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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 271 records · Page 15
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Communication engine for hybrid interconnect technologies

Systems, apparatuses, and methods for dynamically selecting between wired and wireless interconnects for sending packets are disclosed. A system includes at least a hybrid communication engine and a plurality of interconnects for connecting to various end-points. The communication engine dynamically discovers and utilizes the best interconnect technology available in between given end-points. The communication engine dynamically chooses the physical interconnect that is best suited at any given time to send data from one source to one or multiple destinations. This communication can be either on-chip or across nodes. The communication engine makes a decision based on a set of predetermined parameters that can be re-adjusted by the application layer, such as latency of the transmission, message data size, physical distance from source to destination, the energy cost, and the current congestion on the alternative interconnects.

Blagodurov, Sergey↗
DOE OSTI2021

Cybersecurity Certification Recommendations for Interconnected Grid Edge Devices and Inverter Based Resources

Escalating deployment of PV and grid-edge devices on the distribution grid has increased the sustainability and efficiency of the electric grid. However, the increasing number of distributed energy resources (DERs) deployed creates a heightened cyber-physical interdependency on the distribution grid and thus creates more vectors for cyber-attacks to exploit through information and communication technology (ICT) systems and networks. For example, control signal packets can be modified, intercepted, or corrupted due to vulnerabilities in communication protocols used by microgrid controllers and grid edge devices for power control. Therefore, to mitigate and prevent cyber-attacks on grid edge devices and the inverter-based resources connected to the distribution grid, the U.S. Department of Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) awarded funding to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) to research, develop, and harmonize cybersecurity standards for Photovoltaic (PV) systems and for other kinds of DERs. To help develop a standard for DER cybersecurity, NREL established certification recommendations and test cases, in consensus with the solar industry and UL, for ensuring intrinsic design security for DERs. These recommendations were developed to bolster the cybersecure functionalities such as TLS, MAC, CRL, session resumption/renegotiation, and password, system, and service security management within the DER devices. The proposed test cases verify authentication, authorization, confidentiality, and data integrity for data and communications of DERs that use Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). They were also developed to protect DER communications from eavesdropping, replay, man-in-the-middle, denial of service (DoS), spoofing through security certificates, least-privilege violation, and brute-force credentials. This report, which has been validated and reviewed by UL, expands upon those test cases to provide DER cybersecurity certification recommendations which increase DER resiliency and help to mitigate cyber-attacks. UL's collaboration with NREL and approval of this document will accelerate the adoption of a UL standard for DER cybersecurity.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2023

Ultrasonic sensors and methods of using the ultrasonic sensors

An ultrasonic sensor comprises a transducer in operable communication with a power source, a waveguide comprising a metal and at least one of a fissile material or a fertile material in operable communication with the transducer and configured to propagate and reflect acoustic waves generated by the transducer, the transducer configured to convert reflected acoustic waves to an electric signal, a thermally insulative material proximate the waveguide, and a control system in operable communication with the transducer, the control system configured to determine at least a temperature of the waveguide based on the reflected acoustic waves. Related methods are also disclosed.

Woolstenhulme, Nicolas E.↗
DOE OSTI2021

Transmission of Images on High-Temperature Nuclear-Grade Metallic Pipe with Ultrasonic Elastic Waves

Transmission of information using elastic ultrasonic waves on existing metallic pipes provides an alternative communication option for a nuclear facility. The advantages of this approach consist of transmitting information through barriers, such as the containment building wall, with minimal modification of the existing hardware. Because bit rates on the order of kilobits per second are achievable, relatively large volumes of data, such as images, can be transmitted. A viable candidate for an ultrasonic communication channel is a stainless steel pipe of the chemical volume control system (CVCS) that penetrates through the reactor containment building wall through a sealed tunnel. To study ultrasonic communication under simulated nuclear facility conditions of high temperature, a test article was developed by installing heating tapes, temperature controllers, and thermal insulation on a laboratory CVCS-like stainless steel pipe. High temperature and radiation-resilient lithium niobate ultrasonic transducers were utilized for information transmission on the heated pipe. The amplitude shift keying (ASK) digital communication protocol was developed and implemented in a GNU Radio software-defined radio environment. A root-raised-cosine filter was introduced to suppress ultrasonic transducer ringing and thus reduce inter-symbol interference. This resulted in the enhancement of the data transmission bit rate compared to information encoding with square pulses. Demonstrations of communication at high temperature included transmission of a 90-KB image at the bit rate of 10 Kbps with a bit error rate of 10 -3 across a 6-ft-long straight pipe heated up to 230 degrees C. Additional preliminary studies were conducted to evaluate ultrasonic communication system resilience to environmental degradation and damage.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2024

