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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 307 records · Page 17

The International Pulsar Timing Array: Second Data Release

In this paper, we describe the International Pulsar Timing Array second data release, which includes recent pulsar timing data obtained by three regional consortia: the European Pulsar Timing Array, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, and the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. We analyse and where possible combine high-precision timing data for 65 millisecond pulsars which are regularly observed by these groups. A basic noise analysis, including the processes which are both correlated and uncorrelated in time, provides noise models and timing ephemerides for the pulsars. We find that the timing precisions of pulsars are generally improved compared to the previous data release, mainly due to the addition of new data in the combination. The main purpose of this work is to create the most up-to-date IPTA data release. These data are publicly available for searches for low-frequency gravitational waves and other pulsar science.

neutron↗

Guideline for Characterizing and Evaluating a Candidate Project Site for Solar Thermal Applications

This document presents a structured procedure for characterizing and evaluating candidate project sites for concentrating solar power (CSP) and solar heat for industrial processes (SHIP) applications. The objective is to provide project developers, researchers, and other stakeholders with a consistent, technology-agnostic framework for early-stage site assessment, enabling informed decision-making prior to significant investment in project development. Site selection is a critical factor in project success or failure for both CSP and SHIP projects. Key factors such as solar resource availability, land characteristics, environmental and regulatory constraints, infrastructure availability, and community context are determined by the choice of project site and can materially impact project performance, cost, schedule, and overall viability. This procedure is designed to systematically evaluate these factors, identify potential fatal flaws, and prioritize the most favorable candidate sites for further development. The process begins with rapid screening-level evaluation, using publicly available data to assess solar resource, land availability and suitability, zoning and land-use compatibility, and exclusion zones such as protected lands or sensitive habitats. Sites that meet the minimum screening criteria advance to a more detailed characterization. Subsequent sections of this report provide guidance for a next-level assessment of the most important technical and environmental parameters, including: 1) Solar resource quality, variability, and uncertainty using multiyear datasets and, where appropriate, on-site measurement campaigns; 2) Meteorological conditions such as wind, temperature, extreme weather events, and soiling impacts; 3) Land characteristics including slope, shading, and geotechnical conditions; and 4) Environmental and regulatory considerations, including permitting processes, endangered species, cultural resources, and visual impacts. The procedure also addresses infrastructure and integration considerations, including: 1) Grid interconnection requirements for CSP power generation projects; 2) Electrical and operational integration for SHIP facilities; 3) Water availability, quality, and permitting constraints, which are particularly critical for CSP in arid regions; and 4) Site access, construction logistics, and availability of workforce and supporting services. Recognizing the importance of social and economic context, the procedure includes evaluation of community engagement factors, such as stakeholder sentiment, proximity to sensitive visual receptors, workforce development opportunities, and local economic incentives. The outputs of these assessments are synthesized in a cost and risk evaluation, translating site characteristics into expected impacts on capital cost, operating cost, schedule, and technical risk. This is complemented by screening-level performance modeling, including 8760 simulations and long-term projections, to quantify expected energy or thermal output, assess variability thereof, and support comparison between candidate sites. Finally, the procedure provides high-level guidance on a structured go/no-go decision framework, categorizing sites based on identified risks and constraints, and outlining a clear path forward to feasibility studies and front-end engineering design for viable projects. By standardizing the site characterization process across both CSP and SHIP applications, this guideline aims to: 1) Improve consistency and transparency in early-stage project evaluation; 2) Reduce development risk and avoid investment in nonviable project sites; 3) Support collaboration between developers, researchers, and public agencies; and 4) Accelerate successful deployment of concentrating solar technologies for both power generation and industrial process heat.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

