SEARCH · Search NASA
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.
Methods and systems for thermal energy storage and enhanced oil recovery are described herein. In some embodiments, natural gas may be injected down a well which has been previously hydraulically fractured to store thermal energy and to stimulate the well to greater hydrocarbon production.
High intensity proton pulses strike the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS)’s mercury target to provide bright neutron beams. These strikes deposit extensive energy into the mercury and its steel vessel. Prediction of the resultant loading on the target is difficult when helium gas is intentionally injected into the mercury to reduce the loading and to mitigate the pitting damage on the vessel. A 2-phase material model that incorporates the Rayleigh-Plesset (R-P) model is expected to address this complex multi-physics dynamics problem by including the bubble dynamics in the liquid mercury. We present a study comparing the measured target strains in the SNS target station with the simulation results of the solid mechanics simulation framework. We investigate a wide range of various physical model parameters, including the number of bubble families, bubble size distribution, viscosity, surface tension, etc. to understand their impact on simulation accuracy. Our initial findings reveal that using 8-10 bubble families in the model renders a simulation strain envelope that covers the experimental ones. Further optimization studies are planned to predict the strain response more accurately.
An experimental study on electron cyclotron heating (ECH) pre-ionization has been conducted on J-TEXT in support of the joint experiment research for ITER plasma initiation. In this experiment, ECH power was injected to the vessel before the application of loop voltage ionize the neutral gas and form the initial plasma or so-called pre-plasma. The impact of several significant factors, such as magnetic field configuration, pre-fill gas pressure, ECH toroidal injection angle and ECH power on the evolution of pre-plasma are systematically studied, aiming to identify shared features, clarify their potential relationship and optimize the discharge parameters to generate a rather high pre-plasma density. By separating ECH power from the inductive start-up, the effect of pre-plasma on tokamak start-up can be observed. A dynamic magnetic configuration facilitates the transition of pre-plasma to tokamak plasma. To assess the influence of pre-plasma density on tokamak start-up, two kinds of magnetic field configurations are examined. While the effect of different pre-plasma densities on tokamak start-up is negligible, a significant difference is observed between pure ohmic start-up and start-up with pre-ionization. The studies presented here show evolutionary trends and threshold values needed to optimize ECH pre-ionization and also a feasible way to improve pre-plasma density and a configuration to stabilize pre-plasma for transition. Eventually, these results may contribute to multi-machine research and physics analysis that can assist ITER with its optimal preparation for first plasma operation.
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a possible deliberate approach to decrease or reflect incoming solar radiation with the goal of reducing global temperatures, which have increased over the last decades due to high atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Stratospheric aerosol injection, specifically, has shown potential for successfully reducing global temperatures in climate model simulations. Despite the growing literature in the areas of climate change and SRM, their combined effects on renewable energy generation, a climate change mitigation strategy, have not been addressed. In this review paper, we synthesize previous literature on the possible effects of climate change and SRM on renewable energy resources (i.e., wind energy, solar energy, biomass energy, and hydropower), review the status of climate change and SRM research, and explore potential effects of SRM on renewable energy primarily in the Continental United States (CONUS), but with global perspectives as well. We discuss the research challenges and impacts of SRM on renewable energy and conclude by discussing the potential implications of SRM for renewables for SRM governance and policy. This work is not advocating for or against SRM. It is highlighting an important potential impact for future decision makers.
Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) sources are being considered in future energy strategy discussions as potential replacements for fossil natural gas (FNG). While today’s supply of RNG resources is insufficient to meet U.S. demands, there is significant interest in its viability to supplement and decarbonize the natural gas supply. However, the resources that compare the life cycle global warming potential (GWP) of various RNG production pathways are lacking and focus mostly on a singular pathway. This effort is an attempt to close this gap and provide a comparison between the life cycle GWP of three major RNG pathways and the FNG pathway. The three RNG pathways evaluated are Anaerobic Digestion (AD), Thermal Gasification (TG), and Power-to-Gas (P2G) using various feedstocks. The functional unit is 1MJ of compressed RNG ready for injection into the natural gas transmission network. The results show that RNG production is not always carbon neutral or negative. Depending on the pathway the GWP impact of RNG production can range from -229 to 27 g CO 2 e/MJ compressed RNG, with AD of animal manure and AD of municipal solid waste being the least and the most impactful pathways, respectively, compared to the 10.1 g CO 2 e/MJ impact for compressed FNG.
