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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 145 records · Page 8
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Burning Embers: Towards more transparent and robust climate change risk assessments

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments provide policy-relevant insights about climate impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation through a process of peer-reviewed literature assessments underpinned by expert judgement. An iconic output from these assessments is the “burning embers” diagram. Burning embers were first used in the Third Assessment Report to visualize reasons for concern, which aggregate risks from various systems and sectors. In these diagrams, colour transitions show changes in the assessed level of risk to humans and ecosystems as a function of climate change indicated by increasing levels of global mean temperature. Here we review the approach to the construction of burning embers, its evolution across the various IPCC reports, and recent methodological advances in the elicitation process to reduce subjectivity in the expert judgement and improve the transparency of the assessment. We recommend the use of a standardized, transparent process of expert elicitation in the production of burning embers diagrams to enhance their quality, comparability, and credibility.

Zommers, Zinta↗
DOE OSTI2023

Connecting the Dots: An Assessment of Cyber-risks in Networked Building and Municipal Infrastructure Systems

The buildings and city streets we walk down are changing. Driven by various data-driven use cases, there is increased interest in networking and integrating lighting and other building systems (e.g., heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), security, scheduling) that were previously not internet-facing, and equipping them with sensors that collect information about their environment and the people that inhabit it. These data-enabled systems can potentially deliver improved occupant and resident experiences and help meet the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national energy and carbon reduction goals. Deploying connected devices new to being networked, however, is not without its challenges. This paper explores tools available to system designers and integrators that facilitate a cybersecurity landscape assessment – or more specifically the identification of threats, vulnerabilities, and adversarial behaviors that could be used against these networked systems. These assessments can help stakeholders shift security prioritization proactively toward the beginning of the development process.

cyber-risk assesment, adversarial behavior, MITRE ↗
DOE OSTI2026

Toward a standardization of cryostructure and cryogenic soil structure terminology for the field description of permafrost‐affected soils

This paper establishes standardized terminology and field documentation protocols for cryostructures and cryogenic soil structures in permafrost‐affected soils and provides brief guidance on descriptions of ground ice morphology and ice volume estimates. We consolidate permafrost terminology from Russian and North American literature, clarify long‐standing ambiguities, and provide explicit guidelines that align with US Department of Agriculture‐Natural Resources Conservation Service soil description standards. Our scheme makes critical distinctions between cryostructure, the distribution of ice within soil, and cryogenic soil structure, the morphological structure of soil resulting from ice formation. The scheme organizes cryostructures into three main categories: non‐segregated ice, visible segregated ice, and ice matrices. We introduce standardized codes and parameters for field descriptions of ice and soil that enable machine‐readable data collection compatible with existing soil information systems. This standardization will significantly enhance the integration of field observations into landscape‐scale assessments of permafrost stability, infrastructure vulnerability, and ecosystem response to permafrost thaw, addressing an urgent need for quantitative data to inform modeling and decision‐making in rapidly changing Arctic and subarctic environments.

Andersen, Megan L. [University of Minnesota, Saint↗
DOE OSTI2024

Identifying Disadvantaged Communities in the United States: An Energy-Oriented Mapping Tool that Aggregates Environmental and Socioeconomic Burdens

This paper defines a policy-relevant nationwide composite index to identify communities disproportionately impacted by environmental, energy, and climate injustices in the United States. We review existing vulnerability indicators and indices to assess the tradeoffs of different design parameters, including variable selection, geographic unit, dimensionality reduction, weighting, and aggregation methods. From this methodological review, we create the first nationwide, census tract-level index of cumulative burden that includes energy-relevant indicators alongside climate, social, environmental, and economic indicators, and is flexible to the inclusion of additional data sources. We provide a summary of the sources of inputs used to develop a definition for "disadvantaged communities" that can be used to prioritize energy investments. We discuss use-cases for this index including the implementation of the Justice40 Initiative, which calls for 40% of certain federal clean energy benefits to flow to disadvantaged communities in the United States. We use our results to examine historic allocations of federal energy investments and show that communities that we identify as disadvantaged received about 37% fewer funds per capita than non-disadvantaged communities.

