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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 1,729 records · Page 96
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

SDN-Based Smart Cyber Switching (SCS) for Cyber Restoration of a Digital Substation

In recent years, critical infrastructure and power grids have increasingly been targets of cyber-attacks, causing widespread and extended blackouts. Digital substations are particularly vulnerable to such cyber incursions, jeopardizing grid stability. This paper addresses these risks by proposing a cybersecurity framework that leverages software-defined networking (SDN) to bolster the resilience of substations based on the IEC- 61850 standard. The research introduces a strategy involving smart cyber switching (SCS) for mitigation and concurrent intelligent electronic device (CIED) for restoration, ensuring ongoing operational integrity and cybersecurity within a substation. The SCS framework improves the physical network’s behavior (i.e., leveraging commercial SDN capabilities) by incorporating an adaptive port controller (APC) module for dynamic port management and an intrusion detection system (IDS) to detect and counteract malicious IEC-61850-based sampled value (SV) and generic object-oriented system event (GOOSE) messages within the substation’s communication network. The framework’s effectiveness is validated through comprehensive simulations and a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed, demonstrating its ability to sustain substation operations during cyber-attacks and significantly improve the overall resilience of the power grid.

Liu, Chen-Ching (ORCID:0000000289417958)↗
DOE OSTI2026

Entanglement Throughput Measurements and Capacity Estimates for Aerial-Inground Fiber

The throughput of entangled qubit pairs per second (eqps) is a basic performance metric of quantum networks that provide the entanglement distribution capability. Over fiber connections, it is measured using specialized instruments, including photonic entanglement sources and single-photon detectors. Extensive theory has been developed to estimate the capacity of a generic quantum channel, which in turn is applied to estimate the maximum achievable eqps over a fiber connection. However, there is a gap in relating these two performance metrics, in part due to their disparate nature, namely, mathematical formulae of the channel capacity and specialized instrumentation for eqps measurements. We describe eqps measurements collected over testbed connections composed of aerial and inground fiber of lengths up to 45 km. We estimate the normalized capacity using the transmissivity parameter derived from single photon detector measurements. These estimates are then converted to capacity bounds on the connection's eqps using the source eqps rate derived from co-located detector measurements. The results indicate a consistency between eqps measurements and their capacity estimates, and provide insights into relating the parameters of analytic capacity estimates to physical measurements.

Rao, Nageswara [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000234085941)↗
DOE OSTI2019

Enabling Secure Grid Information Sharing through Hash Calendar-based Blockchain Infrastructures

The power grid is becoming increasingly interconnected, as information from grid operations must be accessible to an array of engineers, grid regulators, and market operators. However, there remain challenges ensuring the appropriate integrity and authenticity of the grid information. While traditional cryptographic protocols, like public key infrastructure, provide security for in-transit communication, they come with key exchanges and cost to get public key certificates from a centralized authority. To address these challenges, this paper demonstrates how a hash calendar-based blockchain can be used to provide improved security for communication with the use of distributed ledgers. It demonstrates the security requirements and threats to this communication, and then provides a theoretic definition of the process. Furthermore, it introduces a use-case of the proposed process within the WSU Smart City Testbed DMS with the Guardtime’s Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) architecture.

Kaur, Kudrat J.↗
DOE OSTI2021

On the Limits of EM Based Detection of Control Logic Injection Attacks In Noisy Environments

The difficulty in applying traditional security mechanisms in Industrial Control System (ICS) environments makes a large portion of these mission-critical assets vulnerable to cyber attacks. Therefore, there is a dire need for the development of novel security mechanisms specifically designed to protect such critical systems. Recently a lot of attention has been given to mechanisms that exploit the EM emanations of devices for defense purposes. Such practices may lead to the development of robust external and non-intrusive anomaly detection systems. Nevertheless, the majority of current work in the area neglects to consider the implications of real-life environments, particularly environmental noise. In this work, we explore the limits of EM-based anomaly detection towards identifying injection attacks in control logic software in noisy environments. Our study conducted upon both synthetically generated and real signals identified that indeed environmental noise might significantly degrade the accuracy of the anomaly detection process. Experiments done upon synthetic data indicated that assuming that signals are captured with high sampling rates, even minor code injections can be detected with above-90% accuracy in noisy environments where SNR is up to -2dB. This is true even if naive detection methods are considered. Moreover, experiments done using a real-life testbed attest that even single-instruction injections can be detected with near-perfect accuracy in relatively clean environments. Finally, noise-elimination techniques can drastically improve the reliability of the detection mechanism even in noisy environments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Entanglement Capacity Estimates and Throughput Measurements of Quantum Channels

