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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 1,531 records · Page 85
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2019

Selective high-temperature CO 2 electrolysis enabled by oxidized carbon intermediates

High-temperature CO 2 electrolysers offer exceptionally efficient storage of renewable electricity in the form of CO and other chemical fuels, but conventional electrodes catalyse destructive carbon deposition. Ceria catalysts are known carbon inhibitors for fuel cell (oxidation) reactions; however, for more severe electrolysis (reduction) conditions, catalyst design strategies remain unclear. In this study, we establish the inhibition mechanism on ceria and show selective CO 2 to CO conversion well beyond the thermodynamic carbon deposition threshold. Operando X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy during CO 2 electrolysis—using thin-film model electrodes consisting of samarium-doped ceria, nickel and/or yttria-stabilized zirconia—together with density functional theory modelling, reveal the crucial role of oxidized carbon intermediates in preventing carbon build-up. Using these insights, we demonstrate stable electrochemical CO 2 reduction with a scaled-up 16 cm 2 ceria-based solid-oxide cell under conditions that rapidly destroy a nickel-based cell, leading to substantially improved device lifetime.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2023

The role of ionic blockades in controlling the efficiency of energy recovery in forward bias bipolar membranes

Limited understanding exists about the operation of bipolar membranes (BPMs) in forward bias to convert protonic gradients into electrical work, despite their emerging role in many electrochemical devices. In these device contexts, the BPM is typically exposed to complex electrolyte mixtures, but their impact on polarization remains poorly understood. Here, for this work, we develop a mechanistic model explaining the forward bias polarization behaviour of BPMs in mixed electrolytes with different acidities/basicities. This model invokes that weak acids/bases accumulate in the BPM and impose an ionic blockade that inhibits the recombination of stronger acids/bases, resulting in a substantial neutralization overpotential. We demonstrate the utility of our model for fuel cells and redox flow batteries and introduce two materials design strategies for mitigating this inhibition. Lastly, we apply our findings to enhance the energy efficiency of carbonate management in CO 2 electrolysers. This work highlights how non-equilibrium local environments at membrane–membrane interfaces can define the efficiency of protonic-to-electrical energy conversion.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Integrated rocksalt–polyanion cathodes with excess lithium and stabilized cycling

Co- and Ni-free disordered rocksalt cathodes utilize oxygen redox to increase the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, but it is challenging to achieve good cycle life at high voltages >4.5 V (versus Li/Li + ). Here, in this study, we report a family of Li-excess Mn-rich cathodes that integrates rocksalt- and polyanion-type structures. Following design rules for cation filling and ordering, we demonstrate the bulk incorporation of polyanion groups into the rocksalt lattice. This integration bridges the two primary families of lithium-ion battery cathodes—layered/spinel and phosphate oxides—dramatically enhancing the cycling stability of disordered rocksalt cathodes with 4.8 V upper cut-off voltage. The cathode exhibits high gravimetric energy densities above 1,100 Wh kg -1 and >70% retention over 100 cycles. This study opens up a broad compositional space for developing battery cathodes using earth-abundant elements such as Mn and Fe.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2026

A nanoporous capacitive electrochemical ratchet for continuous ion separations

Directed ion transport in liquid electrolyte solutions underlies many phenomena in natural and industrial settings. While nature has evolved structures that drive continuous ion flow without Faradaic redox reactions, establishing this process in synthetic systems has been challenging. Here, in this study, we report an ion pump that drives aqueous ions against a force using a capacitive ratchet mechanism independent of redox reactions. Modulation of an electric potential between thin metallic layers on either face of a nanoporous alumina wafer immersed in solution results in persistent voltages and ionic currents. This occurs due to the nonlinear capacitive nature of electric double layers, whose repeated charging and discharging sustains a continuous ion flux. Using this approach, we demonstrate ratchet-driven electrodialysis that reaches a 50% decrease in the conductivity of the solution in a dilution cell. These ratchet-based ion pumps can enable continuous desalination and selective ion separation using an electrically powered device with no moving parts.

Kautz, Rylan [University of California, Irvine, CA↗
DOE OSTI2018

Phylogenetic patterns recover known HIV epidemiological relationships and reveal common transmission of multiple variants

The growth of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) sequence databases resulting from drug resistance testing has motivated efforts using phylogenetic methods to assess how HIV spreads. Such inference is potentially both powerful and useful for tracking the epidemiology of HIV and the allocation of resources to prevention campaigns. We recently used simulation and a small number of illustrative cases to show that certain phylogenetic patterns are associated with different types of epidemiological linkage. Our original approach was later generalized for large next-generation sequencing datasets and implemented as a free computational pipeline. Previous work has claimed that direction and directness of transmission could not be established from phylogeny because one could not be sure that there were no intervening or missing links involved. We address this issue by investigating phylogenetic patterns from 272 previously identified HIV transmission chains with 955 transmission pairs representing diverse geography, risk groups, subtypes, and genomic regions. These HIV transmissions had known linkage based on epidemiological information such as partner studies, mother-to-child transmission, pairs identified by contact tracing, and criminal cases. Here, we show that the resulting phylogeny inferred from real HIV genetic sequences indeed reveals distinct patterns associated with direct transmission contra transmissions from a common source. Thus, our results establish how to interpret phylogenetic trees based on HIV sequences when tracking who-infected-whom, when and how genetic information can be used for improved tracking of HIV spread. We also investigate limitations that stem from limited sampling and genetic time-trends in the donor and recipient HIV populations.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