SCALE inventory and reactivity analysis as part of the Hermes 2021 PSAR review

The readiness of SCALE for comprehensive studies of pebble-bed reactors has been demonstrated through detailed analysis of a fluoride salt–cooled, high-temperature pebble-bed reactor (PB-FHR). The methods developed for pebble-bed reactor modeling in SCALE, particularly for inventory generation, have proven effective in gaining insights into the reactor physics of this advanced reactor. Excellent agreement with another code package has been observed, further highlighting SCALE’s strong performance. The SCALE results supported the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s construction permit application review of the Hermes low-power PB-FHR demonstration reactor. A SCALE model of the Hermes reactor was developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory using information from the Preliminary Safety Analysis Report (PSAR) and supplemented with publicly available data. SCALE reactivity coefficient simulations reproduced PSAR results within 1σ statistical uncertainties. Sensitivity studies emphasized the importance of graphite specifications for accurate keff predictions.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Comparative techno-economic and environmental analysis of using nuclear energy and fossil energy with carbon sequestration in U.S. Gulf Coast petroleum refineries

U.S. Gulf Coast refineries have processing capacity of approximately 9.4 million barrels of crude oil per day—about 50% of U.S. national capacity—while consuming natural gas, electricity, and hydrogen, resulting in approximately 100 million metric tonnes (MMT) of onsite CO₂ emissions in 2022. This study evaluates two alternative refinery energy supply pathways: nuclear energy (NE) and fossil energy-derived hydrogen with carbon capture and sequestration (FE-CCS; autothermal reforming), intermittent renewable sources are not considered as they cannot reliably meet continuous industrial heat and hydrogen demands. Using publicly available data for refineries, we conducted a bottom-up, facility-level assessment to estimate energy use by type, well-to-gate refinery emissions, and associated costs of integration. Compared to current refinery operations using natural gas energy supply and conventional hydrogen production (steam methane reforming without sequestration), NE and FE-CCS could produce, respectively, average emissions reductions of 37% and 42%, total abatement costs of $\$$52–$\$$221 and $\$$211–$\$$612/MT CO₂, and additional costs of about $\$$0.2–$\$$6 and $\$$3–$\$$11 per barrel of crude, respectively. Our analysis indicates that 25 out of 27 refineries have lower total additional cost ($\$$/bbl.) for the NE scenario than the FE-CCS scenario, making a strong case for NE integration with petroleum refineries. This work's main contribution is a detailed bottom-up refinery-level analysis method that can be utilized by the worldwide refining industry and stakeholders as they assess different technological options, along with their costs and environmental impacts for a specific refinery operation.

Carbon capture and sequestration↗

A projection method for particle resampling

Particle discretizations of partial differential equations are advantageous for high-dimensional kinetic models in phase-space due to their better scalability than continuum approaches with respect to dimension. Complex processes collectively referred to as particle noise hamper long time simulations with particle methods. One approach to address this problem is particle mesh adaptivity, or remapping, known as particle resampling and remeshing. Here, this work introduces a resampling method that projects particles to and from a (finite element) function space. The method is simple, using standard sparse linear algebra and finite element techniques, and it preserves all moments up to the order of a polynomial represented exactly by the continuum function space. It is distinguished from most other mesh-based methods in that new particle positions and number are decoupled from the mesh, allowing particle and continuum meshes to be adapted relatively independently. While this work is developed with structured particle and continuum phase-space grids on 1X + 1V Vlasov-Poisson models of Landau damping and two-stream instability, the method is well-suited to unstructured grids. Stable long time dynamics are demonstrated up to time T = 500. Reproducibility artifacts and data are publicly available.

Kinetic methods↗

Rapid characterization and failure analysis of 6276 rooftop-harvested photovoltaic connectors

Photovoltaic (PV) connectors, which link modules in series and connect PV strings in parallel, have increasingly been recognized as a primary contributor to PV system failures and a source of numerous fire incidents. However, publicly available data on the rates and types of connector failures are scarce, primarily due to the proprietary nature of the information and the need for comprehensive analysis. This study represents the first large-scale investigation of harvested PV connectors, drawing from a dataset of 6276 connectors from residential rooftop solar systems across the United States. The outcome of this work is twofold: 1) we have established a rapid characterization method for large populations of harvested connectors, incorporating visual inspection, resistance measurements, and X-ray imaging; and 2) the analysis made possible by our rapid-processing method has revealed, for a population of connector models provided by a single rooftop installer, failure statistics and insights for various connector makes and models, installation practices, operating currents, and internal component displacements. This research identifies common failure modes that could be considered in future connector designs standards, and operations and maintenance practices, to ultimately improve the reliability of this vital component of PV infrastructure.

