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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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229 records · Page 13

Reduction of baseplate distortion during directed energy deposition using compliant features

Distortion in additive manufacturing (AM) remains a barrier to its adoption in precision industries. Baseplate warpage is one such issue which compromises the feasibility of post-process precision machining. The restriction to thermal contraction of the deposited part, imposed by the baseplate, generates bending moments, that in turn causes warpage. A novel distortion mitigation strategy using baseplates with integrated compliant features, which enables thermal contraction of the build is presented. Six unique design concepts are evaluated, including a solid reference, using two deposition geometries. A laser, hot-wire, directed energy deposition (DED) process is used to deposit a symmetric cylindrical part (C-part) and a T-shaped asymmetric part (T-part). Flatness deviation of baseplates is measured using structured light 3D scanning. Measurements reveal a reduction in net flatness deviation of 58.8% for the C-part and 40.9% for the T-part, compared to the solid reference. While most designs yielded reductions exceeding 30% and 20% for the C- and T-parts, respectively, one configuration resulted in increased deviation. Finite element (FE) simulations are performed to elucidate the underlying mechanisms affecting distortion of compliant baseplates during DED. Despite variations between predictions and measurements, agreement in the general trend is observed. It also revealed that initial flatness errors in baseplates significantly affect its deviation during deposition. Predictions indicate that compliant features significantly affect the thermal distribution as well as the evolution of flatness deviation in the baseplate during deposition. Notably, one design exhibited a reduction in distortion during cooling, following its initial increase during deposition. FE predictions show a maximum reduction of 60.9% and 38.8% in net flatness deviation for the C- and T-parts, respectively. The performance of compliant baseplates is found to be governed by both its the thermal and mechanical characteristics, which are crucial factors to be considered during design.

Mathews, Ritin [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000301440828)↗

Filling data analysis gaps in time-resolved crystallography by machine learning

There is a growing understanding of the structural dynamics of biological molecules fueled by x-ray crystallography experiments. Time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography (TR-SFX) with x-ray Free Electron Lasers allows the measurement of ultrafast structural changes in proteins. Nevertheless, this technique comes with some limitations. One major challenge is the quality of data from TR-SFX measurements, which often faces issues like data sparsity, partial recording of Bragg reflections, timing errors, and pixel noise. To overcome these difficulties, conventionally, large volumes of data are collected and grouped into a few temporal bins. The data in each bin are then averaged and paired with the mean of their corresponding jittered timestamps. This procedure provides one structure per bin, resulting in a limited number of averaged structures for the entire time interval spanned by the experiment. Therefore, the information on ultrafast structural dynamics at high temporal resolution is lost. This has initiated research for advanced methods of analyzing experimental TR-SFX data beyond the standard binning and averaging method. To address this problem, we use a machine learning algorithm called Nonlinear Laplacian Spectral Analysis (NLSA), which has emerged as a promising technique for studying the dynamics of complex systems. In this work, we demonstrate the power of this algorithm using synthetic x-ray diffraction snapshots from a protein with significant data incompleteness, timing uncertainties, and noise. Our study confirms that NLSA is a suitable approach that effectively mitigates the effects of these artifacts in TR-SFX data and recovers accurate structural dynamics information hidden in such data.

Trujillo, Justin (ORCID:0000000285505360)↗

Assessing the design of integrated methane sensing networks

Abstract While methane is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide, it has a larger warming effect over a much shorter lifetime. Despite accelerated technological efforts to radically reduce global carbon dioxide emissions, rapid reductions in methane emissions are needed to limit near-term warming. Being primarily emitted as a byproduct from agricultural activities and energy extraction, methane is currently monitored via bottom–up (i.e. activity level) or top–down (via airborne or satellite retrievals) approaches. However, significant methane leaks remain undetected and emission rates are challenging to characterize with current monitoring frameworks. In this paper, we study the design of a layered monitoring approach that combines bottom–up and top–down approaches as an integrated sensing network. By recognizing that varying meteorological conditions and emission rates impact the efficacy of bottom–up monitoring, we develop a probabilistic approach to optimal sensor placement in its bottom–up network. Subsequently, we derive an inverse Bayesian framework to quantify the improvement that a design-optimized integrated framework has on emission-rate quantifications and their uncertainties. We find that under realistic meteorological conditions, the overall error in estimating the true emission rates is approximately 1.3 times higher, with their uncertainties being approximately 2.4 times higher, when using a randomized network over an optimized network, highlighting the importance of optimizing the design of integrated methane sensing networks. Further, we find that optimized networks can improve scenario coverage fractions by more than a factor of 2 over experimentally-studied networks, and identify a budget threshold beyond which the rate of optimized-network coverage improvement exhibits diminishing returns, suggesting that strategic sensor placement is also crucial for maximizing network efficiency.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Realization and Calibration of Continuously Parameterized Two-Qubit Gates on a Trapped-Ion Quantum Processor

