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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 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

NREL is Delivering Integrated Solutions for an Affordable and Secure Energy Future

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for energy systems research and development. As the energy systems laboratory, NREL's unique strength lies in developing and integrating a broad array of energy technologies into robust, resilient systems - bridging foundational research with practical applications to lower energy costs, drive economic growth, bolster national security, and deliver abundant and reliable energy.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Integrating Analytical Solutions and U-Net Model for Predicting Groundwater Contaminant Plumes in Pump-and-Treat Systems

Pump-and-treat (P&T) is a common technique for groundwater remediation involving the extraction and treatment of contaminated water above ground. Optimizing the design and operation of the P&T well network is essential for maximizing the system’s effectiveness and efficiency. However, this optimization often necessitates many model evaluations, leading to computationally demanding tasks. This study introduces a novel approach that integrates analytical solutions for groundwater dynamics with the U-Net (Ronneberger et al., 2015) deep learning framework to predict groundwater contaminant plume migration under dynamic pumping conditions. By incorporating the Thiem equation (Thiem, 1906) into the input preprocessing, the U-Net model transforms sparse well data into a continuous spatial field that captures the hydraulic impacts of pumping activities. This integration enables the model to leverage both deep learning capabilities and classical physics-based groundwater theories, enhancing prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. These advancements can facilitate rapid, large-scale evaluations of P&T optimization simulations, allowing for timely and effective decision-making in well placement and system management. We demonstrate the model's robust performance across both simplified transient 2D models and a more complex 3D heterogeneous site model at the 200 West P&T facility at the Hanford Site. The U-Net-based model offers substantial computational advantages, reducing simulation times significantly compared to full physics-based models and providing a powerful tool for rapid site evaluation and P&T system optimization, such as evaluating alternative P&T well network designs. Our findings highlight the potential of advanced machine learning models to significantly enhance the efficiency and sustainability of groundwater remediation efforts, offering a novel application of U-Net architecture in environmental science.

Pump-and-treat↗
DOE OSTI2026

Extreme-scale EV charging infrastructure planning for last-mile delivery using high-performance parallel computing

Here, this paper addresses stochastic charger location and allocation problems under queue congestion for last-mile delivery using electric vehicles (EVs). The objective is to decide where to open charging stations and how many chargers of each type to install, subject to budgetary and waiting-time constraints. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer non-linear program, where each station-charger pair is modeled as a multiserver queue with stochastic arrivals and service times to capture the notion of waiting in fleet operations. The model is extremely large, with billions of variables and constraints for a typical metropolitan area; even loading the model in solver memory is difficult, let alone solving it. To address this challenge, we develop a Lagrangian-based dual decomposition framework that decomposes the problem by station and leverages parallelization on high-performance computing systems, where the subproblems are solved by using a cutting plane method and their solutions are collected at the master level. We also develop a three-step rounding heuristic to transform the fractional subproblem solutions into feasible integral solutions. Computational experiments on data from the Chicago metropolitan area with hundreds of thousands of households and thousands of candidate stations show that our approach produces high-quality solutions in cases where existing exact methods cannot even load the model in memory. We also analyze various policy scenarios, demonstrating that combining existing depots with newly built stations under multiagency collaboration substantially reduces costs and congestion. These findings offer a scalable and efficient framework for developing sustainable large-scale EV charging networks.

Capacity allocation↗
DOE OSTI2026

Enabling kilometer-scale E3SM land model simulation over North America: A new integrated framework solution

This study introduces a novel framework designed to enhance the performance, scalability, and portability of the kilometer-scale E3SM Land Model (km-ELM) within the E3SM modeling infrastructure. By seamlessly integrating cutting-edge data tools, we address existing challenges such as slow performance, limited scalability, and difficulties in software integration in current data-driven ELM simulation over large geographic areas. Our innovative approach leverages the KiloCraft data toolkit to generate unified inputs for simulations ranging from a single-cite case, to a 72,083-cell regional case to a continental configuration encompassing 21.6 million land grid cells at a 1 km × 1 km resolution. We conduct extensive strong- and weak-scaling experiments on three state-of-the-art supercomputers, utilizing up to 100,800 CPU cores across 2400 compute nodes to evaluate end-to-end metrics including wall-clock time, simulation-years-per-day (SYPD), initialization costs, and I/O throughput. Our results reveal the land (LND) component’s efficient scaling, demonstrating near-ideal weak scaling and strong-scaling parallel efficiencies reaching up to 87% at 50,400 cores. We confirm portability and reproducibility through bitwise-equivalent outputs across different machines using identical inputs over supported machines. Notably, at extreme scales, we identify I/O as a critical bottleneck and that leads to effective solution with the SCORPIO/ADIOS stack. Collectively, these findings validate the deployment of km-ELM at a continental scale with high parallel efficiency and provide essential guidance on configuration, decomposition, and I/O settings for optimized kilometer-scale land simulations in E3SM. This work emphasizes the innovative design and practical solutions that enhance the operational capabilities of km-ELM, focusing on software performance and scalability while leaving detailed scientific evaluations of simulated land processes for future investigations.