MC4↗

Small-scale properties from exascale computations of turbulence on a $\mathbf{32\,768^3}$ periodic cube

To study the physics of small-scale properties of homogeneous isotropic turbulence at increasingly high Reynolds numbers, direct numerical simulation results have been obtained for forced isotropic turbulence at Taylor-scale Reynolds number R λ = 2500 on a 32 768 3 three-dimensional periodic domain using a GPU pseudo-spectral code on a 1.1 exaflop GPU supercomputer (Frontier). These simulations employ the multi-resolution independent simulation (MRIS) technique (Yeung & Ravikumar 2020, Phys. Rev. Fluids, vol. 5, 110517) where ensemble averaging is performed over multiple short segments initiated from velocity fields at modest resolution, and subsequently taken to higher resolution in both space and time. Reynolds numbers are increased by reducing the viscosity with the large-scale forcing parameters unchanged. Although MRIS segments at the highest resolution for each Reynolds number last for only a few Kolmogorov time scales, small-scale physics in the dissipation range is well captured – for instance, in the probability density functions and higher moments of the dissipation rate and enstrophy density, which appear to show monotonic trends persisting well beyond the Reynolds number range in prior works in the literature. Attainment of range of length and time scales consistent with classical scaling also reinforces the potential utility of the present high-resolution data for studies of short-time-scale turbulence physics at high Reynolds numbers where full-length simulations spanning many large-eddy time scales are still not accessible. A single snapshot of the 32 768 3 data is publicly available for further analyses via the Johns Hopkins Turbulence Database.

intermittency↗

Energy Emissions Accounting Methods Can Determine Whether Direct Air Capture with Storage Achieves Net Removal

The voluntary carbon market within the United States has expanded rapidly in recent years and enabled private companies and other organizations to provide revenue streams to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. For a CDR technology to participate in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), the emissions associated with constructing and operating the technology must be less than the CO 2 captured from the atmosphere. Assessing the extent to which this is true for direct air capture with storage (DACS), a relatively energy-intensive CDR technology, strongly depends on the accounting method used to assess the emissions intensity of purchased energy. We simulate the hourly weather-dependent operation of sorbent- and solvent-based DACS in California, Louisiana, Texas, and Wyoming, representing a wide range of local weather and electric and natural gas grid compositions. In all cases, the single most important emissions accounting decision is the method used to estimate the emissions intensity of purchased grid electricity, which varies the calculated net removal by −1049% to +108%. All other factors influencing net removal introduce a variation of at most ±14%. No electricity emissions accounting method is universally conservative across all scenarios, and none is objectively more accurate. High-spatiotemporal-resolution, high-quality, publicly available data sets and models for electricity emissions accounting do not currently exist and are urgently needed to enable standardization of emissions accounting methods to more accurately determine the true emissions impacts of DACS and other energy-intensive facilities.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Harmonized Database of Western U.S. Water Rights (HarDWR) v.1

Abstract In the arid and semi-arid Western U.S., access to water is regulated through a legal system of water rights. Individuals, companies, organizations, municipalities, and tribal entities have documents that declare their water rights. State water regulatory agencies collate and maintain these records, which can be used in legal disputes over access to water. While these records are publicly available data in all Western U.S. states, the data have not yet been readily available in digital form from all states. Furthermore, there are many differences in data format, terminology, and definitions between state water regulatory agencies. Here, we have collected water rights data from 11 Western U.S. state agencies, harmonized terminology and use definitions, formatted them for consistency, and tied them to a Western U.S.-wide shapefile of water administrative boundaries.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

An introduction to Spent Nuclear Fuel decay heat for Light Water Reactors: a review from the NEA WPNCS