cumulative burden↗
DOE OSTI2020

Big Data Analytic for Cascading Failure Analysis

With the challenges of increased grid dynamics and more variability of power generation from renewable energy sources, rapidly increasing complexity in the grid model, and abundant data from measurements and simulations, the requirements for computational analysis have also increased dramatically. Power system operators and engineers need to analyze more scenarios, extract meaningful information from a larger set of data, and respond more quickly when faced with these new challenges for large-scale applications, such as contingency analysis. This paper proposes a novel big data analysis approach for power system cascading analysis, prevention, and remediation. The developed techniques will be capable of cascading analysis, better assessment of the system’s vulnerability level, as well as proposing potential remediation. Case studies using IEEE 118-bus system and a 500-bus system, with a comparison against a commercial tool, validate the advantages of the developed big data approach: accurate prediction, and more importantly, faster and effective correction actions.The developed techniques could be further used for other power system applications.

big data, cascading analysis, corrective action, m↗
DOE OSTI2021

Cybersecurity for Grid Connected eXtreme Fast Charging (XFC) Station (CyberX) (Final Scientific/Technical Report)

This report summarizes the activities conducted under the DOE VTO funded project DE- EE0008451, where ABB Inc. (ABB), in collaboration with Idaho National Laboratory (INL), APS Global (APS), and XOS Trucks (XOS) pursued the development of a cyber-resilient extreme fast charging (XFC) management system. This project entitled Cybersecurity for Grid Connected eXtreme Fast Charging (XFC) Station (CyberX) focuses on a resilient architecture for smart charging EV Supply Equipment (EVSE) device control and Coordinated Anomaly Detection System (CADS) features that can be added at the charging site depot level to increase cybersecurity. The project was split into two budget periods focused first on developing the threat model and resilient control concepts and second on testing, improving, and validating those developed resilient control algorithms and features with a focus on key vulnerabilities identified during the threat assessment portion of the project. During the first budget period of the CyberX project, the ABB led team focused on activities to identify, model, and quantitatively prioritize high-impact attack scenarios with potential cyber-physical effects while also modeling and developing concepts for a resilient control system that could securely address integration of DERs and other resources with EV charging. Development of the security focused XFC management system (XMS) was accomplished first by offline simulation using a developed XFC station or depot with 480V input level and simulating measurement inputs to monitoring and control systems in concept development. A representative distribution grid model was developed supporting an EV charging site model with BESS and 6 general EV charging models. These EV charging models allowed multiple configurations of charging level, multiple connected protection and measurement devices, and simulation function to show general compromise of EV, BESS, and protection features based on parallel threat analysis. During the second budget period, the EV site and supporting systems model was developed in more detail and converted from offline model to real-time to real-time with EV charging hardware in the loop (HIL). The resilient control architecture developed as concept in the first part of the project was further tested and validated for integration of local energy resources and XFC charging station site equipment while maintaining cybersecure operating principles. The proposed resilient architecture for smart charging and cybersecurity features consists of two main concepts developed and tested within the project. The first concept is an XFC management system (XMS) consisting of a hardware gateway, software platform, and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) or Distribution Management System integration components. The second concept is a Coordinated Anomaly Detection System (CADS) which forms a primarily software-related subsystem of the total CyberX solution focused on monitoring system measurements, estimation of measurement states, and predicting current at the utility point of interaction based on machine learning for anomaly detection.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Pilot Demonstration of an Attestation and Anomaly Detection Framework using Distributed Ledger Technology for Power Grid Infrastructure

