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At least 1,711 records · Page 95

Magnetic Materials Characterization and Modeling for the Enhanced Design of Magnetic Shielding of Cryomodules in Particle Accelerators

Particle accelerators produce beams of high-energy particles, which are used for both fundamental and applied scientific research and are critical to the development of accelerator driven sub-critical reactor systems. An effective magnetic shield is very important to achieve higher quality factor (Qo) of the cryomodule of a particle accelerator. The allowed value of field inside the cavity due to all external fields (particularly the Earth’s magnetic field) is ~15 mG or less. The goal of this PhD dissertation is to comprehensively study the magnetic properties of commonly used magnetic shielding materials at both cryogenic and room temperatures. This knowledge can be used for the enhanced design of magnetic shields of cryomodes (CM) in particle accelerators. To this end, we first studied the temperature dependent magnetization behavior (M-H curves) of Amumetal and A4K under different annealing and deformation conditions. This characterized the effect of stress or deformation induced during the manufacturing processes and subsequent restoration of high permeability with appropriate heat treatment. Next, an energy based stochastic model for temperature dependent anhysteretic magnetization behavior of ferromagnetic materials was proposed and benchmarked against experimental data. We show that this model is able to simulate and explain the magnetic behavior of as rolled, deformed and annealed amumetal and A4K over a large range of temperatures. The experimental results for permeability are then used in a finite element model (FEM) in COMSOL to evaluate the shielding effectiveness of multiple shield designs at room temperature as well as cryogenic temperature. This work could serve as a guideline for future design, development and fabrication of magnetic shields of CMs.

Sah, Sanjay↗

Science Area 1: Standard Award: Model-Data Fusion to Examine Multiscale Dynamical Controls on Snow Cover and Critical Zone Moisture Inputs (Final Report)

In many mountain watersheds of the world, seasonal snowpacks play an important role as natural reservoirs of water. Seasonal snowpacks accumulate water during cold, wet winter months that subsequently melts. Downstream communities depend on water from melting seasonal snowpacks to support agricultural, industrial, and municipal water needs. Rapidly melting snowpacks can also present a flooding hazard, particularly if snowpacks melt at rates faster than anticipated and where adequate reservoir capacity is unavailable to buffer river flows associated with melt. The spatial and temporal dynamics of snow accumulation and melt also play an important role in supporting upland ecosystems in mountain landscapes. Snowmelt provides soil moisture that enable terrestrial ecosystem productivity and exert control on soil microorganisms that play important roles in global carbon cycles. Climate warming is gradually decreasing the amount of precipitation in mountain watersheds arriving as snow, presenting potentially profound disruptions to mountain ecosystems, as well as downstream delivery of water. The overarching goal of this project was to understand how interactions between the near-surface atmosphere and surface topography control the input, accumulation, retention, and release of water from mountain snowpacks. Over a 5-year period, this project pursued an approach combining high-resolution regional climate modeling, satellite and airborne remote sensing data, and ground-based observations to develop and analyze benchmark datasets to address overarching science questions and hypotheses. Key products include a continuous, long-term, high spatiotemporal resolution (1 km/1 hr) dataset characterizing key climate variables in the Upper Colorado River Basin. The dataset included historical estimates of precipitation, temperature, humidity, solar and longwave radiation, and wind speeds. Additionally, the project developed a 20+ year long, 30 m spatial, daily temporal multi-sensor dataset characterizing snow presence/absence in the East/Taylor River watersheds in the Central Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The project supported training of 1 postdoctoral scholar, 1 Ph.D. student, and 1 M.S. student.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Critical evaluation of Jet-A spray combustion using propane chemical kinetics in gas turbine combustion simulated by KIVA-2