This paper summarized the efforts performed to understand decay heat estimation from existing spent nuclear fuel (SNF), under the auspices of the Working Party on Nuclear Criticality Safety (WPNCS) of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency. Needs for precise estimations are related to safety, cost, and optimization of SNF handling, storage, and repository. The physical origins of decay heat (a more correct denomination would be decay power) are then introduced, to identify its main contributors (fission products and actinides) and time-dependent evolution. Due to limited absolute prediction capabilities, experimental information is crucial; measurement facilities and methods are then presented, highlighting both their relevance and our need for maintaining the unique current full-scale facility and developing new ones. The third part of this report is dedicated to the computational aspect of the decay heat estimation: calculation methods, codes, and validation. Different approaches and implementations currently exist for these three aspects, directly impacting our capabilities to predict decay heat and to inform decision-makers. Finally, recommendations from the expert community are proposed, potentially guiding future experimental and computational developments. One of the most important outcomes of this work is the consensus among participants on the need to reduce biases and uncertainties for the estimated SNF decay heat. If it is agreed that uncertainties (being one standard deviation) are on average small (less than a few percent), they still substantially impact various applications when one needs to consider up to three standard deviations, thus covering more than 95% of cases. The second main finding is the need of new decay heat measurements and validation for cases corresponding to more modern fuel characteristics: higher initial enrichment, higher average burnup, as well as shorter and longer cooling time. Similar needs exist for fuel types without public experimental data, such as MOX, VVER, or CANDU fuels. A third outcome is related to SNF assemblies for which no direct validation can be performed, representing the vast majority of cases (due to the large number of SNF assemblies currently stored, or too short or too long cooling periods of interest). A few solutions are possible, depending on the application. For the final repository, systematic measurements of quantities related to decay heat can be performed, such as neutron or gamma emission. This would provide indications of the SNF decay heat at the time of encapsulation. For other applications (short- or long-term cooling), the community would benefit from applying consistent and accepted recommendations on calculation methods, for both decay heat and uncertainties. This would improve the understanding of the results and make comparisons easier.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Validating and Comparing Energy Estimation Methods at Water Resource Recovery Facilities

Water resource recovery facilities play a crucial role in the water-energy nexus, consuming a substantial amount of energy in the United States. Growing treatment volumes and more stringent water quality standards are expected to increase the amount of energy needed to treat wastewater, but accurately estimating energy consumption and potential remains challenging due to variability in scale, treatment methods, and effluent treatment standards. In this study, we used publicly available data to evaluate the accuracy of methods for estimating energy consumption and generation, then quantified uncertainty based on key factors like flow rate, treatment level, and geographic location. To validate methods, we estimated energy consumption and generation at the facility-level, then compared estimates to self-reported data from utilities in major U.S. cities. We found that process models of treatment trains under best practice configurations were accurate relative to other methods for estimating electricity use, total energy use, and electricity generation from biogas utilization, and less complex methods based on effluent treatment level and prime movers also performed well for estimating electricity consumption and generation, respectively. Applying the evaluated methods to a national inventory of treatment facilities, we estimate that annual energy consumption ranged from 56.3 x 10^3 to 82.5 x 10^3 TJ in 2012 and 83.6 x 10^3 to 127 x 10^3 TJ in 2042. Our results indicate that not all estimation methods are suited for every use case, so we recommend that researchers and practitioners select an estimation method based on data availability and desired computational intensity.

Hodson, Abigayle↗

DNABERT-S: pioneering species differentiation with species-aware DNA embeddings

SUMMARY: We introduce DNABERT-S, a tailored genome model that develops species-aware embeddings to naturally cluster and segregate DNA sequences of different species in the embedding space. Differentiating species from genomic sequences (i.e. DNA and RNA) is vital yet challenging, since many real-world species remain uncharacterized, lacking known genomes for reference. Embedding-based methods are therefore used to differentiate species in an unsupervised manner. DNABERT-S builds upon a pre-trained genome foundation model named DNABERT-2. To encourage effective embeddings to error-prone long-read DNA sequences, we introduce Manifold Instance Mixup (MI-Mix), a contrastive objective that mixes the hidden representations of DNA sequences at randomly selected layers and trains the model to recognize and differentiate these mixed proportions at the output layer. We further enhance it with the proposed Curriculum Contrastive Learning (C2LR) strategy. Empirical results on 28 diverse datasets show DNABERT-S's effectiveness, especially in realistic label-scarce scenarios. For example, it identifies twice more species from a mixture of unlabeled genomic sequences, doubles the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) in species clustering, and outperforms the top baseline's performance in 10-shot species classification with just a 2-shot training. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Model, codes, and data are publically available at https://github.com/MAGICS-LAB/DNABERT_S.