STREAMS guidelines: standards for technical reporting in environmental and host-associated microbiome studies

The interdisciplinary nature of microbiome research, coupled with the generation of complex multi-omics data, makes knowledge sharing challenging. The Strengthening the Organization and Reporting of Microbiome Studies (STORMS) guidelines provide a checklist for the reporting of study information, experimental design and analytical methods within a scientific manuscript on human microbiome research. Here, in this Consensus Statement, we present the standards for technical reporting in environmental and host-associated microbiome studies (STREAMS) guidelines. The guidelines expand on STORMS and include 67 items to support the reporting and review of environmental (for example, terrestrial, aquatic, atmospheric and engineered), synthetic and non-human host-associated microbiome studies in a standardized and machine-actionable manner. Based on input from 248 researchers spanning 28 countries, we provide detailed guidance, including comparisons with STORMS, and case studies that demonstrate the usage of the STREAMS guidelines. In conclusion, STREAMS, like STORMS, will be a living community resource updated by the Consortium with consensus-building input of the broader community.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2019

A laboratory model for the Parker spiral and magnetized stellar winds

Many rotating stars have magnetic fields that interact with the winds they produce. The Sun is no exception. The interaction between the Sun’s magnetic field and the solar wind gives rise to the heliospheric magnetic field – a spiraling magnetic structure, known as the Parker Spiral, which pervades the solar system. This magnetic field is significant for governing plasma processes that source the solar wind. In this work, we report the creation of a laboratory model of the Parker spiral system based on a rapidly-rotating plasma magnetosphere and the measurement of its global structure and dynamic behaviour. This laboratory system exhibits regions where the plasma flows evolve similarly to many magnetized stellar winds. We observe the advection of magnetic field into an Archimedean spiral and the ejection of quasi-periodic plasma blobs into the stellar outflow, which mimics the observed plasmoids that fuel the slow solar wind. This process involves magnetic reconnection and can be modelled numerically by the inclusion of two-fluid effects in the simulation. The Parker spiral system mirrored in the laboratory can be used for studying solar wind dynamics in complementary fashion to conventional space missions such as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Interference of chiral Andreev edge states

The search for topological excitations such as Majorana fermions has spurred interest in the boundaries between distinct quantum states. Here, we explore an interface between two prototypical phases of electrons with conceptually different ground states: the integer quantum Hall insulator and the s-wave superconductor. We find clear signatures of hybridized electron and hole states similar to chiral Majorana fermions, to which we refer as chiral Andreev edge states (CAES). They propagate along the interface in the direction determined by magnetic field and their interference can turn an incoming electron into an outgoing electron or a hole, depending on the phase accumulated by the CAES along their path. Our results demonstrate that these excitations can propagate and interfere over a significant length, opening future possibilities for their coherent manipulation.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Direct observation of a magnetic-field-induced Wigner crystal

Wigner predicted that when the Coulomb interactions between electrons become much stronger than their kinetic energy, electrons crystallize into a closely packed lattice. A variety of two-dimensional systems have shown evidence for Wigner crystals (WCs). However, a spontaneously formed classical or quantum WC has never been directly visualized. Neither the identification of the WC symmetry nor direct investigation of its melting has been accomplished. Here we use high-resolution scanning tunnelling microscopy measurements to directly image a magnetic-field-induced electron WC in Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene and examine its structural properties as a function of electron density, magnetic field and temperature. At high fields and the lowest temperature, we observe a triangular lattice electron WC in the lowest Landau level. The WC possesses the expected lattice constant and is robust between filling factor ν ≈ 0.13 and ν ≈ 0.38 except near fillings where it competes with fractional quantum Hall states. Increasing the density or temperature results in the melting of the WC into a liquid phase that is isotropic but has a modulated structure characterized by the Bragg wavevector of the WC. At low magnetic fields, the WC unexpectedly transitions into an anisotropic stripe phase, which has been commonly anticipated to form in higher Landau levels. Furthermore, analysis of individual lattice sites shows signatures that may be related to the quantum zero-point motion of electrons in the WC lattice.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2025

