Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “Databases”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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

At least 1,711 records · Page 95

Fortifying Environmental Compliance Strategies at Hanford - 19541

At the Hanford Site, located near Richland, Washington, the Department of Energy is cleaning up legacy radioactive and mixed-waste generated from the Manhattan Project in the 1940's. A major component of cleaning up the waste is maintaining compliance with federal and state environmental regulations. Environmental compliance is also determined through permits, agreements, and consent orders issued by regulating agencies such as the Washington State Department of Health: Office of Radiation Protection, Washington State Department of Ecology Nuclear Waste Program, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Maintaining compliance at Hanford reduces environmental impacts and addresses violations, or non-compliances. The following strategies improve compliance and support the avoidance of enforcement actions. At Hanford, regulatory agency environmental enforcement actions, and their corrective actions, are tracked to completion using databases maintained by inspection subject matter experts. The databases are used to provide the Department of Energy and contractor management with up-to-date status of regulatory agency activity and the required corrective actions. Trending enforcement actions helps target compliance vulnerabilities. Findings and corrective actions that are entered into the databases are then trended by date, location, responsible contractor, agency, and type of compliance issue. The ability to review previous non-compliances in certain locations of the Site, or by general alleged violation, provides the project's environmental contacts with information on what types of issues to look for on pre-inspection walk downs. Finding non-compliances during pre-inspection walk downs allows the contractor to correct the issue and avoid potential fines from regulating agencies. The walk downs are conducted by environmental specialists and project personnel looking for issues that may be viewed as a compliance problem. Using agency checklists and previous inspection correspondence can help to provide valuable information during pre-inspection activities. Training regulatory agency inspectors on Site security requirements, cultural and ecological standards, and inspection protocols allows for increased efficiency and reduces potential miscommunication between regulatory agencies and the regulated contractors. The training also allows the contractors to give the regulating agencies the up-to-date policies and procedures that will be addressed during the inspection. Hanford has pre-identified inspection coordinators within each contractor to assist in coordinating with Department of Energy personnel, projects, and management prior to the inspections. These inspection coordinators notify affected management, accommodate and escort the regulators to locations they ask to inspect, set up requested interviews, and gather requested information that will need to be cleared for public release. These practices make for positive experiences and interactions with the regulating agency personnel and help reduce and eliminate environmental non-compliances, findings, violations, and fines. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Experimental validation of the Cristal V2.0 French criticality calculation package - 14587

A new version of the CRISTAL criticality calculation package, named CRISTAL V2.0 [1], has been developed by IRSN and CEA, in collaboration with AREVA and EDF. Four calculation routes are now available, using nuclear data issued from the JEFF-3.1.1 evaluation: two multigroup routes based on 281 groups cross-sections (APOLLO2 - MORET 5 or APOLLO2-Sn calculations), a pointwise Monte Carlo route (TRIPOLI-4{sup R}) and a criticality standard calculation route. The CRISTAL V2.0 package, which will be delivered soon to OECD/NEA data bank, benefits from a broad validation database covering almost all areas of criticality-safety applications, from fuel fabrication to reprocessing, including transportation. 3,127 critical experiments, corresponding to 342 series, either issued from the OECD/ICSBEP Handbook or performed in French facilities (confidential data) were selected for the CRISTAL V2.0 validation database. Currently, more than 2,300 experiments are already part of the validation database. This validation work highlights an overall consistency to experimental data and inter-comparisons between the different calculation routes mainly show good agreements on a large set of common experiments. (authors)

42 ENGINEERING↗

The 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Nuclear Supply Chains vs. Sanctions

The United States and European countries are unlikely to collectively approve of sanctions against Russian exports of nuclear fuel assemblies and uranium in the near term despite the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Rather than bearing the costs that cutting off Russian imports would have on domestic nuclear energy production, the United States and European countries are more likely to prefer developing alternative supply chains of nuclear fuel and enriched uranium to reduce dependence on Russian resources. This outlook is primarily based on two areas of evaluation: (1) comparison of the Russian-made reactor fuel supply chain within the European Union (EU) in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea and in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine, and (2) the dependence of France and the United States on Russia’s exports of enriched uranium. Additionally, the potential impacts to Kazakh uranium exports if trade routes for nuclear resources through Russia became unavailable were considered as an additional factor in the push for disentanglement from Russian nuclear resources. This work utilized BACI, a database of harmonized international trade data at the product level drawn from the United Nations Comtrade Database and created by the French international economics research institute CEPII.1 Comparisons of imports and exports were based on the trade value in U.S. dollars as reported in BACI instead of the quantity of the traded product. This evaluation only considers import and export data up until 2021, since the trade data for 2022 is incomplete within the Comtrade Database for several of the key countries presented in this work, including Australia, Canada, Namibia, Niger, and Russia.

