consumer, a vehicle will tailor the transportation experience to the passenger such as delivering age-appropriate movies via satellite. Cognitive radio will enhance transportation safety by continually sensing what is important to the user adapting to its environment and incoming information, and proposing solutions that improve mobility and quality of life.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2014

A Method for Modeling Household Occupant Behavior to Simulate Residential Energy Consumption

This paper presents a statistical method for modeling the behavior of household occupants to estimate residential energy consumption. Using data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau in the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), actions carried out by survey respondents are categorized into ten distinct activities. These activities are defined to correspond to the major energy consuming loads commonly found within the residential sector. Next, time varying minute resolution Markov chain based statistical models of different occupant types are developed. Using these behavioral models, individual occupants are simulated to show how an occupant interacts with the major residential energy consuming loads throughout the day. From these simulations, the minimum number of occupants, and consequently the minimum number of multiple occupant households, needing to be simulated to produce a statistically accurate representation of aggregate residential behavior can be determined. Finally, future work will involve the use of these occupant models along side residential load models to produce a high-resolution energy consumption profile and estimate the potential for demand response from residential loads.

American Time Use Survey↗
DOE OSTI2014

Analyzing the Energy and Power Consumption of Remote Memory Accesses in the OpenSHMEM Model

PGAS models like OpenSHMEM provide interfaces to explicitly initiate one-sided remote memory accesses among processes. In addition, the model also provides synchronizing barriers to ensure a consistent view of the distributed memory at different phases of an application. The incorrect use of such interfaces affects the scalability achievable while using a parallel programming model. This study aims at understanding the effects of these constructs on the energy and power consumption behavior of OpenSHMEM applications. Our experiments show that cost incurred in terms of the total energy and power consumed depends on multiple factors across the software and hardware stack. We conclude that there is a significant impact on the power consumed by the CPU and DRAM due to multiple factors including the design of the data transfer patterns within an application, the design of the communication protocols within a middleware, the architectural constraints laid by the interconnect solutions, and also the levels of memory hierarchy within a compute node. This work motivates treating energy and power consumption as important factors while designing compute solutions for current and future distributed systems.

Jana, Siddhartha↗
DOE OSTI2014

WriteSmoothing: Improving Lifetime of Non-volatile Caches Using Intra-set Wear-leveling

Driven by the trends of increasing core-count and bandwidth-wall problem, the size of last level caches (LLCs) has greatly increased. Since SRAM consumes high leakage power, researchers have explored use of non-volatile memories (NVMs) for designing caches as they provide high density and consume low leakage power. However, since NVMs have low write-endurance and the existing cache management policies are write variation-unaware, effective wear-leveling techniques are required for achieving reasonable cache lifetimes using NVMs. We present WriteSmoothing, a technique for mitigating intra-set write variation in NVM caches. WriteSmoothing logically divides the cache-sets into multiple modules. For each module, WriteSmoothing collectively records number of writes in each way for any of the sets. It then periodically makes most frequently written ways in a module unavailable to shift the write-pressure to other ways in the sets of the module. Extensive simulation results have shown that on average, for single and dual-core system configurations, WriteSmoothing improves cache lifetime by 2.17X and 2.75X, respectively. Also, its implementation overhead is small and it works well for a wide range of algorithm and system parameters.

cache↗
DOE OSTI2013

The Demand Reduction Potential of Smart Appliances in U.S. Homes

The widespread deployment of demand respond (DR) enabled home appliances is expected to have significant reduction in the demand of electricity during peak hours. The work documented in this paper focuses on estimating the energy shift resulting from the installation of DR enabled smart appliances in the U.S. This estimation is based on analyzing the market for smart appliances and calculating the total energy demand that can potentially be shifted by DR control in appliances. Appliance operation is examined by considering their sub components individually to identify their energy consumptions and savings resulting from interrupting and shifting their load, e.g., by delaying the refrigerator defrost cycle. In addition to major residential appliances, residential pool pumps are also included in this study given their energy consumption profiles that make them favorable for DR applications. In the market analysis study documented in this paper, the U.S. Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) and National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) databases are used to examine the expected life of an appliance, the number of appliances installed in homes constructed in 10 year intervals after 1940 and home owner income. Conclusions about the effectiveness of the smart appliances in reducing electrical demand have been drawn and a ranking of appliances in terms of their contribution to load shift is presented. E.g., it was concluded that DR enabled water heaters result in the maximum load shift; whereas, dishwashers have the highest user elasticity and hence the highest potential for load shifting through DR. This work is part of a larger effort to bring novel home energy management concepts and technologies to reduce energy consumption, reduce peak electricity demand, integrate renewables and storage technology, and change homeowner behavior to manage and consume less energy and potentially save consumer energy costs.

