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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 343 records · Page 19

Future of plasma etching for microelectronics: Challenges and opportunities

Plasma etching is an essential semiconductor manufacturing technology required to enable the current microelectronics industry. Along with lithographic patterning, thin-film formation methods, and others, plasma etching has dynamically evolved to meet the exponentially growing demands of the microelectronics industry that enables modern society. At this time, plasma etching faces a period of unprecedented changes owing to numerous factors, including aggressive transition to three-dimensional (3D) device architectures, process precision approaching atomic-scale critical dimensions, introduction of new materials, fundamental silicon device limits, and parallel evolution of post-CMOS approaches. The vast growth of the microelectronics industry has emphasized its role in addressing major societal challenges, including questions on the sustainability of the associated energy use, semiconductor manufacturing related emissions of greenhouse gases, and others. The goal of this article is to help both define the challenges for plasma etching and point out effective plasma etching technology options that may play essential roles in defining microelectronics manufacturing in the future. The challenges are accompanied by significant new opportunities, including integrating experiments with various computational approaches such as machine learning/artificial intelligence and progress in computational approaches, including the realization of digital twins of physical etch chambers through hybrid/coupled models. These prospects can enable innovative solutions to problems that were not available during the past 50 years of plasma etch development in the microelectronics industry. To elaborate on these perspectives, the present article brings together the views of various experts on the different topics that will shape plasma etching for microelectronics manufacturing of the future.

Engineering↗

Enabling human–infrastructure interfaces for inspection using augmented reality

Decaying infrastructure maintenance cost allocation depends heavily on accurate and safe inspection in the field. New tools to conduct inspections can assist in prioritizing investments in maintenance and repairs. The industrial revolution termed as “Industry 4.0” is based on the intelligence of machines working with humans in a collaborative workspace. Contrarily, infrastructure management has relied on the human for making day-to-day decisions. New emerging technologies can assist during infrastructure inspections, to quantify structural condition with more objective data. However, today’s owners agree in trusting the inspector’s decision in the field over data collected with sensors. If data collected in the field is accessible during the inspections, the inspector decisions can be improved with sensors. New research opportunities in the human–infrastructure interface would allow researchers to improve the human awareness of their surrounding environment during inspections. This article studies the role of Augmented Reality (AR) technology as a tool to increase human awareness of infrastructure in their inspection work. The domains of interest of this research include both infrastructure inspections (emphasis on the collection of data of structures to inform management decisions) and emergency management (focus on the data collection of the environment to inform human actions). This article describes the use of a head-mounted device to access real-time data and information during their field inspection. The authors leverage the use of low-cost smart sensors and QR code scanners integrated with Augmented Reality applications for augmented human interface with the physical environment. This article presents a novel interface architecture for developing Augmented Reality–enabled inspection to assist the inspector’s workflow in conducting infrastructure inspection works with two new applications and summarizes the results from various experiments. The main contributions of this work to computer-aided community are enabling inspectors to visualize data files from database and real-time data access using an Augmented Reality environment.

Maharjan, D.↗

Halide Perovskite Solar Photovoltaics

Technological progress in photovoltaic (PV) technologies provides hope that a comprehensive and desperately needed decarbonization of the energy sector is possible. Commercially successful PV technologies based predominantly on silicon wafer technology are reliable and cost-effective, but remain capital- and carbon-intensive. In this context, emerging PV technologies, such as metal-halide perovskites (MHPs), could further catalyze the energy transition by providing technological opportunities for even lower-cost, mass-producible, high-efficiency solar cells with a significantly reduced "carbon footprint." This themed issue of MRS Bulletin on "Halide perovskite solar photovoltaics summarizes the current state of the art, challenges, and opportunities of perovskite photovoltaics with contributions and perspectives from six expert teams worldwide. The topics covered provide a status update on perovskite PV, remaining hurdles to their deployment, and challenges to realizing the potential of this technology to impact climate goals. Articles in this collection address scalability of perovskite PV and prospects for industrial manufacturing; perovskite PV as an add-on technology on top of commercial silicon PV; environmental and sustainability considerations; and durability and reliability considerations. Further considerations include prospects of automation, coupled to artificial intelligence and machine learning, for accelerating material-based solutions to these outstanding challenges including the possibilities of discovering new absorber and device component materials to enable success and ultimately deployment of these next-generation PVs.