E3SM land model (ELM), km-ELM, scalability, perfor↗
DOE OSTI2025

POWER ELECTRONICS GRID TIED SYSTEM FINAL REPORT

Across the country, electric utilities are grappling with the persistent hurdles of integrating Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). Managing these assets safely and effectively is a complex endeavor, complicated by varying ownership structures, management philosophies, and the diversity of the technologies themselves. Consequently, the industry has seen a proliferation of bespoke system designs, control strategies, and communication frameworks—forcing utilities to spend significant time and resources developing one-off integration solutions. This project addressed these integration hurdles through a scalable demonstration of intelligent devices designed to coordinate and control diverse resources in low-voltage applications. This concept minimized the need for complex integration by transforming the separate DERs into a dispatchable virtual power plant (VPP) with integrated resiliency functions (called a Node). By collaborating with a utility partner, the project focused on developing rapidly implementable use cases that bridged the gap between theoretical control and real-world deployment

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Thermal Management Solution for an Integrated Outer-Rotor Motor Drive: Opportunities and Challenges

This work highlights an integrated thermal management solution for the outer-rotor motor (ORM) drive. The integrated ORM drive utilizes water-ethylene glycol coolant for power electronics and stator cooling. Air cooling is used for rotor laminations, magnets and outer-rotor structures, and the rotor shaft. To fully understand the performance of the integrated ORM drive and thermal management coupling effects, a full drive conjugate heat transfer model has been developed to investigate coupled cooling performance of various components of the ORM drive. Various motor rotational speeds, power output scenarios, and cooling options for the integrated ORM drive have been investigated. The model estimates the operating window for the ORM drive while keeping component operating temperatures below prescribed limits. The model also highlights the importance of windage losses at higher rotational speeds for this ORM design, which involves higher rotor surface area per unit width of the rotor. Different designs are also investigated, particularly focusing on rotor cooling with air either naturally induced by rotor spin or forced airflow with the help of a blower, to circumvent challenges imposed by higher windage losses. The work highlights motor rotational speed limitations and the need for potential liquid cooling options for desired rotor performance at higher rotational speeds. Liquid cooling for the rotor may even become more critical for nonuniform rotor-stator gaps, leading to even higher and uneven windage losses across the full circumference of the motor, consequentially, more heating for the rotor.

30 DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Particle-in-Cell Method for Plasmas with a Generalized Momentum Formulation, Part II: Enforcing the Lorenz Gauge Condition