Demand Reduction↗
DOE OSTI2014

EXTENDING NUCLEAR ENERGY TO NON-ELECTRICAL APPLICATIONS

Electricity represents less than half of all energy consumed in the United States and globally. Although a few commercial nuclear power plants world-wide provide energy to non-electrical applications such as district heating and water desalination, nuclear energy has been largely relegated to base-load electricity production. A new generation of smaller-sized nuclear power plants offers significant promise for extending nuclear energy to many non-electrical applications. The NuScale small modular reactor design is especially well suited for these non-traditional customers due to its small unit size, very robust reactor protection features and a highly flexible and scalable plant design. A series of technical and economic evaluation studies have been conducted to assess the practicality of using a NuScale plant to provide electricity and heat to a variety of non-electrical applications, including water desalination, oil refining, and hydrogen production. The studies serve to highlight the unique design features of the NuScale plant for these applications and provide encouraging conclusions regarding the technical and economic viability of extending clean nuclear energy to a broad range of non-electrical energy consumers.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2015

SBIR Phase II Final Report - Multi-Protocol Energy Management Gateway for Home-Area Networks

Significant amounts of electricity, natural gas, and heating oil are wasted by homeowners due to inefficient operation and inadequate maintenance of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment. Coincident’s work under this award reduces energy waste, saves consumers money, and reduces carbon emissions. It does so in three ways: First, Coincident’s approach replaces the traditional thermostat with a wireless network of sensors and controllers that measure temperature, humidity and occupancy in multiple rooms in the house. The “Internet of Things” is a technology trend holding the promise of ubiquitous inexpensive sensors. The reality, however, is that energy and HVAC monitoring and management is a patchwork of incompatible protocols and expensive proprietary technologies. Coincident’s multi-protocol architecture, developed in part under this award tackles this problem and brings low cost interoperable sensor and control devices to market. Second, the Coincident system eliminates hard-to-program and rigid thermostat schedules and instead provides automatic operation of heating and cooling by combining individual temperature and comfort preferences with energy-saving targets, real-time utility use information, weather data, and room utilization patterns. Energy efficiency technology must be appealing to consumers otherwise it will not be used. The Coincident user interface has engaging features such as remote control from any smart phone or web browser and per-room performance breakdowns. Expected energy savings resulting from more efficient operation of heating and air conditioning equipment are in the range of 10-20%. Third, the Coincident system provides heating and air-conditioning contractors with fine-grained performance data for every residence they support (subject to customer privacy controls). This data is integrated from diverse networks within the residence and includes HVAC performance and fuel use data. This information allows the partner to validate energy savings and identify potential system faults (whether from installation problems or maintenance issues). When combined with professional installation as part of high-efficiency HVAC upgrade, energy savings levels of 20-30% can be achieved. Economic feasibility of energy efficiency technology is one of the key challenges addressed in this award. The Coincident system is engineered to be delivered at a disruptive price point, making the system financially feasible for new and retrofit homes of all types and sizes. The Coincident system is intended to be sold through the HVAC professional—the industry most capable of improving HVAC efficiency. Providing HVAC contractors with detailed home performance data motivates them to sell the product, provides them with maintenance and upgrade revenue opportunities, and therefore delivers customer savings and environmental benefits. Having demonstrated technical and financial feasibility, Coincident has won additional grants and awards, participated in pilot projects, started partnership discussions with several HVAC equipment vendors, and has lined up several large channel partners ready to participate in large pilot rollouts.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2012

Evaluation of Miscellaneous and Electronic Device Energy Use in Hospitals

Miscellaneous and electronic loads (MELs) consume about one-thirdof the primary energy used in US buildings, and their energy use is increasing faster than other end-uses. In healthcare facilities, 30percent of the annual electricity was used by MELs in 2008. This paper presents methods and challenges for estimating medical MELs energy consumption along with estimates of energy use in a hospital by combining device-level metered data with inventories and usage information. An important finding is that common, small devices consume large amounts of energy in aggregate and should not be ignored when trying to address hospital energy use.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2012

Prosumer-Based Distributed Autonomous Cyber-Physical Architecture for Ultra-reliable Green Electricity Internetworks

