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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 1,513 records · Page 84
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2017

Retrieving Historical Electrorefining Data

Pyrochemical Operations began at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) during 1962 (1). Electrorefining (ER) has been implemented as a routine process since the 1980’s. The process data that went through the ER operation was recorded but had never been logged in an online database. Without a database new staff members are hindered in their work by the lack of information. To combat the issue a database in Access was created to collect the historical data. The years from 2000 onward were entered and queries were created to analyze trends. These trends will aid engineering and operations staff to reach optimal performance for the startup of the new lines.

38 RADIATION CHEMISTRY, RADIOCHEMISTRY, AND NUCLEA↗
DOE OSTI2017

Graph Learning in Knowledge Bases

The amount of text data has been growing exponentially in recent years, giving rise to automatic information extraction methods that store text annotations in a database. The current state-of-theart structured prediction methods, however, are likely to contain errors and it’s important to be able to manage the overall uncertainty of the database. On the other hand, the advent of crowdsourcing has enabled humans to aid machine algorithms at scale. As part of this project we introduced pi-CASTLE , a system that optimizes and integrates human and machine computing as applied to a complex structured prediction problem involving conditional random fields (CRFs). We proposed strategies grounded in information theory to select a token subset, formulate questions for the crowd to label, and integrate these labelings back into the database using a method of constrained inference. On both a text segmentation task over academic citations and a named entity recognition task over tweets we showed an order of magnitude improvement in accuracy gain over baseline methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

Seventy-Five Years of Nuclear Criticality Safety Documents - A Bibliography

A collection of nuclear criticality documents was begun in the 1970s at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). Documents in this bibliography are dated as early as 1940. The early documents described experimental work that was of vital importance to the safe use of fissile materials at nuclear reactors, the facilities for preparing or transporting nuclear fuel, or its eventual storage. The experiments were of direct value to support safe operations with fissile material, but they were also needed for validating early physics data and calculational methods and then for validating computational methods used in criticality safety evaluations. Bibliographic information from the past seventy-five years have been entered into a computerized bibliographic database. The database continues to expand. Publications were issued several decades ago based on the information collected at that time. Our new publication is based on a current “snapshot” of the present status of the database. Contributions of information or corrections to this bibliography will be appreciated.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2018

Interlaboratory Round Robin Study on Axial Tensile Properties of Tubular SiC/SiC Specimens

Extensive research and development work is being conducted at different governmental, university and industrial laboratories for developing accident tolerant fuel-cladding systems for light water reactors. Continuous SiC fiber-reinforced SiC matrix (SiC/SiC) composites is one of the candidate materials for replacing the traditional zirconium alloy cladding due to its high temperature stability, chemical inertness and stability under neutron irradiation. A comprehensive database on the statistics of the mechanical properties of SiC/SiC composite is much needed to estimate the failure probability in evolving thermo-mechanical conditions as well as rigorous analysis of the material’s behavior under normal and off-normal reactor conditions. In addition to the properties database, test standards, which ensure the unbiased characterization of the material, are needed. The mechanical properties database, particularly for tubular SiC/SiC specimens, is limited and standardized test methods are still under development.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2017