Continuously parameterized two-qubit gates are a key feature of state-of-the-art trapped-ion quantum processors, as they have favorable error scalings and show distinct improvements in circuit performance over more restricted maximally entangling gatesets. In this work, we provide a comprehensive and pedagogical discussion on how to practically implement these continuously parameterized Mølmer–Sørensen gates on the Quantum Scientific Computing Open User Testbed, a low-level trapped-ion processor. To generate the arbitrary entangling angles, θ, we simply scale the amplitude of light used to generate the entanglement. However, doing so requires careful consideration of amplifier saturation as well as the variable light shifts that result. As such, we describe a method to calibrate and cancel the dominant fourth-order effects, followed by a dynamic virtual phase advance during the gate to cancel any residual light shifts, and find a linear scaling between θ and the residual light shift. Once we have considered and calibrated these effects, we demonstrate performance improvement with decreasing θ. Finally, we describe nuances of hardware control to transform the XX-type interaction of the arbitrary-angle Mølmer–Sørensen gate into a phase-agnostic and crosstalk-mitigating ZZ interaction.

Yale, Christopher Gordon [Sandia National Laborato↗

Mechanistic Modeling of TEG Dehydrator Emissions in Oil and Gas Industry

This work presents a mechanistic modeling approach for simulating methane emissions from triethylene glycol (TEG) dehydrators used in oil & gas (O&G) operations. The model was developed as a modular component of the Mechanistic Air Emissions Simulator (MAES) tool, incorporating species-specific absorption and emission dynamics through two-level, second-order polynomial regression (PR) models trained on ProMax simulation data: (1) species-level regression models that track the transfer rates of individual gas species within the dehydrator unit streams, and (2) outlet flow stream regression models that predict the fraction of inlet gas distributed among the outlet streams of the dehydrator unit. These behaviors were characterized over a range of glycol circulation ratios, wet gas pressures, and temperatures. The model was validated using root mean square error (RMSE) analysis. The species-level PR achieved low root mean square error (RMSE) values (<0.03) for light hydrocarbon species across all dehydrator components, ranging from 0.0009 for methane to 0.029 for normal pentane. Similarly, the outlet-level PR yielded RMSE values below 0.002 for the dry gas fraction, 0.001 for the flash tank fraction, and 0.002 for the still vent fraction, demonstrating strong agreement between predicted and reference ProMax values. When deployed at field facilities, the model significantly improved MAES-simulated dehydrator emissions, revealing that gas-assisted glycol pump emissions are the dominant contributors to both dehydrator-level and site-level methane emissions under uncontrolled conditions. Further analysis of the 154 dehydrator units reported by operators under the AMI 2024 project showed that 54 units (31%) used gas-driven glycol pumps, of which 6 units (11%) operated with uncontrolled flash tanks, and 22 units (40.7%) were identified as potentially oversized. Of the six dehydrator units with uncontrolled gas-assisted pumps, pump emissions accounted for 90.25% of total dehydrator emissions and 63.10% of total site-level emissions. These findings highlight substantial opportunities for emissions mitigation through equipment upgrades.

MAES↗

Impact and mitigation of spectroscopic systematics on DESI DR1 clustering measurements

The large scale structure catalogs within DESI Data Release 1 (DR1) use nearly 6 million galaxies and quasars as tracers of the large-scale structure of the universe to measure the expansion history with baryon acoustic oscillations and the growth of structure with redshift-space distortions. In order to take advantage of DESI's unprecedented statistical power, we must ensure that the galaxy clustering measurements are unaffected by non-cosmological density fluctuations. One source of spurious fluctuations comes from variation in galaxy density with spectroscopic observing conditions, lowering the redshift efficiency (and thus galaxy density) in certain areas of the sky. We measure the uniformity of the redshift success rate for DESI luminous red galaxies (LRG), bright galaxies (BGS) and quasars (QSO), complementing the detailed discussion of emission line galaxy (ELG) systematics in a companion paper [1]. We find small but significant fluctuations of up to 3% in redshift success rate with the effective spectroscopic signal-to-noise, and create and describe weights that remove these fluctuations. We also describe the process to identify and remove data from certain poorly performing fibers from DESI DR1, and measure the stability of the redshift success rate with time. Finally, we find small but significant correlations of redshift success rate with position on the focal plane, survey speed, and number of exposures required, and show the impact of weights correcting these trends on the power spectrum multipoles and on cosmological parameters from BAO and RSD fits. These corrections change the best-fit parameters by <15% of their statistical errors, and thus contribute negligibly to the overall DESI error budget.