metal-halide perovskites↗

Statistical methods for design and testing of 3D-printed polymers

Different statistical methods are used in various fields to qualify processes and products, especially in emerging technologies like Additive Manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing. Since several statistical methods are being employed to ensure quality production of the 3D-printed parts, an overview of these methods used in 3D printing for different purposes is presented in this paper. The advantages and challenges, to understanding the importance it brings for design and testing optimization of 3D-printed parts are also discussed. The application of different metrology methods is also summarized to guide future researchers in producing dimensionally-accurate and good-quality 3D-printed parts. Here, this review paper shows that the Taguchi Methodology is the commonly-used statistical tool in optimizing mechanical properties of the 3D-printed parts, followed by Weibull Analysis and Factorial Design. In addition, key areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Finite Element Analysis (FEA), and Simulation require more research for improved 3D-printed part qualities for specific purposes. Future perspectives are also discussed, including other methods that can help further improve the overall quality of the 3D printing process from designing to manufacturing.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Advanced and functional composite materials via additive manufacturing: Trends and perspectives

Additive manufacturing (AM) has many advantages over conventional subtractive manufacturing methods. The cost-effective AM allows for precise fabrication of complex structures with less material waste, making it a popular manufacturing process in many applications. The recent development of AM materials has advanced significantly. Further, by precisely controlling material distribution and microstructural features, AM facilitates the creation of new composites with specific requirements. AM techniques have contributed considerably to integrating unique functionalities for various applications. This review emphasizes multiple categories of materials, including metal alloys, polymer-based composites, and sustainable composites, as well as applications of sensing materials and strategies and emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

CCSI Toolset 3.19 Release

CCSI Toolset 3.19 Release Highlights A gradient generation tool was developed to support GENN models in FOQUS. Certain machine learning tools train gradient-enhanced neural network (GENN) models which can be more accurate for complex datasets given a priori knowledge of model derivatives. However, the derivatives must be known beforehand and are not often available for process data. This tool automatically predicts the gradients for a training dataset in a form usable by common GENN trainers, such as Surrogate Modeling Toolbox. Support was added for Surrogate Modeling Toolbox GENN models in FOQUS, including updates to the run methods, node properties, test framework, documentation and optional dependencies list. Users can train/save Surrogate Modeling Toolbox gradient-enhanced neural network (GENN) models with custom objects and produce .pkl files compatible with the Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence Plugin in FOQUS. A simpler implementation of the ordering algorithm in the Sequential Design of Experiments (SDOE) module was included. The SDOE examples documentation was updated. The Optimality-Based Design of Experiments was updated to improve the error handling when the results are None.

AS↗

CCSI Toolset 3.20 Release

CCSI Toolset 3.20 Release Highlights Minimum Viable Product surrogate plugin was added for creating Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence models. Corresponding documentation was added for the plugin. Sequential Design of Experiments plots were updated to eliminate an issue with the window stack ordering upon closure of the plots. Support for Python 3.7 was removed. Documentation was improved by adding new mandatory section to the ReadTheDocs configuration and adding installation instructions back for NLOpt. TurbineLite was updated to 3.0.0, which is compatible with SimSinter 3.0.0. The developer environment was updated and 32-bit support was removed. SimSinter was updated to 3.0.0. This version removed gPROMS support and included security updates.

AS↗

CCSI Toolset 3.22 Release

CCSI Toolset 3.22 Release Highlights The Sequential Design of Experiments user interface was updated to resolve an issue where the results would fail to plot in some cases (e.g., Non-Uniform Space Filling designs). The Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence module was updated to support Keras 3 and to reflect changes made to dependencies’ syntax. A check was added to ensure PSUADE is installed and available at FOQUS startup. If PSUADE is not installed, a link to the FOQUS documentation is displayed and FOQUS is closed. The copyright year was updated to include 2024 in places where it had not previously been updated. Typographical errors were corrected to improve clarity in variable names and documentation. The FOQUS documentation was updated to reflect the fact that ALAMO can have two executables and indicates the correct executable to add to the Settings path. SimSinter was updated to version 3.1.0. This version removed gPROMS support and included security updates.

AS↗

TEACHING AN OLD ACCELERATOR NEW TRICKS

The Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS) has been a National User Facility since 1985. In that time, many of the systems that help operators retrieve, modify, and store beamline parameters have not kept pace with the advancement of technology. Development of a new method of storing and retrieving beamline parameters resulted in the testing and installation of a time-series database as a potential replacement for the traditional relational database. InfluxDB was selected due to its self-hosted Open-Source version availability as well as the simplicity of installation and setup. A program was written to periodically gather all accelerator parameters in the control system and store them in the time-series database. This resulted in over 13,000 distinct data points, captured at 5-minute intervals. A second test captured 35 channels on a 1-minute cadence. Graphing of the captured data is being done on Grafana, an Open-Source version is available that co-exists well with InfluxDB as the back-end. Grafana made visualizing the data simple and flexible. The testing has allowed for the use of modern graphing tools to generate new insights into operating the accelerator, as well as opened the door to building large data sets suitable for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning applications.