PV Systems Reliability and Outreach

The project purpose was to collaborate with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to reach out to the photovoltaic (PV) industry to cooperate, collaborate and facilitate establishment and access to PV plant data for use in the Photovoltaic Reliability Operations and Maintenance (PVROM) database. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and EPRI conducted this outreach to expand and accelerate the implementation of PVROM by gathering more data for analyzing trends, with a goal of accelerating the adoption of PV systems as a primary power generation source in the United States. SNL and EPRI analyzed the data from the PVROM database to assess industry trends in operations and maintenance (O&M) and develop guidelines for the industry. More specifically, this project was intended to leverage SNL’s expertise in PV plant reliability data collection and analysis, with data sharing partners that own or operate PV systems who wanted to learn about rigorous reliabilitybased data collection to track issues over time and improve O&M activities. The partnership also worked to host multiple workshops as part of the SNL/EPRI PV Systems Symposium to gather industry feedback on O&M process improvement and data standards, and share insights learned from the collaboration between SNL and EPRI in the area of PV system reliability. Additional outreach included multiple ‘expert elicitation’ interviews led by EPRI to gather best practices and paths forward for improving/standardizing PV plant O&M and asset management practices. Technical accomplishments included further development of the PVROM database process, sharing best practices for reliability data collection and improving industry understanding of existing O&M practices, important knowledge, and new and novel techniques for benefitting EPRI utility partners and the broader PV industry. Improved reliability at a PV power plant leads to a lower levelized cost of energy (LCOE), which is reflected most directly in its operating expenses. Electric utilities that utilize PV as a larger share of plants they own and operate are interested in having a high degree of availability or ‘uptime’, similar to other power generation sources in their service area. Having low cost, reliable PV generation can lead to fewer costs that need to be recovered by the utility over the lifetime of the power plant, and less regulatory uncertainty when considering bulk transmission and distribution system reliability. The public and taxpayers benefit by the electric utility passing through lower electricity costs.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2014

Analysis of 100 SGIP Interconnection Studies

The purpose of the report is to describe the findings from the analysis of 100 Small Generation Interconnection Procedure (SGIP) studies and describe the methodology used to develop the database. The database was used to identify the most likely impacts and mitigation costs associated with PV system interconnections. A total of 100 SGIP reports performed by 3 utilities and one regional transmission operator (RTO) were analyzed. Each record within the database represents an itemized SGIP report and includes information about the generation facility, interconnection topology, electrical power system characteristics, identified adverse system impacts, mitigation options, and costs associated with interconnection the generation facility.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Interlaboratory Round Robin Testing of SiC/SiC Composite Tubes

With the objective to develop accident tolerant fuel-clad systems for light water reactors, extensive research and development work is being conducted at different governmental, university and industrial labs. Continuous SiC fiber-reinforced SiC matrix (SiC/SiC) composites is one of the leading candidate materials for replacing the traditional Zr alloy cladding due to its high temperature stability, chemical inertness and stability under neutron irradiation. A rich database on the statistics of the mechanical properties of SiC/SiC composite is much needed to carry out the feasibility studies as well as rigorous analysis of the material’s behavior under normal and off-normal reactor conditions. In addition to the properties database, test standards, which ensure the unbiased characterization of the material, are needed. The mechanical properties database, particularly for tubular SiC/SiC specimens, is limited and standardized test methods are still under development. The current work focuses on filling these gaps through an interlaboratory round robin testing program of SiC/SiC composite tube specimen involving several organizations from academia, government laboratories and industry. The difficulties and issues in the testing were identified and addressed through the ORNL lead test. This report summarizes the current status and forward planning on the interlaboratory study.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2019

Semi-local Density Functional Approximations for Bulk, Surface, and Confinement Physics

Due to its balance of accuracy and computational cost, density functional theory has become the method of choice for computing the electronic structure and related properties of materials. However, present-day semi-local approximations to the exchange-correlation energy of density functional theory break down for materials containing d and f electrons. In this report we summarize the results of our research efforts within the LDRD 200202 titled "Making density functional theory work for all materials" in addressing this issue. Our efforts are grouped into two research thrusts. In the first thrust, we develop an exchange-correlation functional (BSC functional) within the subsystem functional formalism. It enables us to capture bulk, surface, and confinement physics with a single, semi-local exchange-correlation functional in density functional theory calculations. We present the analytical properties of the BSC functional and demonstrate that the BSC functional is able to capture confinement physics more accurately than standard semi-local exchange-correlation functionals. The second research thrust focusses on developing a database for transition metal binary compounds. The database consists of materials properties (formation energies, ground-state energies, lattice constants, and elastic constants) of 26 transition metal elements and 89 transition metal alloys. It serves as a reference for benchmarking computational models (such as lower-level modeling methods and exchange-correlation functionals). We expect that our database will significantly impact the materials science community. We conclude with a brief discussion on the future research directions and impact of our results.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2019

