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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

Resilient Communities, Maryland (RCM): A Framework for Community-Driven Energy Resilience (Final Technical Report)

The Resilient Communities, Maryland (RCM) project integrates community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches into energy resilience planning. The combination of qualitative, community-driven data and quantitative utility data improves both the effectiveness and efficiency of assessing the impacts of disruptions to energy infrastructure. Centered around a metric of critical services access, RCM created a repeatable framework for evaluating and modeling energy resilience in communities and promoted community engagement, resulting in more equitable stakeholder participation and improved decision-making processes for siting infrastructure to improve community energy resilience.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Resilience of the Electric Grid Through Trustable IoT-Coordinated Assets

The electricity grid has evolved from a physical system to a cyberphysical system with digital devices that perform measurement, control, communication, computation, and actuation. The increased penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) including renewable generation, flexible loads, and storage provides extraordinary opportunities for improvements in efficiency and sustainability. However, they can introduce new vulnerabilities in the form of cyberattacks, which can cause significant challenges in ensuring grid resilience. We propose a framework in this paper for achieving grid resilience through suitably coordinated assets including a network of Internet of Things devices. A local electricity market is proposed to identify trustable assets and carry out this coordination. Situational Awareness (SA) of locally available DERs with the ability to inject power or reduce consumption is enabled by the market, together with a monitoring procedure for their trustability and commitment. With this SA, we show that a variety of cyberattacks can be mitigated using local trustable resources without stressing the bulk grid. Multiple demonstrations are carried out using a high-fidelity cosimulation platform, real-time hardware-in-the-loop validation, and a utility-friendly simulator.

distributed energy resources↗
DOE OSTI2025

Near Term Reliability and Resilience: Revisiting Resilience Metrics for the Electric Grid

This report presents the metrics employed in the Near-Term Reliability and Resilience (NTRR) project to study the inter-dependencies between electric and natural gas infrastructures, particularly under challenging conditions. These metrics were developed and applied to evaluate the reliability and resilience of the electric grid and natural gas systems in near-term scenarios (within the next 10 years) involving extreme weather events and major supply disruptions. The report defines the metrics, explains how they are calculated, and describes the process by which they are used to evaluate reliability and resilience across simulated scenarios. It also demonstrates how the resilience metrics integrate with other project activities and summarizes the software tools deployed to calculate and visualize the results.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2026

Enhancing Building Resilience: Maintaining Energy Efficiency and Thermal Comfort During Power Outages in Cold Climates

The increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and cold snaps, present significant challenges to building energy performance and occupant comfort. Highly correlated with climate events are widespread long duration power interruptions that may affect thousands of buildings and millions of customers. This study evaluates the impact of building energy performance and occupant thermal comfort in medium-sized office buildings in a cold climate region. Using energy models representing pre-1980 and 2019 vintages, simulations were conducted to assess energy performance under typical weather conditions and occupant thermal comfort during power interrupted extreme cold snap and heatwave climate events under both current 2020s and future 2050s weather conditions. The results show a projected 33% increase in cooling energy demand and a 19% reduction in heating energy by 2050. Findings reveal that older buildings are more susceptible to cold discomfort during cold snaps, while modern airtight buildings are more vulnerable to overheating during heatwaves. Various passive energy efficiency measures, such as improved infiltration control, thermal windows, solar-controlled windows, and cool envelopes, were evaluated for their ability to mitigate thermal discomforts. Solar controlled windows and weatherstripping contribute to reducing cold thermal discomfort by 21% during a power-interrupted cold snap. Solar-controlled windows were found to reduce hot thermal discomfort by 34% during a future power-interrupted heatwave. The study highlights the importance of targeted retrofitting strategies to enhance thermal resilience, especially during power outages, to ensure occupant safety and comfort during extreme climate events.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2026

Energy Resilience Options for the Koolauloa Community Resilience Hub – Energy Technology Innovation Partnership Project, Cohort 2: Summary of Findings and Assessment