This report summarizes the design and pilot demonstration of a framework called Grid Guard that was created to provide increased data and device trustworthiness to electric grid devices by leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT), specifically blockchain. Grid Guard contains a combination of core cryptographic methods such as the secure hash algorithm (SHA), and asymmetric cryptography, private permissioned blockchain, baselining configuration data, consensus algorithm (Raft) and the Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) framework. The system implements a low energy, fast, and robust enhancement to system trustworthiness within and across electric grid systems such as substations, control centers and metering infrastructures. Blockchain is a distributed database structured that provides a practically unalterable (immutable) timeline of stored transactions. By relying on hashing and the Raft consensus algorithm, if an entity tries to illegitimately alter a record at one instance of the database the other ledger nodes are not altered. They work to cross-reference each other and easily locate any incorrectly added data and remove it. The bulk raw data is stored in an off-chain storage (outside of the blockchain ledger) and a hash of this baseline data is stored in the Blockchain ledger via hashing windows of time-series and configuration data, after aggregation and filtering. The bulk off-chain data repository is then considered to be trust-anchored using the hashes stored in the blockchain. To secure the electric grid testbed devices and data, device configuration baselines were compared to those baselines that had been previously stored in the ledger. Statistical baselines for device configurations, network communication patterns, and high-speed sensor data are calculated and then stored off-chain and hashes stored in the ledger. Measurements such as three-phase voltage and current, frequency, breaker status, protection scheme settings, network configuration settings (and other device configuration artifacts) and network traffic features (packet interarrival times) are compared every minute or other selected time windows. During phase 1 of the Grid Guard DLT project different DLT technologies were studies, and an assessment was performed on DLT technology vulnerabilities, uses, and key characteristics. DLT consensus protocols were studies (e.g., RAFT, named after Reliable, Replicated, Redundant, And Fault-Tolerant). Also, cryptography, public, private and permissioned or permissionless systems were assessed. Grid Guard implements a permissioned private DLT. Consensus algorithm selection and choice of DLT implementation depended heavily on the use-case. For this use-case, parameters were selected to measure performance and existing tools for assessment. Benchmarking was performed theoretically and practically. During phase 2 hashed transactions/blocks were inserted into the ledger every second. During phase 2 of the Grid Guard DLT project, a prototype framework was developed and demonstrated for attestation of critical substation devices and data using precision timing systems that use PTP and IRIG-B protocols) on a testbed of operational devices that emulated a distribution substation, control center, and power metering infrastructure using real Operational Technology (OT). The testbed includes OT devices such as protective relays, human machine interfaces (HMI), and power meters. To determine when to collect and compare system and network baselines, an initial examination of an anomaly detection capability to identify malicious manipulation of data streams was conducted. The resulting anomaly detection was demonstrated in a set of experiments and leveraged to trigger device artifact attestation checks. Attestation checks occur against device configuration baselines when compared with the immutable blockchain-stored baselines, which provided a cryptographically supported means by which to store baselines. The electrical substation-grid testbed was created to test the Grid Guard framework. The testbed emulates the operations of a portion of a power grid and SCADA systems as closely as possible. The testbed integrates real protocols, mainly IEC 61850 standard protocols, such as the Sampled Value (SV) and the GOOSE protocols. The testbed also supports DNP3 and other layer 2 and layer 3 protocols such as Telnet, SSH, SFTP/FTP and other proprietary protocols needed to connect to industrial control system equipment. The testbed emulates real power conditions using the OpalRT hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) device which can create fault situations that cannot be easily tested on real systems. The electrical substation-grid testbed was created using real measurement, communication, and protection devices that electrical utilities commonly use.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2020

Designing a dynamic vulnerability index to COVID-19 for New Mexico, USA

Motivation: Non-congregational shelters are a place where COVID-19 patients can quarantine away from their household until recovered. NM wants to establish non-congregational shelters for COVID-19 patients and first responders; Where? How many rooms? Create a decision support tool to assess which counties have the most vulnerable population to COVID-19; Socioeconomic status, community practices.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Infrastructure Security Division (ISD) Assessment Prioritization Project

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Infrastructure Security Division (CISA ISD) manages a diverse portfolio of assessments across the nation’s critical infrastructure sectors. These assessments—ranging in type, scope, and complexity—are essential for identifying vulnerabilities and strengthening national security. However, the wide variation in assessment offerings and the increasing demand for limited resources have highlighted the need for a transparent, structured approach to prioritizing assessment activities. To address this challenge, CISA ISD partnered with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to review current assessment methodologies, analyze existing prioritization practices, and develop a comprehensive, national-security-focused prioritization framework. This report summarizes the project’s approach, key findings, and actionable recommendations for enhancing ISD’s assessment program.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2022

Process-based climate change assessment for European winds using EURO-CORDEX and global models