ChatGPT and Other Large Language Models for Cybersecurity of Smart Grid Applications

Cybersecurity breaches targeting electrical substations constitute a significant threat to the integrity of the power grid, necessitating comprehensive defense and mitigation strategies. Any anomaly in information and communication technology (ICT) should be detected for secure communications between devices in digital substations. This paper proposes large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, for the cybersecurity of IEC 61850-based communications. Multi-cast messages such as generic object oriented system events (GOOSE) and sampled values (SV) are used for case studies. The proposed LLM-based cybersecurity framework includes, for the first time, data pre-processing of communication systems and human-in-the-loop (HITL) training (considering the cybersecurity guidelines recommended by humans). The results show a comparative analysis of detected anomaly data carried out based on the performance evaluation metrics for different LLMs. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed is used to generate and extract a dataset of IEC 61850 communications.

ChatGPT↗
DOE OSTI2022

Power Electronic Hardware-in-the-Loop (PE-HIL): Testing Individual Controllers in Large-Scale Power Electronics Systems

Large power electronics systems like multi-port autonomous reconfigurable solar power plant (MARS) are increasingly being researched upon to integrate emerging energy sources. MARS connects photovoltaic (PV) systems and energy storage systems (ESSs) to high-voltage direct current (HVdc) links/grids and high-voltage alternating current (ac) transmission grids. As these large power electronics systems incorporate complex hierarchical control systems that are close-by and communicate fast, the control systems require an unique power electronic hardware-in-the-loop (PE-HIL) real-time architecture to evaluate individual controllers. In this paper, a PE-HIL real-time architecture is proposed to evaluate one of the hundreds to thousands of digital signal processors (DSPs) that are a part of the complex hierarchical control system. The DSP connects to a central processing unit (CPU) and a field programmable gate array (FPGA) that form a part of the upper levels of the control system. The DSP is part of the lower level of the control system. The proposed PE-HIL architecture is tested and evaluated. Preliminary test results are presented to showcase the concept.

Debnath, Suman↗
DOE OSTI2023

Evaluating Named Data Networking for Industrial Control System [Slides]

Current proposed work is: See if the inherent security that comes with Named Networking (NDN) can be applied to Industrial Control Systems; and, Every packet is required to be cryptographically signed which makes every single piece of data communicated in the system secure and authenticated.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Impact of cyberattacks on safety and stability of connected and automated vehicle platoons under lane changes

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) offer a huge potential to improve the operations and safety of transportation systems. However, the use of smart devices and communications in CAVs introduce new risks. CAVs would leverage vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication, thus providing additional system access points compared to traditional systems. Automation makes these systems more vulnerable and increases the consequences of cyberattacks. This study utilizes an infrastructure-based communication platform consisting of cooperative adaptive cruise control and lane control advisories developed by the authors to perform cyber risk assessment of CAVs. The study emulates three types of cyberattacks (message falsification, dedicated denial of service, and spoofing attacks) in a representative traffic environment consisting of multiple CAV platoons and lane change events to analyze the safety and stability impacts of the cyberattacks. Simulation experiments using VISSIM reveals that traffic stream and CAV string is unstable under all three types of cyberattacks. The worst case is represented by the message falsification attack. Increases in volatility are observed over a no attack case, with variations increasing by an average of 43%–51% along with an increase of over 3000 crash conflicts. Similarly, lane change crash conflicts are observed to be more severe compared to rear end crash conflicts, showing a higher probability of severe injuries. Further, the case of slight cyberattack on a single CAV also creates significant disruption in the traffic stream. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) reveals the statistical significance of the results. Furthermore, these results pave the way for future design of secure systems from a monitoring perspective.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2020

Cybersecurity Attacks in Vehicular Sensors

Today's modern vehicles contain anywhere from sixty to one-hundred sensors and exhibit the characteristics of Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS). There is a high degree of coupling, cohesiveness, and interactions among vehicle's CPS components (e.g., sensors, devices, systems, systems-of-systems) across sensing, communication, and control layers. Cyber-attacks in the sensing or communication layers can compromise the security of the control layer. This paper provides a detailed review of potential cyber threats related to the sensing layer. Notably, the focus is mainly towards two categories of sensors: vehicle dynamics sensors (e.g., Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS), magnetic encoders, and inertial sensors) and environment sensors (e.g., Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), ultrasonic, camera, Radio Detection and Ranging (Radar) systems, and Global Positioning System (GPS) units). Furthermore, the paper also offers perspectives through existing countermeasures from literature and stresses the need for data-driven cybersecurity solutions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2023

Invited Paper: Benchmarking and Optimizing Data Movement on Emerging Heterogeneous Architectures