Political science↗

Recent Metallic Fuel Data Recovery in FIPD

The Metallic Fuels Irradiation and Physics Database (FIPD) [1] is an organized collection of metallic fuel test pin data (U-xPu-yZr, = 0 ~ 28; y = 2 ~ 10) and documentation available to industry. FIPD mainly contains three types of data: (1) Fuel pin fabrication data, including fuel slug diameter, fuel slug length, cladding diameter, smear density, etc. (2) Fuel pin operation conditions, including axial distributions for power, temperatures, fluences, burnup, and isotopic densities, etc. and (3) Fuel pin post-irradiation examination (PIE) data, including fission gas release and gas chemistry, profilometry, and neutron radiography, etc. The operating conditions for pins with PIE data available in FIPD span significant ranges across key parameters. The fuel peak burnup extends from less than 5% up to 20 at%. The cladding peak temperature varies from about 490°C to 660°C. Finally, the cladding peak DPA shows a wide range from less than 5 to 120. These broad ranges reflect the diverse testing conditions and operational parameters captured in the available PIE data. More detail about FIPD can be found in ref. [2]. The database development is an ongoing effort covering metallic fuel experiments from the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) and the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF). As reported in the ref. [3, 4], most of the PIE data generated during the IFR program [5] has been collected, reviewed, processed, and integrated into FIPD. The most recently added PIE data can be found in ref. [4], which shows the collection of over 95% of the PIE data by the time of this paper. The recent improvements to the database are summarized in this paper.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Summary of Graphite Data Stored within NDMAS

The Graphite Technology Development Project provides data to support the design of graphite core components within specific reactor service conditions of the next generation of high-temperature, gas-cooled nuclear reactors. Physical, mechanical, and thermal properties of nuclear grade graphite were characterized for specimens that were unirradiated, irradiated, and irradiated under various stress conditions. The material properties include diameter, length, mass, density, compressive strength, tensile strength, flexural strength, modulus, resistivity, thermal diffusivity, and thermal expansion coefficient. Baseline graphite specimens are unirradiated from different grades (2114, IG-110, NBG-17, NBG-18, and PCEA) and different types used in different characterization tests (compressive, flexural, tensile, one-inch cylinder, and quarter-inch cylinder). The Advanced Graphite Creep (AGC) irradiation specimens are from a much larger number of grades and cylinder types (creep, piggyback, and pencil). For baseline graphite, characterization data for 7,756 specimens extracted from thirteen graphite billets were captured to the NDMAS database. For AGC experiments, four irradiation campaigns have been completed: AGC-1, AGC-2, AGC-3, and AGC-4. The ongoing HDG-1 (High-Dose Graphite) experiment, which began irradiation with Cycle 168B on August 26, 2020, includes specimens previously irradiated in AGC-2 in addition to the specimens originally destined for AGC-5.. Besides the characterization data, the AGC data includes irradiation monitoring and physics data representing the irradiation conditions of AGC specimens. Currently, all data for AGC-1, AGC-2, and AGC-3 have been captured to the NDMAS database. Only AGC-4 pre-irradiation and irradiation monitoring data have been captured, and HDG-1 pre-irradiation data are in process of being captured for unirradiated specimens. To date, a total of 38,149 material property records have been captured into NDMAS database for baseline and AGC specimens. All characterization data are qualified for use according to their perspective data verification reports. For the AGC irradiation campaigns, a total of 41,502 qualified physics calculation records were added for AGC-1, AGC-2, and AGC-3. Finally, a total of 173,698,505 AGC irradiation monitoring data records (thermocouple temperature, gas flow rate, gas pressure, gas moisture, applied load, and specimen displacement) have been captured to NDMAS; the majority of those records (~94%) are qualified data records.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Intern Poster: STIG Shouldn't Drop ACID

STIG (Structured Threat Intelligence Graph) is an open-source graph database tool from INL. It’s used to create and process cyber intelligence graphs, which are shared in the cyber threat intelligence community and used to train INL machine learning products like @DisCo. For quality machine learning and critical infrastructure defense, STIG’s database must be ACID: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable. Various ACID tests were designed and applied to STIG to ensure its behavior follows these properties.