cosmological parameters from LSS↗

Reduced‐Order Probabilistic Emulation of Physics‐Based Ring Current Models: Application to RAM‐SCB Particle Flux

Abstract In this work, we address the computational challenge of large‐scale physics‐based simulation models for the ring current. Reduced computational cost allows for significantly faster than real‐time forecasting, enhancing our ability to predict and respond to dynamic changes in the ring current, valuable for space weather monitoring and mitigation efforts. Additionally, it can also be used for a comprehensive investigation of the system. Thus, we aim to create an emulator for the Ring current‐Atmosphere interactions Model with Self‐Consistent magnetic field (RAM‐SCB) particle flux that not only improves efficiency but also facilitates forecasting with reliable estimates of prediction uncertainties. The probabilistic emulator is built upon the methodology developed by Licata and Mehta (2023), https://doi.org/10.1029/2022sw003345 . A novel discrete sampling is used to identify 30 simulation periods over 20 years of solar and geomagnetic activity. Focusing on a subset of particle flux, we use Principal Component Analysis for dimensionality reduction and Long Short‐Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks to perform dynamic modeling. Hyperparameter space was explored extensively resulting in about 5% median symmetric accuracy across all data sets for one‐step dynamic prediction. Using a hierarchical ensemble of LSTMs, we have developed a reduced‐order probabilistic emulator (ROPE) tailored for time‐series forecasting of particle flux in the ring current. This ROPE offers accurate predictions of omnidirectional flux at a single energy with no pitch angle information, providing robust predictions on the test set with an error score below 11% and calibration scores under 8% with bias under 2% providing a significant speed up as compared to the full RAM‐SCB run.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Self-Assembly of Accumulated Sphingolipids into Cytotoxic Fibrils in Globoid Cell Leukodystrophy and Their Inhibition by Small Molecules In Vitro

Globoid cell leukodystrophy (GLD) is a rare hereditary inborn error of metabolism due to recessive mutations that cause loss of function of the enzyme galactosylceramidase (GALC). This results in the accumulation of the sphingolipids galactosylceramide (GalCer) and galactosylsphingosine (GalSph) in the lysosomes of neuronal cells. The accumulated GalCer and GalSph in cerebral macrophages of GLD patients are neurotoxic to oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells, leading to demyelination in the nervous system. The disease typically presents with infantile onset in the first six months of life and death by age 2. Here, we identified a supramolecular structure of GalCer and GalSph that may contribute to GLD pathology. Using biophysical assays commonly used for studying proteinaceous amyloids, e.g., amyloidspecific dyes, microscopical imaging, and a series of analytical methods (FTIR, PXRD, and SAXS), we demonstrate that both GalCer and GalSph can self-assemble in vitro into highly organized fibrils reminiscent of fibrils of amyloidogenic proteins. These fibrils exhibit significant cytotoxicity to both neuronal and oligodendroglial cells. Using an inhibitor of the GALC enzyme in cell culture to mimic the GLD pathophysiology, we could detect the accumulation of these fibrils in cells. We also observed that small molecules, which are bona fide inhibitors of proteinaceous amyloids, effectively mitigated the formation of the GalCer and GalSph fibrillar structures in vitro. Finally, the small molecule ameliorated the cytotoxic effects of the sphingolipid fibrils in SH-SY5Y cells, suggesting a potential avenue for therapeutic intervention in GLD orphan disease.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Envisioning U.S. Climate Predictions and Projections to Meet New Challenges