Range extender mediates long-distance enhancer activity

Although most mammalian transcriptional enhancers regulate their cognate promoters over distances of tens of kilobases, some enhancers act over distances in the megabase range1. The sequence features that enable such long-distance enhancer–promoter interactions remain unclear. Here we used in vivo enhancer-replacement experiments at the mouse Shh locus to show that short- and medium-range limb enhancers cannot initiate gene expression at long-distance range. We identify a cis-acting element, range extender (REX), that confers long-distance regulatory activity and is located next to a long-range limb enhancer of Sall1. The REX element has no endogenous enhancer activity. However, addition of the REX to other short- and mid-range limb enhancers substantially increases their genomic interaction range. In the most extreme example observed, addition of REX increased the range of an enhancer by an order of magnitude from its native 73 kb to 848 kb. The REX element contains highly conserved [C/T]AATTA homeodomain motifs that are critical for its activity. These motifs are enriched in long-range limb enhancers genome-wide, including the ZRS (zone of polarizing activity (ZPA) regulatory sequence), a benchmark long-range limb enhancer of Shh2. The ZRS enhancer with mutated [C/T]AATTA motifs maintains limb activity at short range, but loses its long-range activity, resulting in severe limb reduction in knock-in mice. In summary, we identify a sequence signature associated with long-range enhancer–promoter interactions and describe a prototypical REX element that is necessary and sufficient to confer long-distance activation by remote enhancers.

Bower, Grace↗
DOE OSTI2019

Unified rational protein engineering with sequence-based deep representation learning

Rational protein engineering requires a holistic understanding of protein function. Here, we apply deep learning to unlabeled amino-acid sequences to distill the fundamental features of a protein into a statistical representation that is semantically rich and structurally, evolutionarily and biophysically grounded. We show that the simplest models built on top of this unified representation (UniRep) are broadly applicable and generalize to unseen regions of sequence space. Our data-driven approach predicts the stability of natural and de novo designed proteins, and the quantitative function of molecularly diverse mutants, competitively with the state-of-the-art methods. UniRep further enables two orders of magnitude efficiency improvement in a protein engineering task. Lastly, UniRep is a versatile summary of fundamental protein features that can be applied across protein engineering informatics.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Biogeochemistry of upland to wetland soils, sediments, and surface waters across Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes coastal interfaces

Transferable and mechanistic understanding of cross-scale interactions is necessary to predict how coastal systems respond to global change. Cohesive datasets across geographically distributed sites can be used to examine how transferable a mechanistic understanding of coastal ecosystem control points is. To address the above research objectives, data were collected by the EXploration of Coastal Hydrobiogeochemistry Across a Network of Gradients and Experiments (EXCHANGE) Consortium – a regionally distributed network of researchers that collaborated on experimental design, methodology, collection, analysis, and publication. The EXCHANGE Consortium collected samples from 52 coastal terrestrial-aquatic interfaces (TAIs) during Fall of 2021. At each TAI, samples collected include soils from across a transverse elevation gradient (i.e., coastal upland forest, transitional forest, and wetland soils), surface waters, and nearshore sediments across research sites in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions (Chesapeake and Delaware Bays) of the continental USA. The first campaign measures surface water quality parameters, bulk geochemical parameters on water, soil, and sediment samples, and physicochemical parameters of sediment and soil.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Next-Generation Intensity-Duration-Frequency Curves for Diverse Land across the Continental United States

The current methods for designing hydrological infrastructure rely on precipitation-based intensity-duration-frequency curves. However, they cannot accurately predict flooding caused by snowmelt or rain-on-snow events, potentially leading to underdesigned infrastructure and property damage. To address these issues, next-generation intensity-duration-frequency (NG-IDF) curves have been developed for the open condition, characterizing water available for runoff from rainfall, snowmelt, and rain-on-snow. However, they lack consideration of land use land cover (LULC) factors, which can significantly affect runoff processes. We address this limitation by expanding open area NG-IDF dataset to include eight vegetated LULCs over the continental United States, including forest (deciduous, evergreen, mixed), shrub, grass, pasture, crop, and wetland. This NG-IDF 2.0 dataset offers a comprehensive analysis of hydrological extreme events and their associated drivers under different LULCs at a continental scale. It will serve as a useful resource for improving standard design practices and aiding in the assessment of infrastructure design risks. Additionally, it provides useful insights into how changes in LULC impact flooding magnitude, mechanisms, timing, and snow water supply.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Phonon Conduction in Silicon Nanobeam Labyrinths

Here we study single-crystalline silicon nanobeams having 470 nm width and 80 nm thickness cross section, where we produce tortuous thermal paths (i.e. labyrinths) by introducing slits to control the impact of the unobstructed “line-of-sight” (LOS) between the heat source and heat sink. The labyrinths range from straight nanobeams with a complete LOS along the entire length to nanobeams in which the LOS ranges from partially to entirely blocked by introducing slits, s = 95, 195, 245, 295 and 395 nm. The measured thermal conductivity of the samples decreases monotonically from ~47 W m -1 K -1 for straight beam to ~31 W m -1 K -1 for slit width of 395 nm. A model prediction through a combination of the Boltzmann transport equation and ab initio calculations shows an excellent agreement with the experimental data to within ~8%. The model prediction for the most tortuous path (s = 395 nm) is reduced by ~14% compared to a straight beam of equivalent cross section. This study suggests that LOS is an important metric for characterizing and interpreting phonon propagation in nanostructures.

42 ENGINEERING↗