The throughput is an important performance metric of entangled qubit distribution quantum networks, and may be characterized by the number of distributed entangled qubit pairs per second (ebps). It is measured over physical quantum network connections using specialized instruments, including photonic entanglement sources and single photon detectors. Extensive theory has been developed to estimate the entangled qubit capacity of quantum channels using abstractions of physical connections. These two quantities both characterize the throughput performance but in different ways, and typically have been hard to relate to each other in concrete terms, in part due to the lack of precise measurements with matching analytical models and derivations. We describe measurements on a physical testbed with fiber connections of lengths 0-75 kilometers. We obtain the normalized analytic capacity estimates using the transmissivity approximations derived using single photon coincidence measurements, and convert them to bounds on throughput (measured in ebps) using a multiplier derived from co-located detector measurements. The results indicate consistent throughput measurements upper-bounded by their analytical capacity estimates across all connections. We show that previous capacity estimates using light measurements are below ebps measurements for some connections, due to the inclusion of non-representative decrease of light levels outside C-band with distance.

Rao, Nageswara↗
DOE OSTI2025

Scalable Multi-Facility Workflows for Artificial Intelligence Applications in Climate Research

Earth observation satellites and earth system models are sources of vast, multi-modal datasets that are invaluable for advancing climate and environmental research. However, their scale and complexity pose significant challenges for processing and analysis. In this paper we discuss our experiences in developing and using a scientific research application using an automated multi-facility workflow that orchestrates data collection, preprocessing, artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing, and data movement across diverse computational resources, leveraging the Advanced Computing Ecosystem Testbed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). We demonstrate that our workflow can be seamlessly integrated and orchestrated across research facilities managed by different federal agencies, thus allowing users to extract new scientific insights from climate datasets. The experimental results indicate that the multi-facility workflow significantly reduces processing time, enhances scalability, and maintains high efficiency across varying workloads. Notably, our workflow processes 12,000 high-resolution satellite images in just 44 seconds using 80 workers distributed across 10 nodes on the OLCF systems. Such high throughput is essential for dynamic tokenization and sharding of petascale satellite data for distributed AI model training and inferencing at scale across thousands of GPUs.

Kurihana, Takuya [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000156698565)↗
DOE OSTI2022

Analyzing Data Privacy for Edge Systems

Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based streaming applications are all around us. Currently, we are transitioning from IoT processing being performed on the cloud to the edge. While moving to the edge provides significant networking efficiency benefits, IoT edge computing creates significant data privacy concerns. We propose a methodology that can successfully privacy protect the continual data streams generated by sensors on the edge device. We implement local differential privacy on streaming data and incorporate Bayesian inference and Gaussian process to evaluate the privacy policy. We demonstrate our methodology on a real-world smart meter testbed and identify the optimal privacy protection settings.

Kotevska, Olivera↗
DOE OSTI2021

Cyber-Power Co-Simulation for End-to-End Synchrophasor Network Analysis and Applications

The resiliency, reliability and security of the next generation cyber-power smart grid depend upon efficiently leveraging advanced communication and computing technologies. Also, developing real-time data-driven applications is critical to enable wide-area monitoring and control of the cyber-power grid given high-resolution data from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). North American Synchrophasor Initiative Network (NASPlnet) provides guidance for PMU data exchanges. With the advancement in networking and grid operation, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of different data flow architectures suggested by NASPInet and analyze the impact on applications. Therefore, we need a cyber-power co-simulation framework that supports very large-scale co-simulation capable of running in parallel, high-performance computing platforms and capturing real-life network behavior. This work presents an end-to-end automated and user-driven cyber-power co-simulation using NS3 to model communication networks, GridPACK to model the power grid, and HELICS as a co-simulation engine. Comparative analysis of latency in synchrophasor networks and a performance evaluation of a power system stabilizer application utilizing PMU data in an IEEE 39 bus test system is presented using this cosimulation testbed.

Mustafa, Hussain M.↗
DOE OSTI2022

Emulation Framework for Distributed Large-Scale Systems Integration

Recent trends in systems engineering include integration of very large-scale systems, which entails significant challenges when they are geographically dispersed. In these scenarios, intelligent integration of distributed large-scale systems requires significant coordination among hardware elements as well as all software components. The approach of integrated systems (both computing platform and experimental equipment) for end-to-end orchestration is called federation. Virtual frameworks can aid in the testing, assessment, and implementation of a functional system of interconnected resources. We present an emulation framework that replicates the software environments of multi-site federations of computing systems and instruments. Our emulation framework allows systems engineers to reduce developmentcost and avoid disruptions to production infrastructure. Our framework was effectively used to develop and test software modules for various tasks including container orchestration and instrument access. For performance assessment, however, the emulated framework is severely limited in providing accurate network and IO measurements at 10 Gbps and higher data rates. The data transfer performance profiles estimated using these emulated measurements are usually inaccurate for high bandwidth and high latency connections, since emulation does not accurately reflect the critical network transport dynamics.We utilize measurements from a physical testbed with hardware network emulators to obtain data transfer profiles that closely match the expected profiles for the emulated federations. We show the effectiveness of our approach by an illustrative example of integrated (federated) multi-site ultra large-scale systems that are connected via high speed wide area networks.