Hui o Hau‘ula (HoH) is a community organization dedicated to the well-being of the population of the Ko‘olauloa district on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. In response to growing concerns about challenges related to extreme weather events or natural disasters, HoH formulated the concept of the Ko‘olauloa Community Resilience Hub, or KCRH. The KCRH facility would serve as a focal point for the community during normal conditions, while also providing essential services and acting as a safe space during emergencies, natural or man-made. The concept of the KCRH was initially developed in partnership with the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, +Lab Architects, and the City and County of Honolulu. In the fall of 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy, under the Energy Technology Innovation Partnership Project Program (ETIPP), provided support to the KCRH project, in the form of technical assistance (TA) to be provided by its National Laboratory complex. In this case, the core TA was provided by Sandia National Laboratories, and it was directed to providing options for designing an energy system based at the KCRH that could support critical loads in the event of a 30- day grid outage. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) provided communications and logistics support in the project.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
NASA NTRS2007

Resilient Propulsion Control Research for the NASA Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control (IRAC) Project

Gas turbine engines are designed to provide sufficient safety margins to guarantee robust operation with an exceptionally long life. However, engine performance requirements may be drastically altered during abnormal flight conditions or emergency maneuvers. In some situations, the conservative design of the engine control system may not be in the best interest of overall aircraft safety; it may be advantageous to "sacrifice" the engine to "save" the aircraft. Motivated by this opportunity, the NASA Aviation Safety Program is conducting resilient propulsion research aimed at developing adaptive engine control methodologies to operate the engine beyond the normal domain for emergency operations to maximize the possibility of safely landing the damaged aircraft. Previous research studies and field incident reports show that the propulsion system can be an effective tool to help control and eventually land a damaged aircraft. Building upon the flight-proven Propulsion Controlled Aircraft (PCA) experience, this area of research will focus on how engine control systems can improve aircraft safe-landing probabilities under adverse conditions. This paper describes the proposed research topics in Engine System Requirements, Engine Modeling and Simulation, Engine Enhancement Research, Operational Risk Analysis and Modeling, and Integrated Flight and Propulsion Controller Designs that support the overall goal.

Guo, Ten-Huei↗
DOE OSTI2026

Resilient Solar PV Structures a.k.a. the "Nuts and Bolts" of PV Resilience

Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems can and has survived many extreme weather events. On occasion, however, solar PV systems have been damaged. This damage is related more to the features of individual PV systems rather than the magnitude of the weather events. Much of this damage can be avoided with relatively simple, cost-effective measures that include design, installation, inspection, and O&M best practices.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2026

Status of permanent magnet radiation resiliency studies at CEBAF

An ongoing investigation for the future of Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) lies in upgrading its maximum nominal energy using Fixed-Field Alternating-gradient (FFA) technology for its recirculating arcs, using permanent magnets for the FFA arcs. A common concern among the community is the degradation of these permanent magnets during operation due to the radiation environment in which they will be present. This work, funded by a Laboratory Directed R&D grant, aims to measure the permanent magnet degradation in the CEBAF tunnel enclosure, and extrapolate to the energies expected from the upgrade. We present the latest results of this study, as well as plans moving forward.

Accelerator Physics↗
DOE OSTI2025

Data-driven Community-centered Resilient Assessment and Planning Toolkit for Nexus of Energy and Water (DCRAPT-NEW)