As supercomputers evolve, nodes are continually increasing in complexity. As a result, each generation of parallel systems brings new performance challenges. For instance, on recent systems inter-node communication has outperformed inter-socket, resulting in poor performance of many node-aware communication optimizations. Communication optimizations are critical for the performance and scalability of parallel applications, but are dependent on the parallel architecture, which varies significantly among recent generations of supercomputers. Furthermore, this paper investigates the performance of various paths of data movement on recent generations of systems, and analyzes the increased complexity of communication, particularly on recent heterogeneous systems. The paper also introduces MPI Advance, a communication library that enables optimizations to be created based on benchmark analysis of each emerging system.

benchmarking↗
DOE OSTI2023

Disrupting EV Charging Sessions and Gaining Remote Code Execution with DoS, MITM, and Code Injection Exploits using OCPP 1.6

Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) 1.6 is widely used in the electric vehicle (EV) charging industry to communicate between Charging System Management Services (CSMSs) and Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE). Unlike OCPP 2.0.1, OCPP 1.6 uses unencrypted websocket communications to exchange information between EVSE devices and an onpremise or cloud-based CSMS. In this work, we demonstrate two machine-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks on OCPP sessions to terminate charging sessions and gain root access to the EVSE equipment via remote code execution (RCE). Second, we demonstrate a malicious firmware update with a code injection payload to compromise an EVSE. Lastly, we demonstrate two methods to prevent availability of the EVSE or CSMS. One of these, originally reported by SaiFlow, prevents traffic to legitimate EVSE equipment using a DoS-like attack on CSMSs by repeatedly connecting and authenticating several CPs with the same identities as the legitimate CP. These vulnerabilities were demonstrated with proof-of-concept exploits in a virtualized Cyber Range at Wright State University and/or with a 350 kW Direct Current Fast Charger (DCFC) at Idaho National Laboratory. The team found that OCPP 1.6 could be protected from these attacks by adding secure shell (SSH) tunnels to the protocol, if upgrading to OCPP 2.0.1 was not an option. Index Terms—Electric vehicle charging, cybersecurity, OCPP, cyberattack, cyber-resilience. INSPEC Accession Number: 23981565

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Resilient Distributed Frequency Regulation of Renewable Generators under Communication Interruptions

Modern power systems (MPSs) face significant challenges due to the high penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs) and new types of loads such as electric vehicles (EVs). Traditional load frequency control (LFC) methods struggle with the intermittent, stochastic nature of RESs, the near-zero inertia of power-electronics-based generators, and the mobility of controllable loads and battery systems. This paper introduces a novel resilient distributed frequency regulation method to address these issues. The proposed method employs a state space model to represent the dynamic behavior of participating power sources while accounting for stochastic switching processes to model structural and parameter variations caused by disruptions such as generator connection/disconnection, communication interruptions, and physical faults. By integrating these dynamic and stochastic components, the method treats power grids as a comprehensive stochastic hybrid system. Our method enhances conventional frequency control by incorporating local stability control, neighborhood control decoupling, and coordination feedback. Theoretical analyses establish the stability, convergence, and resilience of the proposed method, and its effectiveness is validated through case studies.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Adaptive Protective Relay Settings – A Vision to the Future

Adaptive relaying utilizes the continuously changing status of the power system as the basis for online adjustment of the power system relay settings. Fundamentally they are protection schemes that adjust settings and/or logic of operations based on the prevailing conditions of the system. These adjustments can include, but are not limited to, the logging of data for post-mortem analysis, communication throughout the system, as well as changing relay parameters. Adaptive relaying considers the fact that the status of a power system can change. These include system configuration changes, load effect, cold load pickup, end-of-line protection, transformer protection, and automatic reclosing. In this research, the author focus on the need for a secure, selective, and reliable system for adaptive overcurrent protection in T&D and Distributed Energy Systems. Various types of adaptive methods are presented and explained along with some pros and cons of each.

Mukherjee, Srijib↗
DOE OSTI2021

Emergency Voltage Regulation in Power Systems via Ripple-Type Control

With increasing penetrations of volatile renewable generation and cyber-physical disruptions, ensuring the safe operation of bulk power systems has become unprecedentedly challenging. Because communication and computational costs restrict centralized system dispatch to being called upon every few minutes, and because purely local schemes are shown to be insufficient, distributed controls have been advocated for handling unanticipated system conditions in real time. The applicability of distributed control schemes, however, is fundamentally limited by their need for widespread communication and model cognizance. In this context, we put forth a hybrid, low-communication, saturation-driven protocol for the coordination of control agents that are distributed over a physical system and are allowed to communicate with peers over a "hotline" communication network. Under this protocol, when agents observe a constraint violation based on local measurements, they respond locally until their control resources saturate, in which case they send a beacon for assistance to peer agents. The scheme ensures that minor violations are efficiently mitigated via fast local controls, whereas severe violations can be handled by collaboration among a relatively small set of agents. We evaluate the performance of this scheme via numerical tests on the IEEE 14-bus test feeder, where agents act upon noisy measurements under diverse scenarios of load variations and severe low-/high-voltage events.

