Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “machine learning and data science”

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 1,783 records · Page 99

Diffractive optical computing in free space

Abstract Structured optical materials create new computing paradigms using photons, with transformative impact on various fields, including machine learning, computer vision, imaging, telecommunications, and sensing. This Perspective sheds light on the potential of free-space optical systems based on engineered surfaces for advancing optical computing. Manipulating light in unprecedented ways, emerging structured surfaces enable all-optical implementation of various mathematical functions and machine learning tasks. Diffractive networks, in particular, bring deep-learning principles into the design and operation of free-space optical systems to create new functionalities. Metasurfaces consisting of deeply subwavelength units are achieving exotic optical responses that provide independent control over different properties of light and can bring major advances in computational throughput and data-transfer bandwidth of free-space optical processors. Unlike integrated photonics-based optoelectronic systems that demand preprocessed inputs, free-space optical processors have direct access to all the optical degrees of freedom that carry information about an input scene/object without needing digital recovery or preprocessing of information. To realize the full potential of free-space optical computing architectures, diffractive surfaces and metasurfaces need to advance symbiotically and co-evolve in their designs, 3D fabrication/integration, cascadability, and computing accuracy to serve the needs of next-generation machine vision, computational imaging, mathematical computing, and telecommunication technologies.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

KG-Hub—building and exchanging biological knowledge graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are a powerful approach for integrating heterogeneous data and making inferences in biology and many other domains, but a coherent solution for constructing, exchanging, and facilitating the downstream use of KGs is lacking. Here we present KG-Hub, a platform that enables standardized construction, exchange, and reuse of KGs. Features include a simple, modular extract–transform–load pattern for producing graphs compliant with Biolink Model (a high-level data model for standardizing biological data), easy integration of any OBO (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies) ontology, cached downloads of upstream data sources, versioned and automatically updated builds with stable URLs, web-browsable storage of KG artifacts on cloud infrastructure, and easy reuse of transformed subgraphs across projects. Current KG-Hub projects span use cases including COVID-19 research, drug repurposing, microbial–environmental interactions, and rare disease research. KG-Hub is equipped with tooling to easily analyze and manipulate KGs. KG-Hub is also tightly integrated with graph machine learning (ML) tools which allow automated graph ML, including node embeddings and training of models for link prediction and node classification.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Analytics-at-scale of Sensor Data for Digital Monitoring in Nuclear Plants (4th Annual Report)

Nuclear plant sites collect and store large volumes of data collected from various equipment and systems. These datasets typically include plant process parameters, maintenance records, technical logs, online monitoring data, and equipment failure data. The collection of such data affords an opportunity to leverage data-driven machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to provide diagnostic and prognostic capabilities within the nuclear power industry to reduce operating and maintenance costs. In this way, nuclear energy can become more economically competitive with other energy sources, and premature closures can be avoided. From a maintenance standpoint, savings can be achieved by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to develop data-driven algorithms to better diagnose and predict potential faults within the system. Improved model accuracy can lead to reductions in unnecessary maintenance and more efficient planning of future maintenance, thus lowering the costs associated with parts, labor, and unnecessary planned, forced, or extended outages. From an operations perspective, cost savings can be generated by shifting from route-based monitoring to wireless technologies for online monitoring, and by transitioning from onsite- to cloud-based computing and storage services. Wireless monitoring would reduce the operator manhours required for taking routine measurements, while cloud computing services would generate cost savings by reducing the amount of hardware needing to be purchased and maintained—all while scaling to both computational and storage demands. This report summarizes this project’s effort to shift from costly, labor-intensive preventative maintenance to cheaper predictive maintenance.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

DeepShadows: Separating low surface brightness galaxies from artifacts using deep learning