99 - GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Potential and limitations of inferring ecosystem photosynthetic capacity from leaf functional traits

Abstract The aim of this study was to systematically analyze the potential and limitations of using plant functional trait observations from global databases versus in situ data to improve our understanding of vegetation impacts on ecosystem functional properties ( EFP s). Using ecosystem photosynthetic capacity as an example, we first provide an objective approach to derive robust EFP estimates from gross primary productivity ( GPP ) obtained from eddy covariance flux measurements. Second, we investigate the impact of synchronizing EFP s and plant functional traits in time and space to evaluate their relationships, and the extent to which we can benefit from global plant trait databases to explain the variability of ecosystem photosynthetic capacity. Finally, we identify a set of plant functional traits controlling ecosystem photosynthetic capacity at selected sites. Suitable estimates of the ecosystem photosynthetic capacity can be derived from light response curve of GPP responding to radiation (photosynthetically active radiation or absorbed photosynthetically active radiation). Although the effect of climate is minimized in these calculations, the estimates indicate substantial interannual variation of the photosynthetic capacity, even after removing site‐years with confounding factors like disturbance such as fire events. The relationships between foliar nitrogen concentration and ecosystem photosynthetic capacity are tighter when both of the measurements are synchronized in space and time. When using multiple plant traits simultaneously as predictors for ecosystem photosynthetic capacity variation, the combination of leaf carbon to nitrogen ratio with leaf phosphorus content explains the variance of ecosystem photosynthetic capacity best (adjusted R 2 = 0.55). Overall, this study provides an objective approach to identify links between leaf level traits and canopy level processes and highlights the relevance of the dynamic nature of ecosystems. Synchronizing measurements of eddy covariance fluxes and plant traits in time and space is shown to be highly relevant to better understand the importance of intra‐ and interspecific trait variation on ecosystem functioning.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Do we have globally representative data to understand soil processes?

Understanding and modeling soils and soil organic matter (SOM) are central to a variety of human needs, from food production to ecosystem management. Soil data have been collected for over a century, but the global spatial and process representativeness of soil data remains unclear. We assessed the representativeness of currently available soil data that could be used to understand a variety of SOM processes. We used 16 open-source soil databases and data from over 281,000 unique locations globally, categorizing the databases into three main data types necessary to understand SOM processes: soil carbon stocks and fluxes, mechanistic drivers of these stocks and fluxes, and soil carbon gain or loss potential. We found that stock and driver data have extensive global coverage. However, data on soil carbon gain or loss potential, particularly data describing change in soils over time such as time series data, are severely limited in their global coverage. We conclude that while significant strides have been made in measuring soil carbon stocks and fluxes, and their drivers, we are limited in global data related to changes in soils over time. Our recommendations for soil data generators are to ensure precise metadata reporting and prioritizing sampling in underrepresented areas like tropical, arctic, mountainous, wetland and arid regions. We also encourage designing revisit schemes that explicitly support change detection and reporting multi-modal datasets that can aid in model development. Targeted measurement of low coverage soil data types and regions is necessary for a range of applications including current and future biogeochemical predictions, and their management and policy implications.

carbon fluxes↗

Evolving landscape of low-energy nuclear physics publications

Evolution of low-energy nuclear physics publications over the last 120 years has been analyzed using nuclear physics databases. An extensive study of Nuclear Science References, Experimental Nuclear Reaction Data (EXFOR), and Evaluated Nuclear Structure Data File (ENSDF) contents provides a unique picture of refereed and non-refereed nuclear physics references. Significant fractional contributions of non-refereed reports, private communications and conference proceedings in EXFOR and ENSDF databases in the 1970’s reflect extensive experimental campaigns and an insufficient number of research journals. This trend has been reversed in recent years because the number of measurements is much lower, while number of journals is higher. In addition, nuclear physics results are mainly published in a limited number of journals, such as Physical Review C and Nuclear Physics A. In the present work, historic publication trends and averages have been extracted and analyzed using nuclear data mining techniques. Lastly, the results of this study and implications are discussed and conclusions presented.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