Jet-A spray combustion has been evaluated in gas turbine combustion with the use of propane chemical kinetics as the first approximation for the chemical reactions. Here, the numerical solutions are obtained by using the KIVA-2 computer code. The KIVA-2 code is the most developed of the available multidimensional combustion computer programs for application of the in-cylinder combustion dynamics of internal combustion engines. The released version of KIVA-2 assumes that 12 chemical species are present; the code uses an Arrhenius kinetic-controlled combustion model governed by a four-step global chemical reaction and six equilibrium reactions. Researchers efforts involve the addition of Jet-A thermophysical properties and the implementation of detailed reaction mechanisms for propane oxidation. Three different detailed reaction mechanism models are considered. The first model consists of 131 reactions and 45 species. This is considered as the full mechanism which is developed through the study of chemical kinetics of propane combustion in an enclosed chamber. The full mechanism is evaluated by comparing calculated ignition delay times with available shock tube data. However, these detailed reactions occupy too much computer memory and CPU time for the computation. Therefore, it only serves as a benchmark case by which to evaluate other simplified models. Two possible simplified models were tested in the existing computer code KIVA-2 for the same conditions as used with the full mechanism. One model is obtained through a sensitivity analysis using LSENS, the general kinetics and sensitivity analysis program code of D. A. Bittker and K. Radhakrishnan. This model consists of 45 chemical reactions and 27 species. The other model is based on the work published by C. K. Westbrook and F. L. Dryer.

Nguyen, H. L.↗

ACStor: Optimizing Access Performance of Virtual Disk Images in Clouds

In virtualized data centers, virtual disk images (VDIs) serve as the containers in virtual environment, so their access performance is critical for the overall system performance. Some distributed VDI chunk storage systems have been proposed in order to alleviate the I/O bottleneck for VM management. As the system scales up to a large number of running VMs, however, the overall network traffic would become unbalanced with hot spots on some VMs inevitably, leading to I/O performance degradation when accessing the VMs. Here, we propose an adaptive and collaborative VDI storage system (ACStor) to resolve the above performance issue. In comparison with the existing research, our solution is able to dynamically balance the traffic workloads in accessing VDI chunks, based on the run-time network state. Specifically, compute nodes with lightly loaded traffic will be adaptively assigned more chunk access requests from remote VMs and vice versa, which can effectively eliminate the above problem and thus improves the I/O performance of VMs. We also implement a prototype based on our ACStor design, and evaluate it by various benchmarks on a real cluster with 32 nodes and a simulated platform with 256 nodes. Experiments show that under different network traffic patterns of data centers, our solution achieves up to 2-8 performance gain on VM booting time and VM’s I/O throughput, in comparison with the other state-of-the-art approaches.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Status of the RRR evaluations for 233,235 U and 239 Pu [Slides]

The presentation discusses the R -Matrix Analysis of 233 U, 235 U, and 239 Pu and how their interplay among PFNS, TNC, RRR, and neutron multiplicities has a significant impact on the benchmarks. The presentation also discusses the 233 U improved agreement on benchmarks, an additional investigation on the thickness of beryllium reflectors, work on URR (up to 40 keV) and/or extension of RRR (600 eV to 2 keV). Also discussed is how the 235 U progresses on understanding reactivity rates related to depletion calculations, improved agreement with measured (capture) data is quite insensitive to resolve the negative slope, and how the 239 Pu negative slope as a function of the temperature is not understood yet (bias over 2σ lower than measured).

07 ISOTOPE AND RADIATION SOURCES↗

A long path-length optical property measurement device for highly transparent detector media

Measurements of the optical properties of highly transparent liquids are necessary for large-scale detectors that seek to detect optical signatures in kiloton-scale or larger volumes. Detailed understanding of the attenuation and scattering properties of fill media is critical to the ability to accurately simulate detector performance, and yet is often unavailable until in-situ measurements can be performed. Moreover, in-situ measurements may rely on effective attenuation lengths or other approximations to characterize performance, rather than absolute measurements of attenuation and scattering. To better understand the optical properties of potential fill media and purification schemes, a system has been developed which provides simultaneous attenuation and differential scattering cross-section measurements for highly transparent liquids. This horizontal, adjustable path-length “long-arm” system provides excellent isolation from the atmosphere, a high degree of vibration insensitivity, and a simple and reliable method of calibration. Further, scattering measurements can be carried out simultaneously at ports along the beamline equipped with optics allowing the selection of scatter angle and polarization. This enables both reliable quantitative scatter measurements and phase-function separation. This system has been extensively tested using deionized (DI) water as a benchmark, and has demonstrated repeatable measurements of attenuation lengths exceeding 100 m and scattering lengths approaching 1 km.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

A Short-Term Solar Forecasting Platform Using a Physics-Based Smart Persistence Model and Data Imputation Method