n this work, laboratory and engineering-scale tests were conducted that mimic the reactive environment of the Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) low activity waste (LAW) melter and off-gas system in order to assess the speciation of mercury at select points in the processing system. The experimental protocols, test equipment, feed materials used, and rationale for testing are detailed in the Test Plan for this work. Particular attention was paid to the amount and speciation of mercury in submerged bed scrubber (SBS) solutions, which are intended to be recycled back to the melter feed at the WTP. Results are presented from detailed mercury analysis of these solutions using Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Method 1630 and modifications to this method for dimethyl mercury and methyl mercury as well as EPA Method 1631 and modifications to this method for total, dissolved, elemental, suspended, and ionic mercury. Testing was conducted in two separate sets of experiments: (1) One set of tests (crucible-scale furnace tests) that involved heating small batches of mercury-spiked melter feed in crucibles to determine the amount of mercury retained in the glass and the species of mercury in the exhaust gases; (2) A second set of tests (DM10 melter tests) was planned that involved creating LAW melter plenum gas compositions using the DM10 melter system, injecting mercury into the off-gas stream, and passing that stream though a reactor that simulates various plenum gas conditions. Operational issues led to the need to use one of the VSL DM100 melters in place of the planned DM10 melter for these tests. The speciation of mercury after exposure to those conditions was monitored. In both sets of tests, the exhaust gases were run through a scrubber that was intended to mimic the LAW SBS in order to determine how much of the mercury exiting the melter would be retained in the primary off-gas system fluids and in what form. After passing through the SBS, the exhaust stream was analyzed to determine particulate, ionic, elemental, and total mercury passing downstream of the SBS. In tests employing gases derived from the DM100 melter that were spiked with elemental mercury, the processing system provided gas temperatures and residence times that are representative of the WTP LAW vitrification system in order to assess the effect of those conditions on mercury speciation. The Decontamination Factor (DF) across the system in the tests with mercury-spiked DM100 melter exhaust was determined using the analytical data from EPA Method 30B (Fluegas Adsorption Mercury Speciation (FAMS TM )) exhaust samples and the amount of mercury detected in the SBS solutions. Mercury species used in melter feed crucible scale tests were divalent (chloride and iodide), monovalent (chloride and fluoride), and elemental mercury. Individual tests included only a single form of mercury in the feed. The results for total mercury mass balances in the crucible tests are also presented.
Upgrades at the spallation neutron source (SNS) accelerator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are underway to double its proton beam power from 1.4 to 2.8 MW. About 2 MW will go to the current first station while the rest will go to the future Second Target Station. The increase of beam power to the first target station is especially challenging for its mercury target. When the short proton beam hits the target, strong pressure waves are generated, causing cavitation erosion and challenging stresses for the target's weld regions. SNS has successfully operated reliably at 1.4 MW by mitigating the pressure wave with the injection of small Helium bubbles into the mercury. To operate reliably at 2 MW, more gas will be injected into mercury to mitigate the pressure wave further. However, the mercury process loop was not originally designed for gas injection, and the accumulation of gas in the pipes is a concern. Due to space constraints, a custom gas liquid separator (GLS) was designed to fit a 90-deg horizontal elbow space in the SNS mercury loop. Simulations and experiments were performed, and a successful design was developed that has the desired efficiency while keeping the pressure losses acceptable.
The Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (MRCSP) was founded in 2003 as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership initiative. Since its founding, MRCSP has made significant strides toward making CCUS a viable option for states in the region. The public/private consortium, funded through the DOE Regional Carbon Sequestration Initiative, brings together nearly 40 industry partners and 10 states. Battelle, as the project lead, oversees research, development and operations and coordinates activities among the partners. The incremental, phased approach has built a valuable knowledge base for the industry and paved the way for commercial-scale adoption of CCUS technologies. From 2008 to 2020, MRCSP Phase III focused on the development of large-scale injection projects. This report is part of a series of reports prepared under the Midwestern Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (MRCSP) Phase III (Development Phase). These reports summarize and detail the findings of the work conducted under the Phase III project. The report describes the geochemical monitoring program under MRCSP to use stable and radiogenic isotope geochemistry in concert with analysis of general geochemical parameters of fluids and gases and analysis of core samples to determine geochemical processes occurring in the reef structure because of CO 2 injection. Specifically, brine and gas samples were collected and analyzed to determine changes occurring between reefs prior to and following CO 2 injection. The analytical results for general geochemical parameters were modeled with chemical equilibrium models to determine if the injection of CO 2 resulted in the mineral dissolution or precipitation. Finally, core samples were collected and analyzed to determine if there was evidence of dissolution features or mineral precipitation.