HydroSource Data Dictionary

In recent years, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has conducted innovative hydropower research sponsored by the US Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) to address important questions regarding technology advancement, existing hydropower assets, future hydropower potential, environmental concerns, policy and regulatory decisions, and market trends to support hydropower sustainability in the United States. Data from this research supports a broad and diverse user base including US federal, state, and local governments; national laboratories; hydropower industry; academia; nonprofit organizations; and other end users. The development of a relational database system is needed to ensure proper management of the continuously increasing breadth and depth of these data to guarantee their future value and reliability for advancing hydropower research and supporting the goals and objectives of our partners and US hydropower stakeholders. During FY 2018, ORNL’s HydroSource team reconciled data from ORNL’s WPTO-funded projects to create the HydroSource Data Model, Version 1 (HSDM1) schema. The HSDM1 schema provides the essential step in data assimilation toward unifying ORNL’s WPTO-funded data into a relational database management system. This report provides technical documentation of the HSDM1 schema to help guide future development and implementation of the HydroSource database system.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

An Eight-County Appraisal of the San Andres Residual Oil Zone (ROZ) 'Fairway' of the Permian Basin

This document assesses the size and distribution of the oil resource in an eight-county portion of the San Andres residual oil zone (ROZ) fairway in the Permian Basin. Using well log analysis, the study divided the ROZ into partitions, developed a database of geologic properties for each partition and estimated the oil in place in each partition. The study then used the FE/NETL CO 2 Prophet Model to estimate the oil that could be produced and CO 2 stored from applying CO 2 EOR to each partition. With the FE/NETL Onshore CO 2 EOR Cost Model, the commercially viable partitions were identified as those that could produce oil and store CO 2 economically at an oil price of $75/STB. The remaining geologically viable partitions could use CO 2 EOR to store CO 2 with production of oil to offset some of the costs. The database used for this study, and a report describing the database is available on NETL's website under the Collection Name Eight-County San Andres ROZ Appraisal.

02 PETROLEUM↗
DOE OSTI2020

A Four-County Appraisal of the San Andres Residual Oil Zone (ROZ) 'Fairway' of the Permian Basin

This document assesses the size and distribution of the oil resource in a four-county portion of the San Andres residual oil zone (ROZ) fairway in the Permian Basin. Using well log analysis, the study divided the ROZ into partitions, developed a database of geologic properties for each partition and estimated the oil in place in each partition. The study then used the FE/NETL CO 2 Prophet Model to estimate the oil that could be produced and CO 2 stored from applying CO 2 EOR to each partition. With the FE/NETL Onshore CO 2 EOR Cost Model, the commercially viable partitions were identified as those that could produce oil and store CO 2 economically at an oil price of $75/STB. The remaining geologically viable partitions could use CO 2 EOR to store CO 2 with production of oil to offset some of the costs. The database used for this study, and a report describing the database is available on NETL's website under the Collection Name: Four-County San Andres ROZ Appraisal.

02 PETROLEUM↗
DOE OSTI2020

Building Interfaces with Echo Using R

The following report details the functionality that was developed to directly query the MongoDB and read in echo records from within R, and the ability to create a cinema database directly from echo records. Both of these efforts used the data collected under the MINOS project for development. The nuclear facility under consideration is the High-Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and co-located Radiochemical Engineering Development Center (REDC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN. HFIR is an 85 MW research reactor and is used primarily for production of a medical radioisotopes, material irradiation experiments, neutron activation, and neutron scattering. Targets for the reactor are fabricated and processed and dissolved at REDC, in addition to other glove-box and hot-cell type activities. An overhead view of the facility is provided. The rest of the report is organized as follows: Section 2 describes how to query the MongoDB and load in echo records from within R, with background information on the database type, MongoDB, and the file format of echo records, hdf5, as well as lessons learned during the development phase. Section 3 details the functionality and usage of creating a cinema database directly from echo records within R. A series of appendixes display all the R code (Section 5), some example scripts where the code is used (Section 6), and useful links for further exploration (Section 7).