Zhou, Zhihan↗

Are there correlations in the HAWC and IceCube high energy skymaps outside the Galactic plane?

We use publicly available data to perform a search for correlations of high energy neutrino candidate events detected by IceCube and high-energy photons seen by the HAWC Collaboration. Our search is focused on unveiling such correlations outside of the Galactic plane. This search is sensitive to correlations in the neutrino candidate and photon skymaps which would arise from a population of unidentified point sources. We find no evidence for such a correlation, but suggest strategies for improvements with new datasets. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗

A Tutorial on the Control of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines: Stability Challenges and Opportunities for Power Capture

Climate change is a serious threat facing humanity. The United States (U.S.) and many other countries are increasing the amount of electrical power generated from renewable energy sources in an effort to combat climate change and ensure energy independence. The U.S. has set goals to achieve a 100% decarbonized electric grid by 2035 and a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050. Renewable energy currently accounts for about 20% of the U.S. power grid. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in the U.S. in 2021, wind and solar photovoltaic generation supplied 9.1% and 4% of total electricity generation, respectively, and the latest publicly available data show that hydropower represented 6.6% of all electricity generated in the U.S. in 2019. As wind farms have been built in many of the best wind resource areas on land, the U.S. and many other countries are turning to offshore wind for further growth of wind power capacity. Further, the U.S. has committed to deploy 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, a significant increase from the 0.04 GW of installed offshore wind in the country as of the end of 2023. Many other countries have also established ambitious goals or plans to increase the amount of installed offshore wind power.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Firm Synthesizer and Supply-chain Simulator (SynthFirm) v1.0

SynthFirm is a large-scale agent-based freight demand model which generates a complete synthetic population of firms in the U.S. and the business-to-business commodity flows between them. Using publicly available data sources as inputs, SynthFirm simulates detailed firm and fleet characteristics, commodity production and consumption, formation of supply chains, and selection of shipping modes, all of which are essential drivers of commodity flow at a disaggregate level.

Xu, Xiaodan↗

cjohnson-LANL/GRL_Kilauea

The python routines are outlined in detail to perform the methods and results in the manuscript under review in the journal Geophysical Research Letters titled “Seismic features predict ground motions during repeating caldera collapse sequence” with LA-UR-23-33345. All routines are written in open source python and were applied to publicly available data sets. The codes formats the data into the appropriate structure required to train a boosted tree regression model. Other codes produce figure results.

Johnson, Christopher W↗

AI for Earthquake Physics

The core LANL program sponsored by Office of Science, Basic Energy Science, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences (DOE-BES-CSGB) and led by PI Johnson aims to research earthquake faults to advance fault physics and earthquake hazards. All work completed is required to be made publicly available through publications and open-source codes supporting the published results. All routines are/will-be written in open source python and applied to publicly available data sets. These routines will format data from input into models, develop and test modeling frameworks for the problems addressed, and produce figures applicable to peer-reviewed manuscripts. All work is reviewed for Los Alamos Unlimited Release before submitting to a journal. This summary encompasses recently completed work and work to be complete for the duration of the program.

Johnson, Christopher↗

Firm Synthesizer and Supply-chain Simulator (SynthFirm) v2.0

SynthFirm is a national-scale agent-based freight demand model which generates a complete synthetic population of firms in the U.S. and the business-to-business commodity flows between them. Using publicly available data sources as inputs, SynthFirm simulates detailed firm and fleet characteristics, commodity production and consumption, formation of supply chains, and selection of shipping modes, all of which are essential drivers of commodity flow at a disaggregate level. The SynthFirm 2.0 version includes national commercial vehicle fleet generation, international trade simulation and automized model validation pipeline, which allows seemless deployment across the nation and build a comprehensive freight inventories at national scale or for selected region.

Yang, Hung-Chia [Lawrence Berkeley National Labora↗