This project, the first of its kind, proposes a new architecture for decentralized management and control of future electricity grids with millions of decision-makers. These economically motivated decision-makers are called prosumers (producer-consumers). Prosumers can produce, consume, and/or store electricity and make strategic decisions enabled by communication networks. Prosumers can be as large as a utility or as small as an electric vehicle or a smart house with a home energy management system. The report first provides an impression of the functionality envisioned in prosumer-based smart grids and the philosophy behind their design. The architecture is intended to provide a platform for many possibilities in service definition and trading. The functionality of the architecture is identified by functional and non-functional requirements related to decentralized control and optimization. In this report, three key technologies are proposed for enabling distributed operation and control in prosumer-based smart grids. The first technology is a cyber-infrastructure model, which provides an underlying framework for distributed communication and computation in smart grids. The model is based on service-oriented computing paradigm and is compatible with the existing service-oriented technologies, used in enterprise computing, such as Web Services. However, it extends these technologies for handling the hard-to-predict real-time aspects of smart grids by introducing resource-aware service deployment and quality-of-service (QoS)-aware service monitoring phases. The second technology is a distributed frequency regulation (DFR) framework, which can ensure midterm frequency stability while avoiding inter-area oscillations and using a limited control effort. DFR can complement today’s Automatic Generation Control (AGC) systems by providing an advanced protocol for coordination between AGC systems of different prosumers. The main advantage of the DFR technology is that each frequency regulator only needs to communicate with its neighbors in the network. The efficacy of DFR is shown through simulations on real-world electric energy systems of different scale and complexity. The third technology introduced in this project is decentralized unit commitment (DUC) for heterogeneous prosumers. The DUC technology is a new scalable method for formulating and solving a distributed energy scheduling problem. The algorithm extends the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and includes several heuristics to mitigate oscillations and traps in local optimality that result from the nonconvexity of unit commitment. The main advantages of DUC is that it can solve the unit commitment problem for large-scale power systems of more than 3,000 nodes faster than the state-of-the-art, centralized methods, and that it is scalable to energy scheduling problems of prosumer systems of any size. In summary, this report illustrates that the distributed architecture for prosumer-based power grids is an enabler of transforming aging power grids into sustainable, resilient, reliable, and efficient smart grids with some desirable functionalities similar to the Internet.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2014

Impact of Wireless Power Transfer in Transportation: Future Transportation Enabler, or Near Term Distraction

While the total liquid fuels consumed in the U.S. for transportation of goods and people is expected to hold steady, or decline slightly over the next few decades, the world wide consumption is projected to increase of over 30% according to the Annual Energy Outlook 2014 [1]. The balance of energy consumption for transportation between petroleum fuels and electric energy, and the related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced consuming either, is of particular interest to government administrations, vehicle OEMs, and energy suppliers. The market adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) appears to be inhibited by many factors relating to the energy storage system (ESS) and charging infrastructure. Wireless power transfer (WPT) technologies have been identified as a key enabling technology to increase the acceptance of EVs. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been involved in many research areas related to understanding the impacts, opportunities, challenges and costs related to various deployments of WPT technology for transportation use. Though the initial outlook for WPT deployment looks promising, many other emerging technologies have met unfavorable market launches due to unforeseen technology limitations, sometimes due to the complex system in which the new technology was placed. This paper will summarize research and development (R&D) performed at ORNL in the area of Wireless Power Transfer (WPT). ORNL s advanced transportation technology R&D activities provide a unique set of experienced researchers to assist in the creation of a transportation system level view. These activities range from fundamental technology development at the component level to subsystem controls and interactions to applicable system level analysis of impending market and industry responses and beyond.

dynamic wireless charging↗
DOE OSTI2015

Effects of Home Energy Management Systems on Distribution Utilities and Feeders Under Various Market Structures: Preprint

The combination of distributed energy resources (DER) and retail tariff structures to provide benefits to both utility consumers and the utilities is poorly understood. To improve understanding, an Integrated Energy System Model (IESM) is being developed to simulate the physical and economic aspects of DER technologies, the buildings where they reside, and feeders servicing them. The IESM was used to simulate 20 houses with home energy management systems on a single feeder under a time of use tariff to estimate economic and physical impacts on both the households and the distribution utilities. HEMS reduce consumers’ electric bills by precooling houses in the hours before peak electricity pricing. Household savings are greater than the reduction utility net revenue indicating that HEMS can provide a societal benefit providing tariffs are structured so that utilities remain solvent. Utilization of HEMS reduce peak loads during high price hours but shifts it to hours with off-peak and shoulder prices and resulting in a higher peak load.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2016

Building Technologies Office FY 2017 Budget At-A-Glance

Buildings and homes use more than 73% of the electrical energy consumed in the United States. They also consume 40% of the nation’s total energy, with an annual energy bill of $430 billion. These energy bills can be cost effectively reduced by 20%–50% or more through various energy-efficient technologies and techniques. The Building Technologies Office (BTO) will continue to develop and demonstrate advanced building efficiency technologies and practices to make buildings in the United States more efficient, affordable, and comfortable.