Electrical energy plays vital role in our socio-economic activity and therefore ensuring the reliability of the electric grid, from the generation, transmission and distribution level is critical. In order to maintain the power system parameter viz., frequency, voltage, etc., optimally, balancing of generation and consumption is very much essential. However, solar energy is infirm power by nature this is due to cloud cover / other local phenomena. Hence, Photovoltaic (PV) power generation brings a significant challenge to the grid operator due to the variability of the solar energy. The complexity of this challenge in terms of planning and dispatch ability of PV resources, aggravates with the high penetration of solar energy into the electric grid. In this setting, reliable solar radiation forecasting models based on accurate and quality input data become essential. In order to develop a suitable model for predicting solar radiation, quality historical / real time measurement is also needed. Under this study NIWE and NREL jointly developed / tested short-term solar forecasting frameworks using a smart persistence and physics-based smart persistence models for intra-hour forecasting of solar radiation (PSPI) and benchmarked 9 different data imputation techniques in 15 Solar Radiation Resource Assessment (SRRA) stations, located at different parts of India. During any measurement campaign, due to various technical reasons, we may miss few observations. However, the missing observation often reduce the performance of any forecasting model. Therefore, suitable data imputation method would assist us to obtain continuous observation of solar radiation. A station-by-station and method-by-method analysis was carried out to understand the performance of each model. Based on our analysis, among all the data imputation methods, the Kalman data imputation method is better for Indian Weather condition. In addition, Kalman StructTS, Linear, Stine and Arima methods yield slightly inferior accuracy compared to Kalman, but outperform the other methods. The extended solar radiation data are used by solar forecasting models to provide the prediction of solar radiation at 15 SRRA stations. As far as short term forecasting model is concerned, the PSPI model outperforms the Smart Persistence model. However, the forecast error is increases with the forecasting horizon.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Methods and Experiences for Developing Abstractions for Data-intensive, Scientific Applications

Developing software for scientific applications that require the integration of diverse types of computing, instruments, and data present challenges that are distinct from commercial software. These applications require scale, and the need to integrate various programming and computational models with evolving and heterogeneous infrastructure. Pervasive and effective abstractions for distributed infrastructures are thus critical; however, the process of developing abstractions for scientific applications and infrastructures is not well understood. While theory-based approaches for system development are suited for well-defined, closed environments, they have severe limitations for designing abstractions for scientific systems and applications. The design science research (DSR) method provides the basis for designing practical systems that can handle real-world complexities at all levels. In contrast to theory-centric approaches, DSR emphasizes both practical relevance and knowledge creation by building and rigorously evaluating all artifacts. In this work, we show how DSR provides a well-defined framework for developing abstractions and middleware systems for distributed systems. Specifically, we address the critical problem of distributed resource management on heterogeneous infrastructure over a dynamic range of scales, a challenge that currently limits many scientific applications. We use the pilot-abstraction, a widely used resource management abstraction for high-performance, high throughput, big data, and streaming applications, as a case study for evaluating the DSR activities. For this purpose, we analyze the research process and artifacts produced during the design and evaluation of the pilot-abstraction. We find DSR provides a concise framework for iteratively designing and evaluating systems. Finally, we capture our experiences and formulate different lessons learned.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

COG Beta-Effective Benchmarks

COG 11.3 calculations with the “new method” using ENDF/B-VIII.0 data are shown to produce results with |C/E – 1| < 3σ in all cases, whereas the other methods produce a few minor outliers. Furthermore, the “new method” using ENDF/B-VIII.0 data is observed to produce “over” and “under” results consistent with 50/50 expectations whereas the other methods appear to be slightly over or under predicting. JEFF-3.3 results are slightly larger overall than ENDF/B-VIII.0 results. In all but a few cases, it is also observed that $F_d/F_t ≥ (vF)_d/(vF)_t ≥ 1 – (k_{prompt}/k_{eff})$ and all estimators produce equivalent results for the most thermal systems. In those other cases, this relation holds within the given statistics.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Uncertainty Quantification Framework for Predicting Material Response with Large Number of Parameters: Application to Creep Prediction in Ferritic-Martensitic Steels Using Combined Crystal Plasticity and Grain Boundary Models