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Heavy-Duty Vehicle Activity Updates for MOVES Using NREL Fleet DNA and CE-CERT Data

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) is a publicly available tool used by researchers and policymakers to help understand motor vehicle emission sources at a national, county, and project level. Estimates of heavy-duty activity in the most recent version of the model at the time this work was conducted, MOVES2014, was identified as an area in need of improvement. The start activity in MOVES2014 is based on a limited and dated data set. In addition, MOVES2014 relies on drive cycles that represent on-network activity but do not account for idling activity that occurs on off-network roads, such as at a distribution center, while the truck is queuing or during loading and unloading. As a result, MOVES2014 may currently underestimate the number of starts and idle and soak time for heavy-duty trucks in real-world operation. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has previously leveraged its expansive Fleet DNA database of heavy-duty vehicles to idle and start activity for six of the nine heavy-duty vehicle source types of classes in the MOVES model. The data available in Fleet DNA from 416 conventional, diesel-powered vehicles provided activity estimates from more than 120,000 hours of operation throughout 14,682 vehicle days between October 2006 and January 2016. NREL calculated start fraction, starts per day, soak fraction, and idle fraction by hour of the day for each vehicle type, state, and vocation, and provided results in .CSV files that can be translated to MOVES table inputs. The idle and start activity from this initial analysis of Fleet DNA data was used to develop default idle and start data for heavy-duty vehicles in MOVES3. Satisfied with the results from the Fleet DNA data used for MOVES3, the EPA asked NREL to extend this start/soak/idle analysis using additional data from a larger number of vehicles for a potential future update to the MOVES model. Such a data set was achieved from a project led by the University of California at Riverside, College of Engineering, Center for Environmental Research & Technology (CE-CERT) and funded by California Air Resources Board. Specifically, this data set consists of 90 heavy-duty vehicles operated mainly in California, which can be separated into five of the nine heavy-duty vehicle classes in the MOVES model. In addition, the heavy-duty activity database collected by CE-CERT provided activity estimates from more than 44,000 hours of operation throughout 4,724 vehicle days between November 2014 and September 2016. This report details the analysis of the heavy-duty activity database collected from the University of California at Riverside by providing graphical analysis and context for the start, soak, and idle distributions. The comparison of the related results from both the Fleet DNA and CE-CERT data sets are documented as well.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2020

FY20 Progress Report on FIPD Development and User Support

The DOE Advanced Reactor Technologies program has supported efforts to recover and preserve metallic fuel data generated throughout the past fast reactor R&D programs. Those efforts have focused on establishing databases for information from the experiments conducted during the Integral Fast Reactor program including data generated at EBR-II, FFTF, and TREAT reactors, as well as out of pile transient testing data. These databases are essential for future-licensing activities of metallic fuel based advanced fast reactors. This report describes the EBR-II Fuels Irradiation & Physics Database (FIPD) development, content updates, and user support during the current fiscal year (FY20). Future plans are also provided.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2021

AI to Predict Glass Compositions Satisfying Property and Cooling Rate Criteria

This project aimed to develop a predictive, artificial intelligence/machine learning-based model to identify glass compositions satisfying specified property requirements. Such a model would provide a systematic approach for narrowing down the nearly infinite range of possible compositions for glasses and minimize unnecessary experimental trial and error. A large empirical data set for training and testing the algorithm was obtained from the SciGlass database. It contains glass compositions and corresponding property data from a wide range of literature sources. However, the currently available form of this data, recently released under an open database license, is not conducive to easy querying and use. The data structure was deciphered and a customized parsing code developed to make this data more usable for the current and future work. Neural network models were developed and trained on viscosity data from the database and demonstrated potential for improving prediction accuracy over a traditional regression model.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2022

Scalable and Energy-Efficient Methods for Interactive Exploration of Scientific Data