Searches for low-surface-brightness galaxies (LSBGs) in galaxy surveys are plagued by the presence of a large number of artifacts (e.g., objects blended in the diffuse light from stars and galaxies, Galactic cirrus, star-forming regions in the arms of spiral galaxies, etc.) that have to be rejected through time consuming visual inspection. In future surveys, which are expected to collect hundreds of petabytes of data and detect billions of objects, such an approach will not be feasible. We investigate the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the problem of separating LSBGs from artifacts in survey images. We take advantage of the fact that we have available a large number of labeled LSBGs and artifacts from the Dark Energy Survey, that we use to train, validate, and test a CNN model. That model, which we call DeepShadows , achieves a test accuracy of 92.0%, a significant improvement relative to feature-based machine learning models. We also study the ability to use transfer learning to adapt this model to classify objects from the deeper Hyper-Suprime-Cam survey, and we show that after the model is retrained on a very small sample from the new survey, it can reach an accuracy of 87.6%. Finally, these results demonstrate that CNNs offer a very promising path in the quest to study the low-surface-brightness universe.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

The Artificial Intelligence Ontology: LLM-Assisted Construction of AI Concept Hierarchies

The Artificial Intelligence Ontology (AIO) is a systematization of artificial intelligence (AI) concepts, methodologies, and their interrelations. Developed via manual curation, with the additional assistance of large language models (LLMs), AIO aims to address the rapidly evolving landscape of AI by providing a comprehensive framework that encompasses both technical and ethical aspects of AI technologies. The primary audience for AIO includes AI researchers, developers, and educators seeking standardized terminology and concepts within the AI domain. We use the term “branches” for classes, and their subclasses, in our ontology that are subclasses of owl:Thing. AIO contains eight branches: Bias, Layer, Machine Learning Task, Mathematical Function, Model, Network, Preprocessing, and Training Strategy, each designed to support the modular composition of AI methods and facilitate a deeper understanding of deep learning architectures and ethical considerations in AI. AIO uses the Ontology Development Kit (ODK) for its creation and maintenance, with its content being more easily updated through AI-driven curation support. This approach not only ensures the ontology's relevance amidst the fast-paced advancements in AI but also significantly enhances its utility for researchers, developers, and educators by simplifying the integration of new AI concepts and methodologies. The ontology's utility is demonstrated through the annotation of AI methods data in a catalog of AI research publications and the integration into the BioPortal ontology resource, highlighting its potential for cross-disciplinary research. The AIO ontology is open source and is available on GitHub ( https://w3id.org/aio/ ) and BioPortal ( https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/AIO ).

Joachimiak, Marcin P. [Biosystems Data Science Dep↗

Using Machine Learning Algorithm to Detect Blowing Snow and Fog in Antarctica Based on Ceilometer and Surface Meteorology Systems

Blowing snow is a common weather phenomenon in Antarctica and plays an important role in the water vapor cycle and ice sheet mass balance. Although it has a significant impact on the climate of Antarctica, people do not know much about this process. Fog events are difficult to distinguish from blowing snow events using existing detection algorithms by a ceilometer. In this study, based on ceilometer, the meteorological parameters observed by surface meteorology systems are further combined to detect blowing snow and fog using the AdaBoost algorithm. The weather phenomena recorded by human observers are ‘true’. The dataset is collected from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2016 at the AWARE site. Among them, three-quarters of the data are used as the training set and the rest of the data as the testing set. The classification accuracy of the proposed algorithm for the testing set is about 94%. Compared with the Loeb method, the proposed algorithm can detect 89.12% of blowing snow events and 76.10% of fog events, while the Loeb method can only identify 64.29% of blowing snow events and 31.87% of fog events.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Graph neural networks for efficient learning of mechanical properties of polycrystals

Herein we present graph neural networks (GNNs) as an efficient and accurate machine learning approach to predict mechanical properties of polycrystalline materials. Here, a GNN was developed based on graph representation of polycrystals incorporating only fundamental features of grains including their crystallographic orientation, size, and grain neighbor connectivity information. We tested our method on modeling stiffness and yield strength of α -Ti microstructures, varying in their crystallographic texture. We find the GNN predicts both properties with high accuracy with mean relative errors of ~1% for unseen microstructures from a given set of textures and < 2% for microstructures of unseen texture, even when presented with limited training data. This accuracy is comparable to methods that require high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) microstructure data, such as 3D convolutional neural networks (3D-CNNs) and models that depend on the computation of spatial statistics. The present results show that graph-based deep learning is a promising framework for property prediction, especially considering the high cost associated with obtaining high-resolution 3D microstructure data and the general scarcity of experimental materials datasets.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Modeling of Vertical Motor-driven Pump for Simulation of a Fault Signature \\ for Condition Monitoring