This paper presents an uncertainty quantification (UQ) framework for the physics-based model prediction of material response with a large number of parameters. The application problem presented in this work is that of predicting creep in Grade 91 steel at 600°C. The material response is defined with a physically based microstructural model with constitutive equations emulating several observed phenomena in Grade 91 and embodied into an explicit geometry mesoscale finite element model for prior austenite grains and grain boundaries. Creep within the grains and in grain boundaries are represented by crystal plasticity for dislocation motion and a physics-based model for cavity growth and nucleation, respectively. The creep behavior of this material is influenced by several parameters, some of which have a wide range of variation based on experimental data. UQ combined with microstructural modeling can discover the core microstructural causes of experimental variability, leading to improved materials with lower variability in critical long-term material properties. In this study, we investigate the model's uncertainty to identify material properties that may be modified during production to increase creep life and analyze different components of the crystal plasticity model for improvements. For this purpose, a quantity of interest is defined as time to minimum creep rate, which correlates well to the creep failure of the material. A deep neural network model was trained and validated to be used as a surrogate for the finite element model. Then, a variance-based sensitivity analysis is performed on the surrogate model to find the Sobol indices of the input parameters in respect to the output quantity of interest. The Sobol indices are used to reduce the dimensionality of the model. Generalized polynomial chaos expansion is used on the reduced basis models to propagate the uncertainty from the input parameters to the quantity of interest using the deep neural network surrogate model. These results are benchmarked against uncertainty propagation using Monte Carlo simulations. In conclusion, the UQ performed through the reduced basis model captures almost all the uncertainty in the model with significantly fewer simulations, making it possible to perform the UQ directly via simulations with the finite element model rather than surrogate machine-learned models.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Extrusion parameter control optimization for DIW 3D printing using image analysis techniques

Material extrusion is a well-recognized facet of additive manufacturing that involves the fabrication of parts through the deposition of structural material from an extrusion head from a bulk supply. In the subdivision of Direct Ink Writing (DIW) additive manufacturing, challenges arise when the structural material is flowable, synchronous extrusion control and tool movement becomes critical for achieving high-quality parts with low defect populations. DIW techniques are most used in laboratory settings using expensive custom instruments and may require specialized 3D slicing software. Here, in this study, the fabrication of an inexpensive, consumer-friendly progressive cavity pump dispensing system is detailed, in which can create high-quality parts by executing G-code commands produced from a commercial slicing software. The precision and repeatability of the movement-synchronized material extrusion is demonstrated through a series of optimization schemes, entailing the alteration of various control parameters, which directly affect the extrusion properties demonstrated during a print. In situ diagnostics were implemented to evaluate the results of the established optimization experiment. Using a machine vision technique, images of the optimization prints are processed. Following this, a supervised machine learning model was trained to autonomously judge whether or not the extrusion parameters produced a passing or failing result. The machine learning scheme serves as a preliminary benchmark for future layer-by-layer evaluation of more complex DIW parts. The construction of the printer and development of in situ characterization capabilities demonstrates the ability for this printer to create high-fidelity DIW parts for a fraction of the price of other systems.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Patch Hierarchical Attention Transformer for Efficient Particle Jet Tagging

Real-time jet tagging is critical for identifying short-lived particle decays in the high-throughput detectors of the Large Hadron Collider, where real-time trigger systems responsible for deciding which collision events to store impose strict latency and accuracy constraints. While transformer architectures achieve the highest jet tagging accuracy when compute is unconstrained, their quadratic self-attention cost makes inference restrictive on trigger budget. Existing efficient variants reduce the computational cost, but hinder the classification performance. To address this limitation, we introduce the Patch Hierarchical Attention Transformer (PHAT-JeT), which combines two mechanisms: a physics-inspired geometric message-passing module that encodes local detector-plane structure, and a hierarchical patch-based attention scheme that computes exact attention within small particle groups while preserving global context through lightweight patch-token communication. Within a restricted budget, PHAT-JeT achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and background rejection among all resource-constrained jet tagging models on four benchmarks (\textsc{hls4ml}, JetClass, Top Tagging, and Quark--Gluon). Our code is available at https://github.com/aaronw5/PHAT-JeT.