collaboration↗
DOE OSTI2021

Emergency Voltage Regulation in Power Systems via Ripple-Type Control: Preprint

With increasing penetration of volatile renewable generation and cyber-physical disruptions, ensuring safe operation of bulk power systems has become unprecedentedly challenging. Since communication and computational costs restrict centralized system dispatch to be called upon every few minutes; and purely local schemes are shown to be insufficient, distributed controls have been advocated for handling unanticipated system conditions in real time. However, the applicability of distributed control schemes is fundamentally limited by their need for widespread communication and model cognizance. In this con-text, we put forth a hybrid low-communication saturation-driven protocol for the coordination of control agents that are distributed over a physical system and are allowed to communicate with peers over a ‘hotline’ communication network. Under this protocol, when agents observe a constraint violation based on local measurements, they respond locally until their control resources saturate, in which case they send a beacon for assistance to peer agents. The scheme ensures that minor violations are efficiently mitigated via fast local controls, while severe violations may be handled by a collaboration of a relatively small set of agents. We evaluate the performance of this scheme via extensive numerical tests on the IEEE 14-bus test feeder, where agents act upon noisy measurements under diverse scenarios of random load variations and severe low/high voltage events.

distributed control↗
DOE OSTI2024

Large-Scale Hydrogen Storage Cyber Risk Assessment

Hydrogen storage systems may become more widely deployed throughout the country, and so it is possible that individual and interconnected systems will be exposed to cyber-attacks. These events can cause physical and financial harm to employees, people in the vicinity of the facility, and the company that owns the facility. The two main ways bad actors may access information or control from a hydrogen storage facility are through information technology and operations technology devices, the former of which refers to data and information from networked devices and the latter of which refers to onsite controls for the physical system. Both types of entryways into the system should be considered when companies conduct cyber risk assessments and when regulators develop or revise relevant codes and standards. This report analyzes cybersecurity risks associated with a generic hydrogen storage system by outlining the system's purpose and the importance of its cybersecurity. The hydrogen storage system architecture and communication protocols are provided to understand potential cyber vulnerabilities. Later, an event tree analysis is performed on hydrogen operation to identify system weaknesses by outlining potential attack scenarios. This report also identifies critical cyber assets related to different hydrogen operations followed by an examination of potential threats, and the impact of cyber assets on those operational assets.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2024

Large-Scale Hydrogen Storage Cyber Risk Assessment

Hydrogen storage systems are becoming more widely deployed throughout the country, and as their presence continues to grow, it is possible that individual and interconnected systems will be exposed to cyber-attacks. These events can cause physical and financial harm to employees, people in the vicinity, and to the company that owns the facility. The two main mechanisms malicious actors may access information or control from a hydrogen storage facility are through information technology and operations technology devices, the former of which refers to data and information from networked devices and the latter of which refers to onsite controls for the physical system. Both types of entryways into the system should be considered when facility managers conduct cyber risk assessments and when regulators develop or revise relevant codes and standards. This report analyzes cybersecurity risks applicable to a wide variety of hydrogen storage systems by outlining the system's purpose and the importance of its cybersecurity. The hydrogen storage system architecture and communication protocols are provided to understand potential cyber vulnerabilities. Later, an event tree analysis is performed on hydrogen operation to identify system weaknesses by outlining potential attack scenarios. This report also identifies critical cyber assets related to different hydrogen operations followed by an examination of potential threats, and the impact of cyber assets on those operational assets.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2022

Communication Requirements for Price-Based Grid Coordination

Meeting ambitious goals for carbon reduction and supporting an electric grid with high levels of renewable energy supply will require significant flexibility from the demand side. This paper outlines a system architecture and communication technology infrastructure to enable dynamic pricing to be used to finely tune coordination between the grid and its customers. Taking a cue from the success of Internet architecture, this system — Price-Based Grid Coordination — emphasizes simplicity and universality. It enables a wide variety of ways for prices and other signals to pass from the grid to individual flexible loads, including multiple possible locations for the intelligence that combines price signals with device functional needs. The paper includes a reference data model to describe how information from the utility level can be conveyed to customer devices, but independent of any particular protocol. The paper also summarizes technology standards development needs, and reviews research needs to address the full spectrum of coordination scenarios.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