The main scientific contributions of this project are the following novel concepts for multidimensional arrays: shape-based similarity join (SIGMOD 2016), incremental view maintenance (SIGMOD 2017), user-defined stencil functions (HPDC 2017), and distributed caching for in-situ processing (SSDBM 2018). Building on our collaboration with the astrophysics group at LBNL, we applied these techniques to the data generated in the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) astronomical survey. They played a pivotal role in the first-ever observation of a neutron star merger, which produces gravitational waves and turns out to be the origin of heavy elements, including gold. This has lead to a Science magazine article that has received extensive media coverage on ACM TechNews, Slashdot, FiveThirtyEight, and Quanta Magazine, among others. Additionally, two other articles detailing related aspects of the same discovery have been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters journal. These publications have more than 3,000 citations according to Google Scholar (as of February 2022). This cross-disciplinary collaboration provided very good opportunities to apply database techniques to real-life scientific problems. The fact that they facilitated major discoveries in astrophysics proves the importance of our research. In addition to the work on multidimensional array databases, this project has also developed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithms for training large scale machine learning models, methods for querying in-situ data, and a database query optimizer based on sketch synopses.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Small Hydropower Interconnections: Analysis of Interconnection Processes

Small hydropower projects have faced the challenge of navigating the process to interconnect their generation source to electricity distribution and transmission grids. Small hydropower developers have found interconnection procedures to be opaque and ultimately result in unexpected cost surprises and long timelines. Noting these challenges, the U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office enlisted Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to investigate the small hydropower interconnection landscape across the United States. After reviewing the status of small hydropower (“Small Hydropower Interconnections: Small Hydropower in the United States”) and the interconnection procedures across the United States (“Small Hydropower Interconnections: State Interconnection Processes”) in the first two white papers of this series, this paper uses recent data from small hydropower interconnection applications to benchmark the efficacy of the process. Using data from interconnection queues hosted by utilities, balancing authorities, independent system operators (ISOs), and regional transmission organizations (RTOs), this paper provides context for the costs, timelines, and types of upgrades required for small hydropower projects. Interconnection applications and study reports for small hydropower projects were analyzed to collect key pieces of information about the interconnection process, timeline, costs, and type of upgrades required for interconnection. Information sourced from the reports was entered into an Interconnection Benchmarking database (IBdb), which may be found in Appendix A.1. Information from this database was used to evaluate the performance and challenges associated with interconnecting small hydropower projects. This white paper presents a description of the sources contained in the interconnection database (Section 2.0), an analysis of the interconnection timeline (Section 3.0), an evaluation the cost of interconnection upgrades (Section 4.0), and a description of the types of infrastructure upgrades (Section 5.0). The final paper in this series (“Small Hydropower Interconnections: Best Practices”) will use the analysis described here to outline best practices for interconnection processes that will help overcome barriers to future small hydropower development.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Review of Experimental Data for Validating Computer Codes Used in Shielding Calculations for Spent Fuel Storage and Transportation Systems

This report presents a review of available radiochemical assay data and shielding benchmarks applicable to spent nuclear fuel (SNF) shielding calculations. The relevant information reviewed herein includes the Spent Fuel Composition (SFCOMPO) database, the Shielding Integral Benchmark Archive and Database (SINBAD), the International Handbook of Evaluated Criticality Safety Benchmark Experiments, and published measurements of external dose rates of casks loaded with SNF. The relevant experimental data identified in this report may be used to support verification and validation of computer codes used in SNF cask/transport shielding applications, as well as development of calculation uncertainties. It should be noted that a relatively small subset of the identified experimental data (e.g., criticality alarm experiments) is available in a standard format established by the international community participating in experimental isotopic and shielding data evaluations. An effort of the SFCOMPO Technical Review Group (TRG) is underway to publish first isotopic evaluations of individual assay data using a standard data evaluation format. The SINBAD TRG has recently initiated benchmark evaluations and modernization of the database. Therefore, more relevant information is expected in the future that will enable users to select quality experimental data in depletion code and shielding code validations for SNF applications.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