This dataset contains depth-resolved soil environmental variables collected between June 2016 and October 2018 from the Bradley Meadow site in the East River watershed. Datalogger output from 7 Campbell CS655 12 cm Soil Moisture and Temperature Sensors including depth, temperature, volumetric water content, and electrical conductivity are included in ‘BM_Merged_T_VWC_0616_10_18.csv’. Sensors were installed in June 2016. Data have been processed to merge raw sensor data and to remove additional variables. No additional QA/QC was performed. Measured pCO2 and depth are contained in ‘BM_EGM_WELL_CO2.csv’. These data represent gas well samples measured via injection using a PP Systems EGM-5 infra-red gas analyzer as described in the methods section. Measured CO2 surface flux values are contained in 'BM_EGM_Surface_Flux.csv'. These were measured using the PP Systems EGM-5 with the Soil Respiration Chamber attachment. Multiple reps are reported for each measurement including CO2 flux rate calculations using built-in linear and quadratic function methods, and average and standard deviations are taken across all reps and calculation methods.
Dual-fuel low-temperature combustion is a possible solution for alleviating the tradeoff between oxides of nitrogen and soot emissions in conventional diesel combustion, albeit with poor combustion stability, high carbon monoxide, and unburned hydrocarbon emissions at low engine loads. The present work compares emissions and combustion (heat release and other metrics) of both diesel and poly-oxy methylene dimethyl ether as high-reactivity fuels to ignite natural gas while leveraging spray-targeted reactivity stratification, which involved multiple injections of the high-reactivity fuels. The experiments included six parametric sweeps of: (1) start of first injection, (2) start of second injection, (3) percentage of energy substitution of natural gas, (4) commanded injection duration ratio, (5) rail pressure, and (6) intake pressure. The experiments were performed on a 1.8 L heavy-duty single-cylinder research engine operating at a medium speed of 1339 rev/min. Not-to-exceed limits for the indicated oxides of nitrogen emissions, maximum pressure rise rate, and the coefficient of variation of the indicated mean effective pressure were set to 1 g/kWh, 10 bar/CAD, and 10%, respectively. The indicated emissions decreased and combustion improved significantly for both fueling combinations when the experimental procedure was applied.
We report there is rising interest globally in the use of hydrogen for the provision of electricity or heat to industry, transport, and other applications in low-carbon energy systems. While there is attention to build out dedicated hydrogen infrastructure in the long-term, blending hydrogen into the existing natural gas pipeline network is also thought to be a promising strategy for incorporating hydrogen in the near-term. However, hydrogen injection into the existing gas grid poses additional challenges and considerations related to the ability of current gas infrastructure to operate with blended hydrogen levels. This review paper focuses on analyzing the current understanding of how much hydrogen can be integrated into the gas grid from an operational perspective and identifies areas where more research is needed. The review discusses the technical limits in hydrogen blending for both transmission and distribution networks; facilities in both systems are analyzed with respect to critical operational parameters, such as decrease in energy density, increased flow speed and pressure losses. Safety related challenges such as, embrittlement, leakage and combustion are also discussed. The review also summarizes current regulatory limits to hydrogen blending in different countries, including ongoing or proposed pilot hydrogen blending projects.
A series of ice pellets was injected into the advanced stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X). Although the pellets were small and slow, deep and efficient particle fueling could be observed experimentally. The most striking feature appearing after the injection of the pellets, however, was a transient increase in the energy confinement time. This transient phase resembled in several aspects modes of enhanced confinement after gas-puff or pellet injection, as observed in other fusion experiments. All experimental attempts, to prolong this phase, failed. In this paper, discharges are described that show the enhanced energy confinement, and some conditions are summarized which seem to be essential in order to generate it. The focus here is on deep particle fueling by pellets, and shaping of the density profiles during and after the series of pellets. During this time, neutral gas particle re-fueling at the plasma edge is reduced, while density profile peaking and low impurity radiation losses are present.
Not Available
The HLW TCO Units are a combination of four rectangular vessels; the Recuperative Heat Exchanger, Electric Heater, Selective Catalytic Oxidizer (SCO), and the Selective Catalytic Reducer (SCR). Each housing is simply a closed rectangular box with formed angle stiffeners welded to the outside perimeter. The housings are connected with process piping and sit on a skid. There is an external frame to support all major process piping and the Electric Heater. The process piping consists of a 14" inlet which enters the heat exchanger. Then the off-gas flows through 18" cross over piping which leads to the heater. Once the off-gas is heated, another section of 18" process piping leads the off-gas through the SCO and SCR. The off-gas then flows through the heat exchanger before exiting through 16" process piping which leads to the customer's piping. The other equipment associated with the HLW TCO is the Ammonia Dilution Skid. The dilution skid controls the ammonia injection into the off-gas. The dilution skid supports two process lines, a 2" line and a 1" line which carries process air and anhydrous ammonia respectively. Ammonia injection into the off-gas is required prior to entering the SCR to ensure the NOx reduction occurs through the SCR catalyst bank.