As part of the ongoing effort to transition from preventive maintenance strategies to condition-based maintenance strategies in nuclear power plants, there is significant reliance on using machine learning techniques. To develop a robust machine learning model that can diagnose all the fault modes of a vertical motor-driven pump, data capturing the unique signature of each fault mode is required. In practice, it is difficult to collect or capture data that captures all the fault modes from a single plant site. So to address this situation, a computational model of a vertical motor-driven pump is developed using the multipurpose finite element software COMSOL Multiphysics. The developed model is used to generate simulated data under normal operation and is compared with the vibration data collected using vibration sensors. Once the simulation model is verified under normal operating condition, simulated data for the fault mode for which minimal or no evidence is available in historical plant process data is developed. This simulated data is used to develop fault signatures to achieve robust predictive models. This paper presents modeling details and verification of the model that can used to generate data for fault modes that are not available at a plant site for condition monitoring purpose.

46 - INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AN↗

Deep Learning for In-Situ Layer Quality Monitoring during Laser-Based Directed Energy Deposition (LB-DED) Additive Manufacturing Process

Defects are a leading issue for the rejection of parts manufactured through the Directed Energy Deposition (DED) Additive Manufacturing (AM) process. In an attempt to illuminate and advance in situ quality monitoring and control of workpieces, we present an innovative data-driven method that synchronously collects sensing data and AM process parameters with a low sampling rate during the DED process. The proposed data-driven technique determines the important influences that individual printing parameters and sensing features have on prediction at the inter-layer qualification to perform feature selection. Three Machine Learning (ML) algorithms including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are used. During post-production, a threshold is applied to detect low-density occurrences such as porosity sizes and quantities from CT scans that render individual layers acceptable or unacceptable. This information is fed to the ML models for training. Training/testing are completed offline on samples deemed “high-quality” and “low-quality”, utilizing only features recorded from the build process. CNN results show that the classification of acceptable/unacceptable layers can reach between 90% accuracy while training/testing on a “high-quality” sample and dip to 65% accuracy when trained/tested on “low-quality”/“high-quality” (respectively), indicating over-fitting but showing CNN as a promising inter-layer classifier.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Advances in geophysical forensic event monitoring

Forensic analysis of man-made, non-nuclear events (such as industrial accidents, explosion experiments and mine collapses) has become more frequent and detailed owing to advancements in geophysical monitoring. Here, in this Technical Review, we demonstrate how geophysical forensic monitoring using seismic, infrasound and hydroacoustic recordings provides insights on events in the solid earth, atmosphere and underwater. Advanced techniques, including machine-learning-based models, have been developed to detect, identify and investigate these events, providing information on location, subevents, sources and explosive yield. The increase in data availability, application of advanced methods and computation and the growth of multitechnology approaches have increased the accuracy of forensic event analysis and enabled more realistic characterization of uncertainties. For example, the 2020 Beirut explosion in Lebanon demonstrated that various seismic, acoustic and other methods could be used to estimate explosive yield (and yield uncertainties) of about 1 ktonne, providing confidence in the application of these methods to smaller events where data are available. However, forensic investigations remain largely limited to known events with identified sources. Increased access to data, sophisticated analysis methods and high-resolution earth models will improve forensic event analysis further, enabling civil and scientific applications, such as localization in the search for the lost ARA San Juan submarine.

geophysics↗

Review of multi-faceted morphologic signatures of actinide process materials for nuclear forensic science

Particle morphology is an emerging signature that has the potential to identify the processing history of unknown nuclear materials. Using readily available scanning electron microscopes (SEM), the morphology of nearly any solid material can be measured within hours. Coupled with robust image analysis and classification methods, the morphological features can be quantified and support identification of the processing history of unknown nuclear materials. The viability of this signature depends on developing databases of morphological features, coupled with a rapid data analysis and accurate classification process. With developed reference methods, datasets, and throughputs, morphological analysis can be applied within days to (i) interdicted bulk nuclear materials (gram to kilogram quantities), and (ii) trace amounts of nuclear materials detected on swipes or environmental samples. In conclusion, this review aims to develop validated and verified analytical strategies for morphological analysis relevant to nuclear forensics.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Mirostructure Characterization of Friction Consolidated Copper-Nickel using a Machine Learning Approach: Developing Process to Microstructure Associations