Wind energy is an important pillar of decarbonization strategies and potentially vulnerable to climate change. Existing wind climate change assessments rely on climate models but a systematic investigation of the global-to-regional climate modeling chain is missing. In this study, I highlight key limitations, namely (a) the differing representation of land use change in global and regional climate models which compromises comparability, and (b) the consistency of large-scale features along the global-to-regional climate modeling chain. To this end, I analyze the large European Coordinated Downscaling Experiment (EURO-CORDEX) ensemble (rcp85: N = 49; rcp45: N= 18; rcp26: N = 22) along with the driving global models (rcp85: N = 7; rcp45: N = 5; rcp26: N = 7), finding evidence that climate change reduces mean wind speeds by up to -0.8 ms -1 (offshore) and -0.3 ms -1 (onshore). I provide physical explanations for these changes by identifying two key drivers. First, onshore wind speeds drop in the driving global models in regions and scenarios with strong land use change but show no drop in EURO-CORDEX where land use is held constant. Second, offshore wind reductions follow decreases in the equator-to-pole temperature gradient remarkably well with correlations reaching around 0.9 in resource-rich European countries like Ireland, the United Kingdom and Norway, implying that arctic amplification is a severe risk for European offshore wind energy. My results suggest that earlier conclusions of negligible climate change impacts on wind energy might be premature if either land use changes strongly or polar amplification is at or above the range sampled in global climate models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

System Health and Status Reporting is Used to Improve Infrastructure Systems at the Hanford Site - 20449

Reliable physical infrastructure systems are vital to completing the clean-up mission and the start-up and commissioning of new nuclear waste processing facilities at the Hanford Site. Key infrastructure systems at Hanford include water, sewer, and electrical utilities, roads, telecommunications/network systems, and fire systems. All of the infrastructure systems are non-nuclear, General Service systems that are being maintained under formal engineering configuration control and none are specifically credited in any documented safety analysis (DSA). Starting in calendar year 2017, the Hanford Site's infrastructure and services contractor started producing system health and status reports for a total of 15 critical infrastructure systems as means to get a better understanding of each system's health and how it could be improved to ensure better and more reliable service delivery. As the reporting, tracking, and use of the metrics has matured, the number of systems for which reports are being developed has been expanded to a total of 23. Each of the critical infrastructure systems are assigned primary and alternate design authorities that complete qualifications on each assigned system. The design authorities actively manage and maintain configuration control on each of their systems and track metrics associated with availability, maintenance (corrective and preventive), and configuration of the technical baseline. The metrics are based on the principles established in Chapter V of DOE O 420.1C, Facility Safety, [1] and have been tailored as appropriate to each of the key infrastructure systems. An overall assessment of system health is performed and documented on a routine basis (e.g., quarterly). Included in this documentation is a quantitative score for each of the metrics (i.e., availability, maintenance, configuration management) along with results of system walk-downs, description of any permanent design modifications, identification of new or emerging issues and vulnerabilities affecting the system, and an assessment by the design authority of actions necessary to improve the system health score. The overall status scores are calculated using a formula and based on a pre-determined grading scale, a color is assigned for simple presentation. The information gained from developing the reports is being used to (1) assist with making timely and better informed decisions through the use of solid technical bases that are increasing the overall reliability and capabilities of the Site's infrastructure systems as new expense and capital projects in the Reliability Projects Investment Portfolio (RPIP) are prioritized and executed; (2) feed the risk management program, and (3) integrate the technical content of Master Plans that describe the Site's needs for the system and the system's capabilities to meet those future needs. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2023

Multi-dimensional resilience: A quantitative exploration of disease outcomes and economic, political, and social resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic in six countries

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a need for better understanding of countries’ vulnerability and resilience to not only pandemics but also disasters, climate change, and other systemic shocks. A comprehensive characterization of vulnerability can inform efforts to improve infrastructure and guide disaster response in the future. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework for studying countries’ vulnerability and resilience to incident disasters across multiple dimensions of society. To illustrate this methodology, we leverage the rich data landscape surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic to characterize observed resilience for several countries (USA, Brazil, India, Sweden, New Zealand, and Israel) as measured by pandemic impacts across a variety of social, economic, and political domains. We also assess how observed responses and outcomes (i.e., resilience) of the COVID-19 pandemic are associated with pre-pandemic characteristics or vulnerabilities, including (1) prior risk for adverse pandemic outcomes due to population density and age and (2) the systems in place prior to the pandemic that may impact the ability to respond to the crisis, including health infrastructure and economic capacity. Our work demonstrates the importance of viewing vulnerability and resilience in a multi-dimensional way, where a country’s resources and outcomes related to vulnerability and resilience can differ dramatically across economic, political, and social domains. This work also highlights key gaps in our current understanding about vulnerability and resilience and a need for data-driven, context-specific assessments of disaster vulnerability in the future.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

An integrated metagenomic, metabolomic and transcriptomic survey of Populus across genotypes and environments