Building, Budget, Finance↗
DOE OSTI2016

Establishing a Common Definition for Zero Energy Buildings: Time to Move the Market

To change the current paradigm from buildings being consumers of energy to producers of energy requires a common language to facilitate market transformation. Common definitions help create market movement by sharing concepts across market actors. While the term 'zero energy buildings' has been in the marketplace for over 20 years, no common definition had been established. US DOE, last year, embarked on a process to evaluate current definitions and solicit industry input to formulate a common definition and nomenclature for zero energy buildings. This definition uses commonly available site measurements and national conversion factors to define zero energy buildings on a source energy basis for a variety of boundary conditions including building, portfolio, campus, and community. Issues addressed include multiple fuel types, cogeneration, and renewable energy certificates. This paper describes the process used to arrive at the definition, looks at methods of calculating site to source energy conversions, and how boundary decisions affect a robust and stable definition that can be used to direct programs and policies for many years to come. This stability is critical to move building investments towards buildings that produce as much energy as they consume.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2016

Geothermal Energy Production from Oil/Gas Wells and Application for Building Cooling

One significant source of low-temperature geothermal energy is the coproduced hot water from oil/gas field production. In the United States, daily oil production has reached above 8 million barrels in recent years. Considering various conditions of wells, 5-10 times or more water can be coproduced in the range of temperature 120 F to 300 F. Like other geothermal resources, such energy source from oil/gas wells is under-utilized for its typical long distance from consumption sites. Many oil/gas fields, however, are relatively close (less than 10 miles) to consumers around cities. For instance, some petroleum fields in Pennsylvania are only a few miles away from the towns in Pittsburg area and some fields in Texas are quite close to Houston. In this paper, we evaluate geothermal potential from oil/gas wells by conducting numerical simulation and analysis of a fractured oil well in Hastings West field, Texas. The results suggest that hot water can be continuously coproduced from oil wells at a sufficient rate (about 4000 gallons/day from one well) for more than 100 years. Viable use of such geothermal source requires economical transportation of energy to consumers. The recently proposed two-step geothermal absorption (TSGA) system provides a promising energy transport technology that allows large-scale use of geothermal energy from thousands of oil/gas wells.

Wang, Honggang↗
DOE OSTI2016

Towards Cache-Enabled, Order-Aware, Ontology-Based Stream Reasoning Framework

While streaming data have become increasingly more popular in business and research communities, semantic models and processing software for streaming data have not kept pace. Traditional semantic solutions have not addressed transient data streams. Semantic web languages (e.g., RDF, OWL) have typically addressed static data settings and linked data approaches have predominantly addressed static or growing data repositories. Streaming data settings have some fundamental differences; in particular, data are consumed on the fly and data may expire. Stream reasoning, a combination of stream processing and semantic reasoning, has emerged with the vision of providing "smart" processing of streaming data. C-SPARQL is a prominent stream reasoning system that handles semantic (RDF) data streams. Many stream reasoning systems including C-SPARQL use a sliding window and use data arrival time to evict data. For data streams that include expiration times, a simple arrival time scheme is inadequate if the window size does not match the expiration period. In this paper, we propose a cache-enabled, order-aware, ontology-based stream reasoning framework. This framework consumes RDF streams with expiration timestamps assigned by the streaming source. Our framework utilizes both arrival and expiration timestamps in its cache eviction policies. In addition, we introduce the notion of "semantic importance" which aims to address the relevance of data to the expected reasoning, thus enabling the eviction algorithms to be more context- and reasoning-aware when choosing what data to maintain for question answering. We evaluate this framework by implementing three different prototypes and utilizing five metrics. The trade-offs of deploying the proposed framework are also discussed.

Data Discovery↗
DOE OSTI2017

Managing time-substitutable electricity usage using dynamic controls

A predictive-control approach allows an electricity provider to monitor and proactively manage peak and off-peak residential intra-day electricity usage in an emerging smart energy grid using time-dependent dynamic pricing incentives. The daily load is modeled as time-shifted, but cost-differentiated and substitutable, copies of the continuously-consumed electricity resource, and a consumer-choice prediction model is constructed to forecast the corresponding intra-day shares of total daily load according to this model. This is embedded within an optimization framework for managing the daily electricity usage. A series of transformations are employed, including the reformulation-linearization technique (RLT) to obtain a Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) model representation of the resulting nonlinear optimization problem. In addition, various regulatory and pricing constraints are incorporated in conjunction with the specified profit and capacity utilization objectives.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2017

Managing time-substitutable electricity usage using dynamic controls

A predictive-control approach allows an electricity provider to monitor and proactively manage peak and off-peak residential intra-day electricity usage in an emerging smart energy grid using time-dependent dynamic pricing incentives. The daily load is modeled as time-shifted, but cost-differentiated and substitutable, copies of the continuously-consumed electricity resource, and a consumer-choice prediction model is constructed to forecast the corresponding intra-day shares of total daily load according to this model. This is embedded within an optimization framework for managing the daily electricity usage. A series of transformations are employed, including the reformulation-linearization technique (RLT) to obtain a Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) model representation of the resulting nonlinear optimization problem. In addition, various regulatory and pricing constraints are incorporated in conjunction with the specified profit and capacity utilization objectives.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