Imam, Neena↗
DOE OSTI2024

Synchrophasor Data Anomaly Detection on Grid Edge by 5G Communication and Adjacent Compute

The fifth-generation mobile communication (5G) technology offers the opportunities to enhance the grid real-time monitoring. The 5G-enabled phasor measurement units (PMUs) features flexible positioning and cost-effective long-term maintenance, without constraints of fixing wire. This paper is the first to demonstrate the applicability of 5G in PMU communication, and the experiment was carried out at Verizon non-standalone testbed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Advanced Wireless Communication lab. The performance of 5G-enabled PMU communication setup is reviewed and discussed in this paper, and the paper presents a real-time dynamic linear model (DML) based synchrophasor data anomaly detection application. Last but not least, the practicability of implementing 5G for wide-area protection strategies is explored and discussed by analyzing the experimental results.

5G, Synchrophasor data, machine learning, anomaly ↗
DOE OSTI2024

Nanosecond Transient Validation of Surge Arrester Models to Predict Electromagnetic Pulse Response

The impact of high-altitude electromagnetic pulse events on the electric grid is not fully understood, and validated modeling of mitigations, such as lightning surge arresters (LSAs) is necessary to predict the propagation of very fast transients on the grid. Experimental validation of high frequency models for surge arresters is an active area of research. Further, this article serves to experimentally validate a previously defined ZnO LSA model using four metal-oxide varistor pucks and nanosecond scale pulses to measure voltage and current responses. The SPICE circuit models of the pucks showed good predictability when compared to the measured arrester response when accounting for a testbed inductance of approximately 100 nH. Additionally, the comparatively high capacitance of low-profile arresters show a favorable response to high-speed transients that indicates the potential for effective electromagnetic pulse mitigation with future materials design.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2026

Curation and Dissemination of Complex Multi-Modal Datasets for Radiation Detection, Localization, and Tracking

The PANDAWN sensor network in Chicago, IL, is a state-of-the-art testbed for networked, multi-modal sensing. It integrates AI/data science methods into its operation, from data acquisition to automated data labeling and curation workflows. The curation and dissemination of diverse multi-modal datasets will enable the development of new radiological/nuclear (R/N) detection, localization, and tracking algorithms and methods relevant across the nonproliferation mission space. This article first introduces the PANDAWN sensor network and the features that make it stand out from previous multi-modal data acquisition efforts. We then review the various data streams acquired on the PANDAWN nodes and present the implementation of an automated data curation pipeline that includes the labeling of radiation and contextual data streams. Here, we finally provide a short overview of different studies that leveraged the curated datasets.

Data curation↗
DOE OSTI2020

Customizable Scale-Out Key-Value Stores

Enterprise KV stores are often not well suited for HPC applications, and thus cumbersome end-to-end KV design customization is required to meet the needs of modern HPC applications. To this end, in this article we present bespoKV, an adaptive, extensible, and scale-out KV store framework. bespoKV decouples the KV store design into the control plane for distributed management and the data plane for local data store. For the control plane, bespoKVprovides pre-built modules, called controlets, supporting common distributed functionalities (e.g., replication, consistency, and topology) and their various combinations. This decoupling allows bespoKV to take a user-provided single-server KV store, called a datalet, and transparently enables a scalable and fault-tolerant distributed KV store service. The resulting distributed stores are also adaptive to consistency or topology requirement changes and can be easily extended for new types of services. Such specializations enable innovative uses of KV stores in HPC applications, especially for emerging applications that utilize KV-friendly workloads. We evaluate bespoKV in a local testbed as well as in a public cloud settings. Experiments show that bespoKV-enabled distributed KV stores scale horizontally to a large number of nodes, and performs comparably and sometimes 1.2× to 2.6× better than the state-of-the-art systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Compact, Single Stage, >1 kV Medium-Voltage Line Impedance Stabilization Network