Wang, Aaron [Illinois U., Chicago] (ORCID:00000003↗

Strictly Enforcing Invertibility and Conservation in CNN-Based Super Resolution for Scientific Datasets

Abstract Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized image “super resolution” (SR), dramatically outperforming past methods for enhancing image resolution. They could be a boon for the many scientific fields that involve imaging or any regularly gridded datasets: satellite remote sensing, radar meteorology, medical imaging, numerical modeling, and so on. Unfortunately, while SR-CNNs produce visually compelling results, they do not necessarily conserve physical quantities between their low-resolution inputs and high-resolution outputs when applied to scientific datasets. Here, a method for “downsampling enforcement” in SR-CNNs is proposed. A differentiable operator is derived that, when applied as the final transfer function of a CNN, ensures the high-resolution outputs exactly reproduce the low-resolution inputs under 2D-average downsampling while improving performance of the SR schemes. The method is demonstrated across seven modern CNN-based SR schemes on several benchmark image datasets, and applications to weather radar, satellite imager, and climate model data are shown. The approach improves training time and performance while ensuring physical consistency between the super-resolved and low-resolution data. Significance Statement Recent advancements in using deep learning to increase the resolution of images have substantial potential across the many scientific fields that use images and image-like data. Most image super-resolution research has focused on the visual quality of outputs, however, and is not necessarily well suited for use with scientific data where known physics constraints may need to be enforced. Here, we introduce a method to modify existing deep neural network architectures so that they strictly conserve physical quantities in the input field when “super resolving” scientific data and find that the method can improve performance across a wide range of datasets and neural networks. Integration of known physics and adherence to established physical constraints into deep neural networks will be a critical step before their potential can be fully realized in the physical sciences.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

FY20 Proxy App Suite Release: Report for ECP Proxy App Project Milestone ADCD-504-10

Version 4.0 of the ECP Proxy App Suite is practically unchanged from the previous release. The current set of proxies has proven useful for many aspects of benchmarking and co-design and we see little reason to alter the suite. Although there have been few changes to the ECP suite, the team has been hard at work in other areas. In the area of Machine Learning (ML) we have now created a separate proxy suite dedicated to this scientific applications of ML. The suite includes: miniGAN (Generative Adversarial Networks), miniRL (Reinforcement Learning), CRADL (inline inference), Cosmoflow-Benchmark (Convolutional Neural Network), and MLPerf-DeepCam (Climate Segmentation Benchmark). Section 3 contains more information about these proxies as well as the principles that are guiding the development of the suite. We have surveyed available proxies for several application domains including Computational Fluid Dynamics, Quantum Chemistry, Quantum Computing Simulation, Molecular Dynamics, Monte Carlo Transport, and Density Functional Theory to identify gaps in proxy coverage. Several new proxy apps are either already available or will be released soon to fill these gaps. Section 4 provides full details. Finally, section 5 reports on our continued collaboration with the ECP Continuous Integration (CI) effort to use proxy apps to help identify problems and roadblocks to cross-lab CI. We have also assisted the El Capitan Center of Excellence (COE) to stand up a CI system that will be used to test releases of HPE and AMD software stacks. We hope that the COE effort can serve as a model for ECP by showing how the Proxy App Team can work with AD and ST teams identify critical features, kernels, patterns, etc. and incorporate them into a CI system that will help ensure that Frontier and Aurora will provide those needed capabilities.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Resource Management for Real-Time Adaptive Agents

Increased autonomy and automation in onboard flight systems offer numerous potential benefits, including cost reduction and greater flexibility. The existence of generic mechanisms for automation is critical for handling unanticipated science events and anomalies where limitations in traditional control software with fixed, predetermined algorithms can mean loss of science data and missed opportunities for observing important terrestrial events. We have developed such a mechanism by adding a Hierarchical Agent-based ReaLTime technology (HART) extension to our Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) middleware. Traditional DRM provides mechanisms to monitor the realtime performance of distributed applications and to move applications among processors to improve real-time performance. In the HART project we have designed and implemented a performance adaptation mechanism to improve reaktime performance. To use this mechanism, applications are developed that can run at various levels of quality. The DRM can choose a setting for the quality level of an application dynamically at run-time in order to manage satellite resource usage more effectively. A groundbased prototype of a satellite system that captures and processes images has also been developed as part of this project to be used as a benchmark for evaluating the resource management framework A significant enhancement of this generic mission-independent framework allows scientists to specify the utility, or "scientific benefit," of science observations under various conditions like cloud cover and compression method. The resource manager then uses these benefit tables to determine in redtime how to set the quality levels for applications to maximize overall system utility as defined by the scientists running the mission. We also show how maintenance functions llke health and safety data can be integrated into the utility framework. Once thls framework has been certified for missions and successfully flight tested it can be reused with little development overhead for other missions. In contrast, current space missions llke Swift manage similar types of resource trade -off completely with the scientific application code itself, and such code must be re-certified and tested for each mission even if a large portion of the code base is shared. This final report discusses some of the major issues motivating this research effort, provides a literature review of the related work, discusses the resource management framework and ground-based satellite system prototype that has been developed, indicates what work is yet to be performed, and provides a list of publications resulting from this work.