In the face of a changing climate, the understanding, predictions, and projections of natural and human systems are increasingly crucial to prepare and cope with extremes and cascading hazards, determine unexpected feedbacks and potential tipping points, inform long-term adaptation strategies, and guide mitigation approaches. Increasingly complex socio-economic systems require enhanced predictive information to support advanced practices. Such new predictive challenges drive the need to fully capitalize on ambitious scientific and technological opportunities. These include the unrealized potential for very high-resolution modeling of global-to-local Earth system processes across timescales, reduction of model biases, enhanced integration of human systems and the Earth Systems, better quantification of predictability and uncertainties; expedited science-to-service pathways, and co-production of actionable information with stakeholders. Enabling technological opportunities include exascale computing, advanced data storage, novel observations and powerful data analytics, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Looking to generate community discussions on how to accelerate progress on U.S. climate predictions and projections, representatives of Federally-funded U.S. modeling groups outline here perspectives on a six-pillar national approach grounded in climate science that builds on the strengths of the U.S. modeling community and agency goals. This calls for an unprecedented level of coordination to capitalize on transformative opportunities, augmenting and complementing current modeling center capabilities and plans to support agency missions. Tangible outcomes include projections with horizontal spatial resolutions finer than 10 km, representing extremes and associated risks in greater detail, reduced model errors, better predictability estimates, and more customized projections to support next generation climate services.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

AI-Driven Crack Detection for Remanufacturing Cylinder Heads Using Deep Learning and Engineering-Informed Data Augmentation

Detecting cracks in cylinder heads traditionally relies on manual inspection, which is time-consuming and susceptible to human error. As an alternative, automated object detection utilizing computer vision and machine learning models has been explored. However, these methods often face challenges due to a lack of sufficiently annotated training data, limited image diversity, and the inherently small size of cracks. Addressing these constraints, this paper introduces a novel automated crack-detection method that enhances data availability through a synthetic data generation technique. Unlike general data augmentation practices, our method involves copying cracks from one location to another, guided by both random and informed engineering decisions about likely crack formations due to cyclic thermomechanical loads. The innovative aspect of our approach lies in the integration of domain-specific engineering knowledge into the synthetic generation process, which substantially improves detection accuracy. We evaluate our method’s effectiveness using two metrics: the F2 score, which emphasizes recall to prioritize detecting all potential cracks, and mean average precision (MAP), a standard measure in object detection. Experimental results demonstrate that, without engineering insights, our method increases the F2 score from 0.40 to 0.65, while maintaining a stable MAP. Incorporating detailed engineering knowledge further enhances the F2 score to 0.70 and improves MAP to 0.57, representing increases of 63% and 43%, respectively. These results confirm that our approach not only mitigates the limitations of traditional data augmentation but also significantly advances the reliability and precision of crack detection in industrial settings.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Mid-Atlantic US observations of radiocarbon in CO 2 : fossil and biogenic source partitioning and model evaluation

Accurately quantifying regional anthropogenic CO 2 fluxes is fundamental to improving our understanding of the carbon cycle and for creating effective carbon mitigation policies, and the radiocarbon to total carbon ratio in atmospheric CO 2 (Δ 14 CO 2 ) is a robust tracer of fossil fuel CO 2 that can discriminate between biogenic and fossil fuel CO 2 sources. NASA's Atmospheric Carbon and Transport-America (ACT-America) airborne mission between 2016 and 2019 aimed to improve the accuracy of regional greenhouse gas flux estimates, through refining our understanding and characterization of fluxes and flux uncertainties in models. Δ 14 CO 2 observations from 26 flights are presented for examining seasonal CO 2 source partitioning in the Mid-Atlantic USA. Observed variability in boundary layer CO 2 at timescales ranging from intra-day to seasonal was largely driven by biogenic CO 2 (CO 2bio ) variability that ranged from −19.7 ppm in summer to 16.2 ppm in fall, while fossil fuel CO 2 (CO 2ff ) variability remained at 3.3±2.0 ppm. Carbonyl sulfide uptake was well-correlated with CO 2bio uptake, and examining this relationship, as well as that between CO 2 and CO 2bio variability reinforces the seasonal extent of gross primary productivity response throughout ACT-America. We use airborne Δ 14 CO 2 flask sampling alongside in situ carbon monoxide measurements to calculate high-frequency CO 2ff and evaluate the magnitude and diurnal variability of modeled CO 2ff , deducing likely transport errors in an example flight. Although ACT-America CO 2ff signals were attenuated due to the broad source regions sampled, results illustrate the value of Δ 14 CO 2 sampling and observation-based methodologies for regional CO 2 flux attribution, evaluation and improvement of modeled CO 2 .