In a previous paper Christlieb et al. (A particle-in-cell method for plasmas with a generalized momentum formulation, part I: Model formulation, 2024), we developed a new particle-in-cell (PIC) method for the relativistic Vlasov–Maxwell system in which the electromagnetic fields and the equations of motion for the particles were cast in terms of scalar and vector potentials through a Hamiltonian formulation. This new method evolved the potentials under the Lorenz gauge using integral equation methods. New methods to construct spatial derivatives of the potentials that converge at the same rates as the fields were also presented. The new particle method was compared against standard explicit discretizations, including the well-known FDTD-PIC method, for a range of applications involving sheaths and particle beams. Here, this paper extends this new class of methods by focusing on the enforcement the Lorenz gauge condition in both exact and approximate forms using co-located meshes. A time-consistency property of the proposed field solver for the vector potential form of Maxwell’s equations is established, which is shown to preserve the equivalence between the semi-discrete Lorenz gauge condition and the analogous semi-discrete continuity equation. Using this property, we present three methods to enforce a semi-discrete gauge condition. The first method introduces an update for the continuity equation that is consistent with the discretization of the Lorenz gauge condition. Both the finite difference and spectral implementations satisfy this discrete gauge condition to machine precision. The second approach we propose enforces a semi-discrete continuity equation using the boundary integral solution to the field equations. The potential benefit of this approach is that it eliminates spatial derivatives that appear on the particle data, namely the current density, which is often calculated by linear combinations of low-order spline basis functions. This method is ideally suited to boundary integral equation methods that invert multi-dimensional operators without dimensional splitting techniques and will be the subject of future work. The third approach introduces a gauge correcting method that makes direct use of the gauge condition to modify the scalar potential and uses local maps for both the charge and current densities. This results in a gauge error, as the maps do not enforce the continuity equation. The vector potential coming from the current density is taken to be exact, and using the Lorenz gauge, we compute a correction to the scalar potential that makes the two potentials satisfy the gauge condition. This method also enforces the gauge condition to machine precision. We demonstrate two of the proposed methods in the context of periodic domains. Problems defined on bounded domains, including those with complex geometric features remain an ongoing effort. However, this work shows that it is possible to design computationally efficient methods that can effectively enforce the Lorenz gauge condition in a non-staggered PIC formulation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Summary of Analytical Services for the Hanford Site Radionuclide NESHAP Program

This document is a summary of the point source analytical requirements used to demonstrate compliance for the Department of Energy (DOE) Hanford Site operations with 40 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 61, “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants,” (NESHAP) Subpart H, “National Emission Standards for Emissions of Radionuclides Other Than Radon From Department of Energy Facilities,” and the Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 246-247, “Radiation Protection – Air Emissions.” This reference collects information from multiple source documents and is not intended to create, supersede, replace or over-ride any existing contractual, DOE, federal or state statutes, regulations, compliance agreements, orders, permits, licenses or other requirements. The requirement source document governs where any difference may exist. The Hanford Mission Integration Solutions (HMIS) Environmental organization has been contracted by DOE to manage and report data collected from the sampling and monitoring of radioactive air emissions point sources, colloquially called stacks. The Environmental organization coordinates the analyses and reporting of samples collected at various facilities across the Hanford Site. These facilities operate approximately 52 stacks that require sampling, monitoring or estimating radioactive air emissions. The stacks are operated by Bechtel National, Inc. (BNI), Central Plateau Cleanup Company (CPCCo), Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure (H2C), Hanford Laboratory Management and Integration (HLMI), and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Stack samples from CPCCo, HLMI and H2C facilities are collected by the operating contractor staff, delivered to HMIS, and then shipped to an offsite contracted laboratory for analyses. The field and laboratory sample data uploaded into the Sample Management and Analytical Results Tracking (SMART) database are used to calculate sample volumes and concentrations. Sample concentrations are evaluated for compliance with federal and state regulations, permits, and license requirements. The SMART database also calculates total curies released for sampled point sources and stacks. Point source effluent concentrations and releases are published annually in publicly available reports. The BNI and PNNL operate several DOE-Hanford Field Office (HFO) stacks subject to the requirements of 40 CFR 61, Subpart H and WAC 246-247. The concentrations, curies released and dose modeling evaluation for these stacks are included in the DOE-HFO annual radionuclide NESHAP report. The sample collection, analyses and emissions estimates for these stacks are outside the scope of HMIS contracted responsibilities and not addressed further in this document.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

A Particle-in-Cell Method for Plasmas with a Generalized Momentum Formulation, Part I: Model Formulation