This paper presents the design of a single-phase, single-stage line impedance stabilization network (LISN) for medium-voltage (MV) applications. More than 1 kV rated widebandgap (WBG) power semiconductor switches are increasingly utilized in new, emerging power electronics energy systems to improve power density and efficiency. However, due to inherently fast-switching speeds, WBG switch modules emit considerable electromagnetic interference (EMI) (e.g., common mode (CM) or differential mode (DM)). State-of-the-art offers standardized LISN solutions to validate and certify the new energy system for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). However, most are for low voltage applications (i.e., < 1 kV). MV LISNs (i.e., > 1 kV) are rare until recently and literature does not provide sufficient guidelines for designing and characterizing such devices. It has been a critical challenge for many scientists and engineers to reliably certify the emerging MV energy systems (e.g., electric ships and aircraft). This paper addresses such a technology gap. Specifically, a CISPR 16-1-2 compliant 50Ω/50μH LISN with 1.5kV, 75A and 30MHz measurement capability has been proposed. Detailed performance study versus non-linear parasitic parameters variations in MV inductors and capacitors have been done. Based on new understandings, novel techniques to intuitively mitigate unwanted parasitic have been proposed to develop the proposed LISN successfully. Thorough characterization of important LISN parameters are presented and factors influencing them are analyzed. A rigorous analysis, experimental tests, and in-depth comparisons over state-of-the-art have been made to validate the effectiveness. This is done through the state-of-the-art 300kVA MV EMI testbed.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2026

AMAROK: A Radio Frequency Development Platform for High-Power, Full-Scale Positive Ion Sources for DIII-D Neutral Beam Injectors

Next-generation neutral beam injection (NBI) systems demand RF ion sources capable of efficiently coupling >120 kW at 2–4-MHz frequencies, yet existing designs face voltage standoff and impedance-matching challenges. To address this, the advanced multicoil antenna for RF operations at kilowatts (AMAROK) was developed as a high-power RF inductively coupled plasma (ICP) source delivering up to 200 kW in the 2–4-MHz range via four phase-controlled generators for flexible power sharing. Two antenna designs—a single-strap multiturn (MT) and a multistrap single-turn (ST) design—were evaluated to optimize resonance, impedance matching, and power coupling across plasma loads. Here, a semi-analytical self-resonant frequency (SRF) model, validated experimentally, predicts resonance trends for arbitrary turn counts and tubing diameters, enabling rapid antenna optimization. Strap-to-strap mutual inductance in the ST configuration showed strong spatial dependence, guiding generator operation and total load inductance. These insights informed a custom π -topology matching network, achieving stable impedance matching over a wide range of plasma-driven loads. Collectively, these results position AMAROK as a versatile testbed for advancing high-power RF source technology in fusion NBI applications.

DIII-D↗
DOE OSTI2026

Integrated Neutronics Modeling for Inertial Fusion Energy Systems: Development and Application to LD-FIRST

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is proposing a new Laser Driven Fusion Integration Research and Science Test Facility (LD-FIRST) with the goal of providing an experimental testbed for future Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) systems. However, IFE systems require detailed and accurate multiphysics modeling to quantify material damage, thermal loading, and tritium breeding within complex chamber environments. This article presents the first step in an integrated multiphysics framework that couples meshed CAD-based geometry within Monte Carlo neutronic simulations to enable high-fidelity analysis of IFE chamber concepts, with future coupling to external codes. The neutronics workflow utilizes OpenMC and its third-party capability to use CAD-based geometries through DAGMC and tally on unstructured meshes with Libmesh to evaluate neutron transport behavior, geometric fidelity, and material performance under reactor-relevant conditions. The use of tailored tallies on unstructured meshes in this framework allows direct transfer without interpolating to CFD simulation tools. Two IFE chambers were evaluated, both conceived by LLNL: HYLIFE-II and Laser IFE (LIFE). This work produced high-fidelity conformal surface and volumetric meshes of the HYLIFE-II and LIFE chambers with mapped spatial insight into material damage, thermal loading, and tritium breeding. The HYLIFE-II model was built utilizing available resources and used as a test case to verify that the neutronics framework can handle complex geometries. The LIFE chamber CAD was provided by LLNL and was the main focus of this work. This work analyzes multiple ternary alloy breeding materials for the LIFE chamber, across different 6 Li enrichments to produce data relevant to the LD-FIRST project. This work also investigates the level of model fidelity for the LIFE chamber, and results show that inclusion of detailed first wall and coolant structures increased the predicted tritium breeding ratio (TBR) by ~30%, highlighting the sensitivity of tritium breeding and the need for a high-fidelity simulation framework for IFE chambers. These developments provide a scalable toolset for the design and optimization of next-generation IFE chambers, forming a solid foundation for future coupled multiphysics analysis.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2026

Deploying MARTe2 and MDSplus for Scalable Real-Time Control Systems: A Proof-of-Concept for the SMART Tokamak

The SMART tokamak is a spherical tokamak with flexible shaping that will need a modular and high-performance real-time control system. This work presents the implementation and validation of the MARTe2 framework at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) as a testbed for supporting SMART (University of Seville, Spain). The system integrates MARTe2, MDSplus for data archiving, and user datagram protocol (UDP)-based communication with both synthetic and physical devices. A deterministic control loop was developed using custom control algorithms, showing the system’s ability to operate under strict real-time constraints. The resulting framework is scalable, maintainable, and adaptable to experimental tokamaks like SMART.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