Baier, Bianca C. [National Oceanic and Atmospheric↗

Report series: finding of effect and mitigation documentation for the mercury solar photovoltaic array and battery energy storage system, area 23, nevada national security site, nye county, nevada

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Field Office (NNSA/NFO) proposes to install solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation arrays and an associated battery energy storage system (BESS) for the town of Mercury at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) in Nye County, Nevada (Figure 1). The purposes of the development of this facility are to support long-term efforts to modernize Mercury and to provide energy-resilient infrastructure and address climate adaptation needs. Because it is within the boundary of the Mercury Historic District (MHD), it is subject to the terms of the Programmatic Agreement Between the National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Field Office and the Nevada State Historic Preservation Officer Regarding Modernization and Operational Maintenance of the Nevada National Security Site, at Mercury in Nye County, Nevada (hereafter referred to as the Mercury PA). An identification and evaluation report prepared for this undertaking determined that a contributing element to the MHD, the Mercury airstrip (26NY15777), is within the APE (Haynes 2024). The Mercury airstrip was developed following the closure of Camp Desert Rock in 1957 and used until late 1963 or 1964 when the Camp Desert Rock Airport was renovated, and the Mercury Bypass road constructed. The town of Mercury and the immediate surrounding area have been determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as the MHD (SHPO Resource No. D230) under Criteria A and C for its importance in supporting nuclear testing and scientific research from 1951 through 1992 (Reed 2019). Originally recorded in 2016, 26NY15777 was determined individually not eligible for listing in the NRHP because it lacked sufficient integrity to convey its significance (Palmer 2016). It was subsequently determined in 2018 to be a contributing element of the MHD in an architectural survey of the district (Palmer 2018) and identified in Appendix C of the Mercury PA as a Category I contributing element. However, as per Stipulation IV.B.2, because the airstrip had already been formally evaluated and determined not to be individually eligible for the NRHP in consultation with the SHPO, this categorization was an error. NNSA/NFO reported this to the SHPO in Haynes 2024 and the SHPO concurred on June 11, 2024 (Reed). Accordingly, the airstrip is a Category II Property for the purposes of complying with the Mercury PA. The Mercury airstrip is a historic property for the purposes of compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and subject to the stipulations of the Mercury PA.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Ripening of Rh Nanoparticle Catalysts in Reverse Water–Gas Shift via a Data-Driven Model Combining Physics, Theory, and Experiment

Degradation via sintering is an ongoing challenge that impedes the broad commercial success of supported metallic nanoparticle catalysts. To mitigate degradation via informed catalyst design and process operations, here we aim to disambiguate the underlying mechanisms of sintering by combining theory and experiment in a quantitative framework. While mechanistic sintering models exist, they only model a single sintering pathway, even though multiple sintering mechanisms can occur simultaneously or dominate at different stages of the process. Data-driven machine learning models have emerged as a means to represent complex processes through data regression. However, machine learning models have very large data needs and lack mechanistic insights due to their black-box encoding. To develop an interpretive model of catalyst degradation via sintering, we constructed a hybrid model combining mechanistic “physics-based” models and data-driven methods to obtain both reliable predictions and mechanistic insights regarding experimentally observed sintering phenomena. Focusing on nanoparticle sintering in the Rh–TiO 2 catalyst for the reverse water–gas shift (RWGS) reaction, the hybrid model couples a mechanistic term for Ostwald ripening with energy values calculated via density functional theory (DFT) with a parametric, data-driven discrepancy function term for unmodeled mechanisms. The hybrid model is trained using Bayesian inference with data collected from small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) in situ experiments wherein average nanoparticle diameter versus time was measured at three relevant operating temperatures. The calibrated hybrid model results show that an Ostwald ripening-only model parameterized with fixed DFT energies does not fully capture the time and temperature dependence of the SAXS-observed sintering kinetics, and that an additional functional contribution, or DFT energy calibration, is required to reconcile simulation and experiment. Analysis of the hybrid-model error confirms that the hybrid model outperforms both the purely mechanistic and purely data-driven alternatives in terms of expected predictive accuracy for time-evolving average particle sizes. Furthermore, the results support the hypothesis that the Ostwald ripening mechanism is less important for explaining the sintering phenomena as operating temperature increases under an assumed fixed DFT parameterization. This could be explained in one of two ways: either latent, unmodeled sintering mechanisms dominate at higher temperatures, or the DFT uncertainty increases with temperature. The proposed modeling approach directly links theory to experiments and simulations via a statistical hybrid modeling framework and can be extended to other catalytic systems to improve predictive models and mechanistic understanding.

Bayesian hybrid modeling↗