Urban areas, including Detroit and Pittsburgh, have suffered significant dual outages of the electrical and water infrastructure in the past decade due, in part, to the increasing number of extreme weather events. With increasing temperatures and rainfall intensity, these regions need to prepare for increasing extreme events through community-based energy and water resilience analysis, planning, and enhancement. This project developed a suite of open-source, open-access, community-centered, data-driven assessment and distributed energy resource (DER) and planning tools for energy and water resilience enhancement in urban areas. Through establishing a multi-level community awareness and engagement mechanism and a comprehensive collection of power outage and flooding data, an innovative group of community energy and water resilience assessment and planning tools have been developed for a wide range of users with differing and variable sets of data available to them. The developed tools include (1) DOE EAGLE-I data-driven, deep-learning assisted resilience assessment and DER planning tools at the county level with socioeconomic factors incorporated; (2) Utility annual power outage data-driven tools for long term resilience assessment and DER planning and 15-min power outage data-driven tools for short term resilience assessment and planning; (3) Detailed engineering tools for energy and water systems resilience assessment and planning when the system topology and component fragility curves are available; (4) Alternative Resiliency Metric Calculation that extracts and separates outage and restoration processes; and (5) Co-optimization tools that evaluate the resilience of the power and sewage system and allow users to conduct joint planning with energy and wastewater systems. The developed tools provide planners, decision-makers, and stakeholders with powerful capabilities to systematically evaluate system/community resilience and optimal and actionable guidance for enhancing resilience while prioritizing DER investments. The tools have been used and validated in Detroit and Pittsburgh and can be used in other areas of the nation. In addition, this project will (1) advance the knowledge and applications of machine-learning methods in analyzing and fusing different layers of information and generating meaningful data points such as generating rare weather events; (2) significantly improve the energy and water resilience of the identified communities in Detroit and Pittsburgh and prepare for more frequent and severe weather conditions; (3) help communities assess extreme weather event impacts and address short-term and long-term resilience-related issues The developed tools have been made public via GitHub and demonstrated to community stakeholders and utility companies via the two annual workshops and numerous community engagement meetings. The project outcomes are also disseminated through publications in various journals and conference proceedings, and presentations at top conferences.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2026

Exploring stages of resilience maturity as communities confront climate risks

Coastal communities are facing increased risks due to climate change, as evidenced by heightened shocks such as hurricanes and wildfires, and stressors including sea-level rise and drought. To confront these risks, many coastal communities are planning and designing their built environments in new ways, with the overall goal of increasing their resilience. However, resilience practices have been widely guided by an event-based timeframe, which may not be sufficient to confront the multiple and overlapping threats expected over the coming decades. To address this concern, this study investigated a long-term perspective on resilience progression, termed resilience maturity. To better understand resilience maturity in practice, this study drew directly on community perspectives, thereby identifying common challenges. Furthermore, variation in resilience maturity across communities provided an opportunity to identify existing successful strategies. Inductive qualitative analysis was used to examine perspectives from 15 interviews with local practitioners across 12 coastal communities. The analysis revealed that communities in early stages of resilience maturity often struggle with local stakeholder alignment and minimal dedicated resilience resources. In contrast, those further along the maturity path often face technology barriers and challenges in aligning regional stakeholders. Few examples of a fully mature resilience culture were found within the communities studied, underscoring systemic barriers to achieving advanced resilience maturity. Overall, these findings supported development of a practical framework for classifying community resilience efforts, identifying common obstacles, and informing localized resilience advancement.

Resilience maturity↗
DOE OSTI2026

Stakeholder-guided holistic, Adaptive Framework for enhancing community Energy Resilience (SAFER) (Final Technical Report)

The Stakeholder-guided holistic, Adaptive Framework for enhancing community Energy Resilience (SAFER) project advances resilience science and engineering by addressing challenges in rural Kansas communities where aging infrastructure, extreme weather, and socioeconomic disparities heighten vulnerability to energy disruptions. Traditional approaches often focus on technical performance while overlooking community concerns and priorities. SAFER responds by integrating community perspectives with advanced analytical frameworks to create a holistic model for measuring and improving resilience. Project objectives included developing novel resilience metrics, advancing modeling frameworks that capture interdependencies across infrastructures, and embedding community-centric indicators directly into planning processes for distributed energy resources. The key technical innovations included the creation of self-organizing map (SOM)-based indices for objective resilience quantification, hetero-functional graph theory (HFGT) models linking power, water, transportation, and community assets, and graph neural network (GNN) tools for identifying critical nodes in complex systems. Community-centric energy planning was demonstrated through optimal siting and sizing of (photovoltaic) PV and battery storage, ensuring resilience enhancements also addressed energy burden and energy insecurity. SAFER engaged community partners in Dodge City and Ford County through surveys, focus groups, and workshops, generating more than 600 responses that established baseline measures of energy burden, financial insecurity, and willingness-to-pay to avoid outages. This data, organized in terms of a community capitals framework, informed the development of weighted reliability indices that better reflect community costs than traditional utility metrics. SAFER’s GNN-based critical node identification framework identified expert-labelled critical nodes with over 99% accuracy, while also uncovering additional functionalities essential for proactive resilience planning. The project’s models demonstrated that optimal PV and storage deployment could improve resilience indices by over 11 percent, with dispatch strategies further enhancing outcomes, confirming both the technical effectiveness and economic feasibility of these approaches. Through its combined emphasis on rigorous modeling, community-focused planning, and community engagement, SAFER advances the state of resilience research while delivering direct benefits to rural communities. The project provides tools, guidelines, and resilience heatmaps that help utilities, local governments, and residents better anticipate disruptions, prioritize investments, and strengthen the capacity to withstand and recover from energy-related hazards. Furthermore, the developed HFG and GNN frameworks are designed for transferability, allowing them to be adapted for resilience planning in other communities with minimal retraining. This inductive learning capability provides a scalable pathway to extend the SAFER project’s impact. Thus, creating a foundation for a nationally applicable model of infrastructure resilience. Additionally, the HFG can also be extended to include other FEMA community lifelines.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Foundational Concepts in Simulation-Based Resilience Analysis and Design