Here, this paper formulates a new particle-in-cell method for the Vlasov–Maxwell system. Under the Lorenz gauge condition, Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic fields can be written as a collection of scalar and vector wave equations. The use of potentials for the fields motivates the adoption of a Hamiltonian formulation for particles that employs the generalized (conjugate) momentum. A notable advantage offered by the Hamiltonian formulation is the elimination of time derivatives in the Lorenz gauge formulation that are required by the standard Newton–Lorentz treatment of the particles. This allows the fields to retain the full time-accuracy guaranteed by the field solver. The resulting updates for particles require only knowledge of the fields and their spatial derivatives. An analytical method for constructing these spatial derivatives is presented that exploits the underlying integral solution used in the field solver for the wave equations. Moreover, these derivatives are demonstrated to converge at the same rate as the fields in both time and space. The Method of Lines Transpose field solver we consider in this work is globally first-order accurate in time and high-order accurate in space (e.g., fourth- and fifth-order) and belongs to a larger class of methods which are unconditionally stable, can address geometry, and leverage $\mathcal {O}(N)$ fast summation methods for efficiency. We demonstrate the method on several well-established benchmark problems on bounded domains, including a plasma sheath as well as a relativistic particle beam. The efficacy of the proposed formulation is established by comparing with a second-order accurate finite-difference time-domain method that employs a leapfrog time advance for particles and a charge conserving map suitable for bounded domains. The new method shows mesh-independent numerical heating properties even in cases where the plasma Debye length is smaller than the grid spacing. This is an important feature of the new method for problems defined on bounded domains, because it permits the use of coarser grids in space in the representation of the fields. Such a capability has significant implications for the simulation of plasmas in bounded domains with complex geometry, where the ratio between the largest and smallest cells can vary significantly. The use of high-order spatial approximations in the new method also means that fewer grid points are required in order to achieve a fixed accuracy. Our results also suggest that the new method can be used with fewer simulation particles per cell compared to the benchmark explicit method, which permits further computational savings.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Miniaturized Millimeter-Wave Multilayer Filter Design Using Additive Manufacturing

Here, this article presents an innovative, fully additive manufactured approach to millimeter-wave multilayer circuits. An aerosol jet printer is used to fabricate a multilayer stepped-impedance low-pass filter. By leveraging the second layer for miniaturization, we achieve a more compact design. By precisely controlling conductor separation and utilizing 3-D printing technology, we were able to optimize the width of the high- and low-impedance segments for optimal filter performance. Two filter types were successfully fabricated: a low-pass microstrip filter and a low-pass stripline filter, both with a cutoff frequency near 29 GHz and exhibiting acceptable stopband attenuation. The stripline configuration allows for a 36% decrease in the stripline waveguide conductor area while achieving a great passband insertion loss of just 0.62 dB, enabled by aerosol jet printing (AJP). The line loss of both designs was characterized using a microstrip through line and a stripline through line. Both designs demonstrated low overall loss, with the microstrip line exhibiting a loss of 0.26 dB/mm and the stripline having a loss of 0.37 dB/mm at 29 GHz. This work demonstrates a multilayer integration solution and offers an advantage in reducing the size of RF circuits such as filter banks for next-generation integrated RF front ends.

additive manufacturing↗
DOE OSTI2026

A Systems-Level Approach to Address Risks and Ethics in Artificial Intelligence Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the world, from completely controlling routine or mundane tasks like text and image generation, to powering advanced algorithms that control critical systems. The recent advances in generative AI quickly overwhelmed multiple industries from education to finance as first adopters rushed (and continue to rush) to take advantage of the technology. The expanding AI ecosystem presents novel risks and ethical challenges that must be handled to ensure that technology is leveraged fairly and ethically. There are intertwined risks and ethical challenges stemming from the stochastic nature of AI (i.e., intrinsic risks), as well as from specific applications (i.e., extrinsic risks). Appropriately regulating AI requires a systems-approach to develop an integrated solution to these dependent challenges. Thus far, however, questions of risk, ethics and regulation appear to occupy separate spaces. This paper reviews the risks and ethical implications of AI and proposes a system-level approach to integrating ethics and regulation for the nascent industry.

22 - GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

A mixed-integer PDE-constrained optimization formulation for constructing electromagnetic cloaks with multiple materials

We study the design of an electromagnetic cloak from multiple materials with an additional constraint on the mass of the cloak. Our problem is an example of a topology optimization problem, and we formulate this problem as a mixed-integer partial-differential equation constrained optimization (MIPDECO) problem, where Maxwell’s equation models the propagation of the wave through the cloak and surrounding medium. We use binary variables to model the assignment of the different materials, and their relevant properties (permittivity and density). The mass constraint adds a nontrivial constraint to this problem. We propose a two-phase strategy to solve this problem. In the first phase, we solve a continuous relaxation, and then propose a new variant of the feasibility pump that exploits the structure of the PDE to obtain an initial integral solution candidate. In the second phase, we use a trust-region approach to improve this incumbent. We also consider a continuation or mesh-sequencing approach to find better solutions faster on consecutively finer meshes. We present detailed numerical results to illustrate the effectiveness of our approaches for constructing multi-material cloaks with a mass constraint.