A centralized resource for bacterial–fungal interactions research

Research on bacterial-fungal interactions (BFIs) has revealed that fungi and bacteria frequently interact with one another within diverse ecosystems and microbiomes. Assessing the current state of knowledge within the field of BFI research, particularly with respect to what interactions between bacteria and fungi have been previously described, is very challenging and time consuming. This is largely due to a lack of any centralized resource, with reports of BFIs being spread across publications in numerous journals using non-standardized text to describe the relationships. To address this issue, we have developed the BFI Research Portal, a publicly accessible database of previously reported interactions between bacterial and fungal taxa to serve as a centralized resource for the field. Users can query bacterial or fungal taxa to see what members from the other kingdom have been observed as interaction partners. Search results are accompanied by interactive and intuitive visual outputs, and the database is a dynamic resource that will be updated as new BFIs are reported.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

An Implementation of ICME in Materials Information Exchanging Interfaces

The Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) approach provides a new paradigm for improving the performance of existing materials or discovering and developing new materials. It focuses on developing effective connections between isolated engineering fields, to bring quantitative processing-structure-property relationships and abundant validated data that populate the knowledge base for accelerating the research of new materials while reducing the cost of development. The data exchanging interfaces play a key role in building such ICME connections among different materials models, simulation tools and individual organizations. With implementations of information exchanging interface between different materials database, and interface between database and applications, this paper concludes that in building effective ICME applications, 1) standards-compliant interface can improve the exchange efficiency; 2) popular web service enables automated online materials data transfer; 3) customized data interoperation scripts can provide flexibility and productivity.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Applying U.S. metal fuel experience to new fuel designs for fast reactors

With the increasing interest in small modular reactors or microreactors, developers are working to design and submit licensing approval requests of U–10Zr-fueled fast reactors. The developers and their proponents cite prior metal fuel experience (worldwide, but U.S. experience in particular for many developers) as the motivation and justification for their reactor concepts. The experience with metal fuel deployment in sodium-cooled fast reactors as well as the underlying irradiation testing database, provide a suitable basis for analytically justifying the use of metal fuel in new reactors. The evolution of metal fuel design and capability illustrates the importance of key fuel design parameters to consider in new applications of the prior experience: fuel smeared density, plenum-to-fuel volume ratio, the ratio of cladding radius to thickness, fuel composition, and cladding and duct materials. In-service operating and deployment conditions to be considered include fuel linear heat generation rate, fuel temperature, cladding temperature, peak burnup and peak fast fluence. Fuel designs and in-service conditions that are bounded by the database and experience are most easily addressed, but deviations from those previous parameters and conditions can be addressed by considering impacts on previously established behavior and applying other mitigating conservatisms, as appropriate. Here, the authors recommend any new deployment proceed with fuel surveillance and monitoring to mitigate risk, application of conservative measures to address uncertainties, and a fuel qualification program that addresses a range of in-service operating conditions with production fuel. The work reported should be of interest to students and regulators unfamiliar with metal fuel in fast reactors.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

A Proxy Method to Bridge LCA Data Gaps Using Automated Material Classification and Probabilistic Under-Specification

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) are essential for understanding the environmental impacts of material production. However, gaps in life cycle inventory (LCI) data for material and chemical inputs present a key challenge for LCA practitioners, especially in the early design stages. Strategies for filling in these gaps require additional time and expertise, which can hinder the LCA’s completion. This study combined automatic material classification and probabilistic under-specification to create a time-efficient method to fill material LCI data gaps. To illustrate the proposed method, proxy environmental impact distributions were generated using publicly available material LCI data classified into the ChemOnt chemical taxonomy using the open-source chemical classification software ClassyFire. Input materials with data gaps were then classified into the same taxonomy, where proxy environmental impact values could be selected from the available distributions to quickly fill in any data gaps. Although these methods were applied to classify material production processes available in the Federal LCA Commons and Ecoinvent databases, they can be applied to any LCA database. This study shows that classifying materials by their chemical structure produces taxonomies with increased granularity relative to industrial classification, improving the ability of under-specified proxy data to be used for differentiating the environmental impacts of competing designs.

biological databases↗

Do Practical Standard Coupled Cluster Calculations Agree Better than Kohn–Sham Calculations with Currently Available Functionals When Compared to the Best Available Experimental Data for Dissociation Energies of Bonds to 3d Transition Metals?