Resilience is a topic of increasing interest–with ever-present calls from policymakers to increase the resilience of complex systems and infrastructure. However, resilience as a concept can be confusing, because of a lack of a common unified definition and frame of reference. Sometimes it can appear as if resilience analysis is merely duplicating other, more mature fields such as safety, reliability, or risk, while other times it seems as if resilience is providing an “alternative” view with limited rigor. To better understand the resilience concept (and its relation to the broader field of risk management), this paper will present the perspective of simulation-based resilience analysis and design, including some of the foundational precepts and resultant concepts defining the resilience concept. It will further present the motivation for using simulation to understand resilience and highlight some ongoing work and research challenges in this area. From this frame of reference, one can better understand the field of resilience, including how different aspects and definitions of resilience relate to each other, and how resilience relates to broader design considerations and practices.

resilience↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Foundational Concepts in Simulation-Based Resilience Analysis and Design

Resilience is a topic of increasing interest–with ever-present calls from policymakers to increase the resilience of complex systems and infrastructure. However, resilience as a concept can be confusing, because of a lack of a common unified definition and frame of reference. Sometimes it can appear as if resilience analysis is merely duplicating other, more mature fields such as safety, reliability, or risk, while other times it seems as if resilience is providing an “alternative” view with limited rigor. To better understand the resilience concept (and its relation to the broader field of risk management), this paper will present the perspective of simulation-based resilience analysis and design, including some of the foundational precepts and resultant concepts defining the resilience concept. It will further present the motivation for using simulation to understand resilience and highlight some ongoing work and research challenges in this area. From this frame of reference, one can better understand the field of resilience, including how different aspects and definitions of resilience relate to each other, and how resilience relates to broader design considerations and practices.

resilience↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Understanding Resilience Optimization Architectures With an Optimization Problem Repository

Optimizing a system’s resilience can be challenging, especially when it involves considering both the inherent resilience of a robust design and the active resilience of a health management system to a set of computationally-expensive hazard simulations. While prior work has developed specialized architectures to effectively and efficiently solve combined design and resilience optimization problems, the comparison of these architectures has been limited to a single case study. To further study resilience optimization formulations, this work develops a problem repository which includes previously-developed resilience optimization problems and additional problems presented in this work: a notional system resilience model, a pandemic response model, and a cooling tank hazard prevention model. This work then uses models in the repository at large to understand the characteristics of resilience optimization problems and study the applicability of optimization architectures and decomposition strategies. Based on the comparisons in the repository, applying an optimization architecture effectively requires understanding the alignment and coupling relationships between the design and resilience models, as well as the efficiency characteristics of the algorithms. While alignment determines the necessity of a surrogate of resilience cost in the upper-level design problem, coupling determines the overall applicability of a sequential, alternating, or bilevel structure. Additionally, the application of decomposition strategies is dependent on there being limited interactions between variable sets, which often does not hold when a resilience policy is parameterized in terms of actions to take in hazardous model states rather than specific given scenarios.

Resilience↗