Calculus of Variations and Optimization↗
DOE OSTI2025

RFSoC based digital low level RF control firmware and software suite (mimo_llrf) v1.0

It features a framework of a firmware and software architecture in support of building a digital low-level RF control system for accelerators, where precised digital RF generation and measurement are needed across many RF channels. It primarily supports the Xilinx RFSoC chips (xczu48dr, xczu47dr, xczu29dr) and their evaluation boards (zcu208, zcu216), for a highly integrated solution enabling the need for synchronous low-level RF systems, including: multi-tile synchronization, external reference for sampling clocks, deterministic delay, aligned NCO phase for digital mixers, and built-in EPICS IOC.

Du, Qiang [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (↗
DOE OSTI2024

Integrate Latimer Controls' Solution into RTAC (CRADA Final Report, CRD-23-24672)

Latimer Controls, Inc. was awarded two vouchers under the Department of Energy's American-Made Solar Prize Round 6 to conduct collaborative research at a national laboratory. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) was selected as a partner to assist Latimer Controls in the performance evaluation of its photovoltaic (PV) control software. This collaboration focuses on developing a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed at NREL, which will be used to test and validate the Latimer PV control technology in a realistic yet de-risked environment. Both Latimer and NREL teams will work together to analyze the collected test data, derive insights, and disseminate the scientific findings. Recent studies underscore the potential of solar energy as a zero-marginal-cost and zero-emission flexibility resource within the bulk power system, particularly when integrated with advanced control systems. To enhance the performance of such systems, Latimer Controls has developed leading-edge technologies, including machine learning (ML) algorithms and hierarchical inverter set-point allocation methods. These innovations are designed to estimate the operational headroom of large PV plants for grid integration and control. However, comprehensive validation under real-world conditions remains necessary. To address this gap, the concurrent CRADA project proposes the real-world application and validation of the Latimer Control solution within a HIL environment. Initially, the Latimer algorithm was developed and tested within MATLAB Simulink, a platform suitable for research-level simulations and iterative development. However, transitioning this technology to a real solar site as an industry-ready solution necessitates implementation in a format compatible with widely used solar power plant controllers. In this additional CRADA work, the MATLAB Simulink-based logic will be translated into Structured Text, a programming language compliant with IEC 61131 standards, which is commonly used for custom logic implementations in industry-leading programmable logic controllers (PLCs), such as the Schweitzer SEL real-time automation controller (RTAC). This transition will facilitate the deployment of the Latimer Control solution in real-world solar power plants, thereby advancing the technology towards commercialization.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2026

Hanford Site Revegetation Monitoring Report for Fiscal Year 2025

Revegetation of remediated and disturbed areas on the Hanford Site is performed to support U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Field Office’s goal of meeting cleanup and revegetation requirements mandated in the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. Revegetation and monitoring activities are conducted in accordance with DOE/RL-2011-116, Hanford Site Revegetation Manual , area-specific revegetation plans, mitigation action plans, and memorandums of agreement.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2025

Townsend’s Ground Squirrel Conservation on the Hanford Site for Calendar Year 2023: Translocation to Support At-Risk Ground Squirrel Populations

The U.S. Department of Energy, Richland Operations Office (RL) conducts ecological monitoring on the Hanford Site to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with an array of environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing RL activities. Ecological monitoring data provide baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitat under RL stewardship at the Hanford Site, which is required for accurate ecological impact assessment decision making under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. In addition, ecological monitoring helps ensure that RL, its contractors, and other entities conducting activities on the Hanford Site are in compliance with DOE/EIS-0222-F, Final Hanford Comprehensive Land Use Plan Environmental Impact Statement. RL places priority on monitoring those plant and animal species or habitats with specific regulatory protections or requirements; or that are rare and/or declining (federal or state listed endangered, threatened, or sensitive species) or of significant interest to federal, state, or tribal governments or the public.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Hanford Reach Fall Chinook Salmon Redd Monitoring Report for Calendar Year 2025

The U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Field Office (HFO) conducts ecological monitoring on the Hanford Site to collect and track data needed to ensure compliance with an array of environmental laws, regulations, and policies governing HFO activities. Ecological monitoring data provide baseline information about the plants, animals, and habitats under HFO stewardship at the Hanford Site required for decision making. Fall Chinook salmon redds have been monitored at the Hanford Site annually since 1948, including aerial counts, to provide an index of relative abundance among spawning areas and years

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