Abstract Bridging molecular information to ecosystem-level processes would provide the capacity to understand system vulnerability and, potentially, a means for assessing ecosystem health. Here, we present an integrated dataset containing environmental and metagenomic information from plant-associated microbial communities, plant transcriptomics, plant and soil metabolomics, and soil chemistry and activity characterization measurements derived from the model tree species Populus trichocarpa . Soil, rhizosphere, root endosphere, and leaf samples were collected from 27 different P. trichocarpa genotypes grown in two different environments leading to an integrated dataset of 318 metagenomes, 98 plant transcriptomes, and 314 metabolomic profiles that are supported by diverse soil measurements. This expansive dataset will provide insights into causal linkages that relate genomic features and molecular level events to system-level properties and their environmental influences.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Leverage demand-side policies for energy security

Energy security is a top priority for governments, companies, and households because energy systems and the critical functions that they support are threatened by disruptions from wars, pandemics, climate change, and other shocks (1). More often than not, governments rely on policies focused on energy supply to enhance energy security while generally ignoring demand-side possibilities. Further, the indicators traditionally used to measure energy security are also tilted toward the supply side; this fails to capture the full spectrum of vulnerability to energy crises. Energy security assessments need to reflect the wider benefits of security related interventions more accurately. To that end, we develop a systematic approach to measuring the energy security impacts of policy interventions that explicitly considers energy demand (buildings, transport, and industry). Here, we determine that demand-side actions outperform conventional supply-side approaches at making countries more resilient. Energy demand links more directly than supply to the satisfaction of critical social functions and human well-being that are at the core of energy security. Yet, demand-side perspectives tend to be neglected or underrepresented in analysis and policy debates on energy security. Factors that contribute to this supply-side bias include the traditional sectoral organization of industries and policy institutions along fuels (coal, oil, and gas) and energy forms (electric utilities) as well as the decentralized and multivaried activities characteristic of energy demand (from vehicles to household appliances to manufacturing and more), which leads to a multitude of actors and institutional fragmentation. The basic fundamentals of energy systems and markets, where demand and supply are intricately linked, have also not yet risen from vague awareness to a central organizing principle among policy-makers for structuring the energy security discourse.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Investigating the Influence of River Geomorphology on Human Presence Using Night Light Data: A Case Study in the Indus Basin

Human settlements have historically thrived near rivers due to enhanced navigation and trade, and the availability of water supply and resources. The use of night light data, representing economic activities, provides a novel approach to studying the interactions between human activity and rivers over time. Here, we use the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) stable night light data from 2000 to 2013 as a proxy for human presence and activities to quantify the statistical relationships between night light presence and intensity in the Indus Basin, Asia. We test how these data are affected by proximity to trunk channels and by channel type (single/multi-thread) in the study area. We find that night light presence is enhanced by 26% within a 0 to 5 km proximity range of the Indus River and its tributaries, relative to the basin as a whole. We interpret this to represent increased human presence and activity within this zone. However, the mean intensity is lower near the river and higher away from the river, signifying denser settlements, such as towns and cities, which are preferentially located away from the Indus and its tributaries. Moreover, the enhancement of lit pixels signifying human presence and activities is increased by 18% near single-thread sections of the Indus River, compared to segments of the Indus displaying multi-thread morphologies. We suggest that this is due to the enhanced stability of single-threaded channels, relative to mobile multi-threaded channel reaches. This study demonstrates how night lights are an important tool in studying the relationship between human presence and river dynamics in large catchments such as the Indus, and we suggest that these data will have an important role in assessing differential flood spatial and social vulnerability at a regional scale.

Environmental Sciences & Ecology↗
DOE OSTI2023

Development Principles for Thermal-Spectrum Molten-Salt Breeder Reactors

Thermal-spectrum molten-salt breeder reactors (MSBRs) have potentially highly advantageous characteristics. This paper provides guiding principles to increase the probability of realizing their potential in future deployments. The guiding principles range from specific technology recommendations, to means to minimize the impact of current nuclear supply chain issues, to approaches to decreasing the difficulty of safety adequacy assessment, to methods to minimize proliferation vulnerability. The most substantial overall recommendation, however, is to initiate a modern, thermal-spectrum MSBR development program.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Dynamic Risk-Aware Patch Scheduling

A program that defines and assesses the dynamic risk of software vulnerabilities and considers the dynamic risks into patch scheduling to reduce security risks posed by vulner­abilities and provide formal guidance to security operations at various organizations.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