In this report the unsteady, nonlinear magnetization dynamics induced by spin injection in an easy-plane ferromagnetic channel subject to an external magnetic field are studied analytically. Leveraging a dispersive hydrodynamic description, the Landau-Lifshitz equation is recast in terms of hydrodynamic-like variables for the magnetization's perpendicular component (spin density) and azimuthal phase gradient (fluid velocity). Spin injection acts as a moving piston that generates nonlinear, dynamical spin textures in the ferromagnetic channel with downstream quiescent spin density set by the external field. In contrast to the classical problem of a piston accelerating a compressible gas, here, variable spin injection and field lead to a rich variety of nonlinear wave phenomena from oscillatory spin shocks to solitons and rarefaction (expansion) waves. A full classification of solutions is provided using nonlinear wave modulation theory by identifying two key aspects of the fluid-like dynamics: subsonic/supersonic conditions and convex/nonconvex hydrodynamic flux. Familiar waveforms from the classical piston problem such as rarefaction waves and shocks manifest in their spin-based counterparts as smooth and highly oscillatory transitions, respectively, between two distinct magnetic states. The spin shock is an example of a dispersive shock wave, which arises in many physical systems. New features without a gas dynamics counterpart include composite wave complexes with “contact” spin shocks and rarefactions. Magnetic supersonic conditions lead to two pronounced piston edge behaviors including a stationary soliton and an oscillatory wave train. These coherent wave structures have physical implications for the generation of high frequency spin waves from pulsed injection and persistent, stable stationary and/or propagating solitons in the presence of magnetic damping. The analytical results are favorably compared with numerical simulations.
In this work, large-eddy simulations (LESs) are conducted for a multiple-injection flame in a diesel engine environment using an unsteady flamelet/progress variable (UFPV) approach in which differential diffusion is considered. The suitability of the UFPV tabulation approach is first evaluated through a priori analyses using the state-of-the-art direct numerical simulation (DNS) dataset. Both the instantaneous data and the conditional values for the major and minor species' mass fractions are compared between the UFPV and the DNS. The comparisons show that the proposed UFPV tabulation approach can give good predictions for the multiple-injection flame at different injection phases. While the gas temperature and major species mass fractions can be accurately predicted with or without differential diffusion being considered in the UFPV flamelet library, the prediction accuracy for the highly diffusive species (e.g., hydrogen) in the main injection phase can be noticeably improved when differential diffusion is taken into account. The fully coupled LES/UFPV simulations show that the overall structure of the multiple-injection flame can be predicted, and the conditional thermo-chemical values are close to the filtered DNS dataset. The reasons for the remaining discrepancies found in the a priori analyses and the a posteriori simulations using the UFPV approach are analyzed.
All present circular particle accelerators are built around linear focusing optics. Un-avoidable nonlinear elements appear in accelerators, such as magnetic aberrations and space-charge effects, which are typically corrected using nonlinear magnets. However, these added nonlinearities degrade particle beam stability, and in most cases, the system becomes non-integrable. The Integrable Optics Test Accelerator (IOTA), at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), is a test bed to study beam dynamics in integrable lattices for both electron and proton beams, independently. This work presents experimental results of the nonlinear electron beam dynamics behavior in IOTA using an elliptical nonlinear magnet. The elliptical nonlinear magnet allows for a large betatron tune spread, allowing for a stable high-intensity beam. In a future experimental run, minimally invasive beam instrumentation is needed to study time-dependent collective instabilities, and halo formation in space-chargedominated proton beams. Traditional profile monitors are too destructive to the beam or just measure one dimension of the beam. A gas sheet can be injected perpendicular to theproton beam at an angle. By doing so, a two-dimensional, turn-by-turn, transverse profile measurement can be made, which will preserve the integrity of the beam. The developmentand progress of a gas sheet beam profile monitor will also be presented.
This project seeks to integrate a sCO2 bottoming cycle with a 5.3 MW gas turbine to develop a CHP system that is able to transition rapidly between 50% and 100% load by engaging or bypassing the bottoming cycle while maintaining electrical system efficiency above 30% at all times. The project team will engineer an optimized design of the power systems. The needed new key components, such as advanced heat exchangers and a steam injection system for the gas turbine, will be developed and their performance demonstrated in rig tests. The feasibility of the whole integrated CHP system will be validated through a cyber-physical approach.