Friction consolidation (FC) is a solid phase processing approach where discrete material forms such as powders, chips, nuggets, etc. are densified via shear deformation. The precursors are placed in a billet container and brought in contact with a rotating tool that applying the desirable amount of normal force. Under the combined action of the rotation and normal pressure, the discrete precursor is consolidated through porosity reduction and shear deformation. FC is increasingly being studied as an attractive approach to manufacturing fully dense parts from powder forms owing to its ability to mix, alloy and consolidate difficult-to-process precursors in minimal number of process steps. Material consolidation and deformation in shear consolidation processes have been studied extensively previously for different material combinations previously. However, despite the extensive research in this area, understanding of the mechanistic processes in pore consolidation, deformation-induced mixing and material solubility during FC is still evolving. Material development using solid phase processing approaches such as FC is often performed based on research experience/education, which can be biased. Conventional analysis and simulation tools in this area tend to be successful only when material thermodynamic pathways and microstructural evolution sequences resulting from processing are clearly defined or known. They are not as effective for emerging advanced manufacturing technologies where material evolution pathways are not well established. The ability to predict optimal process parameters based on material chemistry and bulk properties is essential to accelerate materials design and processing, as are an understanding of the relevant structure-processing-property relationships. These structure-processing-property-performance relationships are at the core of materials science research. Microstructure characterization provides the link to these four core areas, often through visualizing material microstructure using imaging techniques. However, linking microstructure image data (i.e., micrographs) to variables of interest (e.g., processing parameters, material chemistry) in a reproducible, generalizable, and quantitative manner is a significant challenge. Typically, quantitatively linking image data to processing history relies on significant domain knowledge and manual or subject matter expert (SME)-heuristic based image analysis. Such an approach to image analysis has the potential to be biased, inefficient, and difficult to replicate.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

BUTTER-E - Energy Consumption Data for the BUTTER Empirical Deep Learning Dataset

The BUTTER-E - Energy Consumption Data for the BUTTER Empirical Deep Learning Dataset adds node-level energy consumption data from watt-meters to the primary sweep of the BUTTER - Empirical Deep Learning Dataset. This dataset contains energy consumption and performance data from 63,527 individual experimental runs spanning 30,582 distinct configurations: 13 datasets, 20 sizes (number of trainable parameters), 8 network "shapes", and 14 depths on both CPU and GPU hardware collected using node-level watt-meters. This dataset reveals the complex relationship between dataset size, network structure, and energy use, and highlights the impact of cache effects. BUTTER-E is intended to be joined with the BUTTER dataset (see "BUTTER - Empirical Deep Learning Dataset on OEDI" resource below) which characterizes the performance of 483k distinct fully connected neural networks but does not include energy measurements.

Array↗

Missing Wedge Completion via Unsupervised Learning with Coordinate Networks

Cryogenic electron tomography (cryoET) is a powerful tool in structural biology, enabling detailed 3D imaging of biological specimens at a resolution of nanometers. Despite its potential, cryoET faces challenges such as the missing wedge problem, which limits reconstruction quality due to incomplete data collection angles. Recently, supervised deep learning methods leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have considerably addressed this issue; however, their pretraining requirements render them susceptible to inaccuracies and artifacts, particularly when representative training data is scarce. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a proof-of-concept unsupervised learning approach using coordinate networks (CNs) that optimizes network weights directly against input projections. This eliminates the need for pretraining, reducing reconstruction runtime by 3–20× compared to supervised methods. Our in silico results show improved shape completion and reduction of missing wedge artifacts, assessed through several voxel-based image quality metrics in real space and a novel directional Fourier Shell Correlation (FSC) metric. Our study illuminates benefits and considerations of both supervised and unsupervised approaches, guiding the development of improved reconstruction strategies.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Characterization of the Sulfur-Saturated Melt Versions of the LAW ML1 Glasses