Coupled-cluster (CC) methods have been extensively used as the high-level approach in quantum electronic structure theory to predict various properties of molecules when experimental results are unavailable. It is often assumed that CC methods, if they include at least up to connected-triple-excitation quasiperturbative corrections to a full treatment of single and double excitations (in particular, CCSD(T)), and a very large basis set, are more accurate than Kohn–Sham (KS) density functional theory (DFT). In the present work, we tested and compared the performance of standard CC and KS methods on bond energy calculations of 20 3d transition metal-containing diatomic molecules against the most reliable experimental data available, as collected in a database called 3dMLBE20. It is found that, although the CCSD(T) and higher levels CC methods have mean unsigned deviations from experiment that are smaller than most exchange-correlation functionals for metal–ligand bond energies of transition metals, the improvement is less than one standard deviation of the mean unsigned deviation. Furthermore, on average, almost half of the 42 exchange-correlation functionals that we tested are closer to experiment than CCSD(T) with the same extended basis set for the same molecule. The results show that, when both relativistic and core–valence correlation effects are considered, even the very high-level (expensive) CC method with single, double, triple, and perturbative quadruple cluster operators, namely, CCSDT(2)Q, averaged over 20 bond energies, gives a mean unsigned deviation (MUD(20) = 4.7 kcal/mol when one correlates only valence, 3p, and 3s electrons of transition metals and only valence electrons of ligands, or 4.6 kcal/mol when one correlates all core electrons except for 1s shells of transition metals, S, and Cl); and that is similar to some good xc functionals (e.g., B97-1 (MUD(20) = 4.5 kcal/mol) and PW6B95 (MUD(20) = 4.9 kcal/mol)) when the same basis set is used. We found that, for both coupled cluster calculations and KS calculations, the T1 diagnostics correlate the errors better than either the M diagnostics or the B1 DFT-based diagnostics. The potential use of practical standard CC methods as a benchmark theory is further confounded by the finding that CC and DFT methods usually have different signs of the error. We conclude that the available experimental data do not provide a justification for using conventional single-reference CC theory calculations to validate or test xc functionals for systems involving 3d transition metals.

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory↗

Toward Fast and Reliable Potential Energy Surfaces for Metallic Pt Clusters by Hierarchical Delta Neural Networks

Data-driven machine learning force fields (MLF) are more and more popular in atomistic simulations, and exploit machine learning methods to predict energies and forces for unknown structures based on the knowledge learned from an existing reference database. The latter usually comes from density functional theory calculations. One main drawback of MLFs is that physical laws are not incorporated in the machine learning models and instead, MLFs are designed to be very flexible to simulate complex quantum chemistry potential energy surface (PES). In general, MLFs have poor transferability, and hence a very large trainset is required to span all the target feature space to get a reliable MLF. This procedure becomes more troublesome when the PES is complicated, with a large number of degrees of freedom, in which building a large database is inevitable and very expensive, especially when accurate but costly exchange-correlation functionals have to be used. In this manuscript, we exploit a high dimensional neural network potential (HDNNP) on Pt clusters of size 6 to 20 as one example. Furthermore, our standard level of energy calculation is DFT GGA (PBE) using a plane wave basis set. We introduce an approximate but fast level with the PBE functional and a minimal atomic orbital basis set, then a more accurate but expensive level, using a hybrid functional or non-local vdw functional and a plane wave basis set, is reliably predicted by learning the difference with HDNNP. Findings show that such a differential approach (named ΔHDNNP) can deliver very accurate predictions (error < 10 meV/atom) in reference to converged basis set energies as well as more accurate but expensive xc functional. The overall speedup can be as large as 900 for 20 atom Pt cluster. More importantly, ΔHDNNP shows much better transferability due to the intrinsic smoothness of delta potential energy surface, and accordingly one can use much smaller trainset data to obtain better accuracy than the conventional HDNNP. A multi-layer ΔHDNNP is thus proposed to obtain very accurate predictions versus expensive non-local vdW functional calculations in which the required trainset is further reduced. The approach can be easily generalized to any other machine learning methods and opens a path to study the structure and dynamics of Pt clusters and nanoparticles.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Accurate Thermochemistry of Complex Lignin Structures via Density Functional Theory, Group Additivity, and Machine Learning