Welch, Lonnie↗

SU(N) magnetism in chains of ultracold alkaline-earth-metal atoms: Mott transitions and quantum correlations

We investigate one-dimensional SU(N) Hubbard chains at zero temperature, which can be emulated with ultracold alkaline-earth-metal atoms, by using the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), Bethe ansatz (BA), and bosonization. We compute experimental observables and use the DMRG to benchmark the accuracy of the Bethe ansatz for N>2 where the BA is only approximate. In the worst case, we find a relative error {epsilon} < or approx. 4% in the BA ground-state energy for N{<=}4 at filling 1/N, which is due to the fact that BA improperly treats the triply and higher occupied states. Using the DMRG for N{<=}4 and the BA for large N, we determine the regimes of validity of strong- and weak-coupling perturbation theory for all values of N and, in particular, the parameter range in which the system is well described by a SU(N) Heisenberg model at filling 1/N. We find this depends only weakly on N. We investigate the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition from a Luttinger liquid to a Mott insulator by computing the fidelity susceptibility and the Luttinger parameter K{sub {rho}} at 1/N filling. The numerical findings give strong evidence that the fidelity susceptibility develops a minimum at a critical interaction strength which is found to occur at a finite positive value for N>2.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Automatic Energy Schemes for High Performance Applications

Although high-performance computing traditionally focuses on the efficient execution of large-scale applications, both energy and power have become critical concerns when approaching exascale. Drastic increases in the power consumption of supercomputers affect significantly their operating costs and failure rates. In modern microprocessor architectures, equipped with dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and CPU clock modulation (throttling), the power consumption may be controlled in software. Additionally, network interconnect, such as Infiniband, may be exploited to maximize energy savings while the application performance loss and frequency switching overheads must be carefully balanced. This work first studies two important collective communication operations, all-to-all and allgather and proposes energy saving strategies on the per-call basis. Next, it targets point-to-point communications to group them into phases and apply frequency scaling to them to save energy by exploiting the architectural and communication stalls. Finally, it proposes an automatic runtime system which combines both collective and point-to-point communications into phases, and applies throttling to them apart from DVFS to maximize energy savings. The experimental results are presented for NAS parallel benchmark problems as well as for the realistic parallel electronic structure calculations performed by the widely used quantum chemistry package GAMESS. Close to the maximum energy savings were obtained with a substantially low performance loss on the given platform.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

An entropy-based debiasing approach to quantifying experimental coverage for novel applications of interest in the nuclear community

This manuscript proposes a novel information-theoretic approach to the quantification of experimental relevance, i.e., coverage, to achieve optimal data assimilation results for nuclear engineering applications. Specifically, this work posits the need for a new metric, called coverage (q C ) of an application’s quantity of interest, i.e., eigenvalue or power peaking for an advanced reactor concept, defined herein as the theoretically maximum achievable reduction in the quantity’s uncertainty given measurements from a pool of experiments in a manner that is independent of the data assimilation procedure employed. Currently, reduction in a quantity’s uncertainty is strongly biased by the underlying assumptions of the assimilation procedure to account for the under-determined nature of such problems and the similarity criterion employed to identify relevant experiments. To address this challenge, this work has developed a coverage metric, q C , based on mutual information, which establishes a new conceptual framework for assessing coverage, one that is independent of the model parameters and responses degree of variations in both the experimental and application domains, i.e., linear vs non-linear, and their prior uncertainty distributions, i.e., Gaussian vs. non-Gaussian. The q C is an entropic measure capable of addressing coverage for general nonlinear problems with non-Gaussian uncertainties and inclusive of the measurement uncertainties from multiple experiments. Numerical experiments from manufactured analytical problems as well as a set of benchmarks from the ICSBEP handbook are employed to demonstrate its theoretical and practical performance as compared to the c k -based experiment selection methodology, commonly employed in the neutronic community. The manuscript then employs other well-known adaptations to existing data assimilation methodologies for nonlinear and non-Gaussian problems capable of achieving the coverage posited by q C .

Bayesian data assimilation↗