This report provides the results from the chemical analyses of the sulfur-saturated melt versions of the Low-Activity Waste Machine Learning study glasses, a series of simulated nuclear waste glasses designed and fabricated at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. These data will be used in the development, validation, and implementation of enhanced property/composition models for waste glass vitrification at Hanford. Chemical analyses were performed on a representative sample of each of the sulfur-saturated melt versions of the glasses to allow for comparisons with targeted compositions as well as the measured compositions of the quenched glasses. The relative differences between the targeted and measured concentrations of F- for one glass, K 2 O for one glass, Na 2 O, for one glass, P 2 O 5 for one glass, and ZrO 2 for several of the glasses were greater than ±10%. As expected, the measured concentrations of SO 3 in most of the glasses were higher than targeted due to the use of the sulfur saturation method in fabricating these glasses.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Hyper‐Local Temperature Prediction Using Detailed Urban Climate Informatics

The accurate modeling of urban microclimate is a challenging task given the high surface heterogeneity of urban land cover and the vertical structure of street morphology. Recent years have witnessed significant efforts in numerical modeling and data collection of the urban environment. Nonetheless, it is difficult for the physical‐based models to fully utilize the high‐resolution data under the constraints of computing resources. The advancement in machine learning (ML) techniques offers the computational strength to handle the massive volume of data. In this study, we proposed a modeling framework that uses ML approach to estimate point‐scale street‐level air temperature from the urban‐resolving meso‐scale climate model and a suite of hyper‐resolution urban geospatial data sets, including three‐dimensional urban morphology, parcel‐level land use inventory, and weather observations from a sensor network. We implemented this approach in the City of Chicago as a case study to demonstrate the capability of the framework. The proposed approach vastly improves the resolution of temperature predictions in cities, which will help the city with walkability, drivability, and heat‐related behavioral studies. Moreover, we tested the model's reliability on out‐of‐sample locations to investigate the modeling uncertainties and the application potentials to the other areas. This study aims to gain insights into next‐gen urban climate modeling and guide the observation efforts in cities to build the strength for the holistic understanding of urban microclimate dynamics.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Summary of Methodology for Mitigating Risks Associated with Licensing and Qualifying AM Nuclear Materials

The US Department of Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies (AMMT) program focuses on accelerating the development, qualification, demonstration, and deployment of advanced materials and manufacturing technologies to enable reliable and economical nuclear energy. Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is one of the most popular additive manufacturing (AM) processes for fabricating components with intrinsically complex geometries. LPBF was extensively explored for nuclear applications under the previous Transformational Challenge Reactor program. Additionally, Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed and licensed the Peregrine software and larger digital platform that couples machine learning and in situ data collection during AM to detect anomalies and any evolved defects. The digital platform will be critical to (1) the qualification of AM components for nuclear applications that link location-specific data to macroscopic properties and (2) predict final component performance. Current in situ process monitoring tools are valuable for observing the formation of stochastic flaws, but additional data are needed to predict the resulting microstructures and associated material performance. Rapid cooling rates and large thermal gradients have caused large heterogeneities in the microstructure, which cause anisotropy in mechanical performance. The AMMT program is evaluating the best approaches for addressing these heterogeneities and their effect on component performance using a combination of multiscale modeling, enhanced in situ process monitoring, and high throughput experimental testing. This report summarizes strategies for mitigating the risks associated with qualifying AM components, including developing new sensing capabilities for in situ process monitoring and characterizing melt pool solidification and residual stresses to inform multiscale modeling efforts.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Prediction of the Cu oxidation state from EELS and XAS spectra using supervised machine learning

Abstract Electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) and X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) provide detailed information about bonding, distributions and locations of atoms, and their coordination numbers and oxidation states. However, analysis of XAS/EELS data often relies on matching an unknown experimental sample to a series of simulated or experimental standard samples. This limits analysis throughput and the ability to extract quantitative information from a sample. In this work, we have trained a random forest model capable of predicting the oxidation state of copper based on its L-edge spectrum. Our model attains an R 2 score of 0.85 and a root mean square error of 0.24 on simulated data. It has also successfully predicted experimental L-edge EELS spectra taken in this work and XAS spectra extracted from the literature. We further demonstrate the utility of this model by predicting simulated and experimental spectra of mixed valence samples generated by this work. This model can be integrated into a real-time EELS/XAS analysis pipeline on mixtures of copper-containing materials of unknown composition and oxidation state. By expanding the training data, this methodology can be extended to data-driven spectral analysis of a broad range of materials.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