A molecular-level understanding of lignin structures and bond dissociation energies could facilitate depolymerization technologies. Still, this information is currently limited due to the lack of databases and the simplification of surrogate models. Here, substitution effects on seven common linkages in lignin polymers are systematically investigated. An automated reaction network generator is employed to create a database of structures. A new group additivity (GA) model based on principal component analysis (PCA) descriptors is introduced and trained on gas-phase density functional theory data of 4100 species at the M06-2X/6-311++G(d,p) level. Hydrogen bonds, local steric, and nonaromatic ring contributions are also incorporated. Lastly, we improve the accuracy of the group additivity model to reach the G4 theory by computing a data set of 770 species at this level and using a data fusion approach.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Tests of Exchange-Correlation Functional Approximations Against Reliable Experimental Data for Average Bond Energies of 3d Transition Metal Compounds

One of the greatest challenges for the theoretical study of transition-metal-containing compounds is the treatment of intrinsically multi-configurational atoms and molecules, which require a multireference (MR) treatment in wave function theory. The accuracy of density functional theory for this kind of system is still being explored. Here, we continue that exploration by presenting the predictions of 42 exchange-correlation (xc) functionals of 11 types [local spin density approximation (LSDA), generalized gradient approximation (GGA), nonseparable gradient approximation (NGA), global-hybrid GGA, meta-GGA, meta-NGA, global-hybrid meta-GGA, range-separated hybrid GGA, range-separated hybrid meta-GGA, range-separated hybrid meta-NGA, and DFT augmented with molecular mechanics damped dispersion (DFT-D)]. DFT-D is tested both for Grimme’s DFT-D3(BJ) model with Becke-Johnson damping and for ωB97X-D, which has the empirical atom-atom dispersion parametrized by Chai and Head-Gordon. The Hartree-Fock (HF) method has also been included because it can be viewed as a functional with 100% HF exchange and no correlation. These methods are tested against a database including 70 first-transition-row (3d) transition metal-containing molecules (19 single-reference molecules and 51 MR molecules), all of which have estimated experimental uncertainties equal to or less than 2.0 kcal/mol in the heat of formation. We analyze the accuracy in terms of the atomization energy per bond instead of the enthalpy of formation of the molecule because it allows us to test electronic energies without the possibility of cancellation of errors in electronic energies with errors in vibrational energies. All the density functional and HF wave functions have been optimized to a stable solution, in which the spatial symmetry is allowed to be broken to minimize the energy to a stable solution. We find that Ï„-HCTHhyb has the smallest mean unsigned error (MUE) in average bond energy, in particular 2.5 kcal/mol, for the full set of 70 molecules, and it also gives the smallest MUE for MR systems. For single-reference systems, MPW1B95 has the best performance, with an MUE of 1.6 kcal/mol. Among local functionals, which are the least expensive, the best performance (MUE = 3.9 kcal/mol) for the total database is achieved by OreLYP, OLYP, M06-L, and τ-HCTH. It is observed that adding HF exchange does not guarantee better accuracy for GGAs or for the NGA, but inclusion of the kinetic energy densities can benefit the GGAs and NGA calculations. The metal hydrides and metal oxides are demonstrated to be most difficult bond types to predict, and CrO 3 , FeH, CrO, VH and MnS are found to be the most difficult molecules to predict. The middle transition metals (V, Cr, and Mn) lead to larger errors on average than either the early or late transition metals.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Neutral Loss Mass Spectral Data Enhances Molecular Similarity Analysis in $\mathrm{METLIN}$

We report Neutral loss (NL) spectral data presents a mirror of MS 2 data and is a valuable yet largely untapped resource for molecular discovery and similarity analysis. Tandem mass spectrometry (MS 2 ) data is effective for the identification of known molecules and the putative identification of novel, previously uncharacterized molecules (unknowns). Yet, MS 2 data alone is limited in characterizing structurally related molecules. To facilitate unknown identification and complement the METLIN-MS 2 fragment ion database for characterizing structurally related molecules, we have created a MS 2 to NL converter as a part of the METLIN platform. The converter has been used to transform METLIN’s MS 2 data into a neutral loss database (METLIN-NL) on over 860 000 individual molecular standards. The platform includes both the MS 2 to NL converter and a graphical user interface enabling comparative analyses between MS 2 and NL data. Examples of NL spectral data are shown with oxylipin analogues and two structurally related statin molecules to demonstrate NL spectra and their ability to help characterize structural similarity. Mirroring MS 2 data to generate NL spectral data offers a unique dimension for chemical and metabolite structure characterization.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