Novak, D.↗

Using MLIR Framework for Codesign of ML Architectures Algorithms and Simulation Tools

MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation), is an extensible compiler framework that supports high-level data structures and operation constructs. These higher-level code representations are particularly applicable to the artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) domain, allowing developers to more easily support upcoming heterogeneous AI/ML accelerators and develop flexible domain specific compilers/frameworks with higher-level intermediate representations (IRs) and advanced compiler optimizations. The result of using MLIR within the LLVM compiler framework is expected to yield significant improvement in the quality of generated machine code, which in turn will result in improved performance and hardware efficiency

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Fire Community Observatory: Interdisciplinary, AI-informed Post-Fire Rapid Response for Improved Water Cycle Science at Watershed Scale

Wildfire is an ecological disturbance that disrupts the hydrological cycle. In the past few years, a record number of multiple-and-compounding fires have occurred across urban-wildland gradients in the Western United States. Changes to watershed hydrological partitioning in response to fires (infiltration, runoff, evapotranspiration) presents unprecedented challenges to “Water-in-the-West” through negative impacts to water supply and its quality, and is a direct threat to downstream communities, groundwater, and drinking water supply infrastructure. While much work is being done to advance Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) use during fires for emergency response (i.e. predict fire movement, direct evacuations), significant potential exists to use AI/ML to address three scientific grand challenges that are rarely addressed in a convergent science context: 1) how to enhance the potential resiliency of a landscape before fire(s), 2) how to cost-effectively and optimally monitor watershed changes after fires, and 3) how to predict future hydrological and biogeochemical trajectories in fire-impacted watershed given climate change. This whitepaper addresses DOE Focal Area 1: Data acquisition and assimilation enabled by machine learning, AI, and advanced methods.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Brain Connectivity Workshop Series Report

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) BRAIN Initiative aims to accelerate development and application of technologies that show how individual brain cells in complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought and action. Complete wiring diagrams of the mammalian brain will revolutionize the capabilities of researchers to formulate and test models of how activity within brain circuits drives coordinated function and behavior. A top priority for the BRAIN Initiative, motivated by the strategic guidance of the BRAIN 2.0 Working Group report, is to muster the resources and foster the collaborations needed to generate these wiring diagrams at the level of long-range projections (“projectomes”) and synapses (“connectomes”) in whole mammalian brains, including those from rodents, humans, and other large-brained mammals. Achieving the scale and resolution necessary to characterize and use these projectomes and connectomes will not only push the boundaries of current imaging and computational capabilities to generate faster, cheaper, and more scalable technologies, but also drive broad innovation in data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

42 ENGINEERING↗

MindSynchro

This report presents the developments and results of MindSynchro project as part of DOE OE FOA 1861. DOE and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have made available to FOA awardees datasets containing years of real historical data recorded from various phasor measurement units (PMUs) which are installed in three large US interconnections: Texas (IC A), Western (IC B), and Eastern (IC C). The main goal of the project, which was successfully achieved, was to develop methods for detection and identification of events which are relevant for power grid operation. Tasks performed for achieving the project goals included data exploration and pre-processing, the development and application of physics-based features, data analysis and labeling based on unsupervised learning approaches, training and testing of DSSL models for classification of events which are relevant for power grid operation, and deployment of solutions to cloud environments. The methods developed in the project can potentially provide relevant benefits to power grid asset owners/operators in general in terms of situational awareness. Two main types of outcomes can be provided by these tools: Identification of specific relevant power grid event types: Semi-supervised ML methods developed in the project can adequately employ not only the relatively scarce labeled data but also the large amount of available unlabeled data to train models for detection of specific event types. Such methods enable the application of trained models for the detection of events in a population of PMUs much larger than that associated to the labeled events. Support in data labeling / label validation: Labels are critical for training of models for identification of specific types of events. However, labeling large amounts of data is a manual and tedious process. This means that such process is error prone and is not scalable. Methods developed in the project, based on ensembles of clustering models, have been successfully employed for turning manual labeling into a scalable process. Accurate identification of specific relevant events can provide the operators with immediate situational awareness that could otherwise require hours or days of analysis from domain experts. We envision that such methods could be initially employed in support of post-mortem analysis of events and, as confidence is gained, they could be employed for online/real-time support, providing, among other benefits, insights for avoiding major events which could happen due to a combination of smaller ones. On the longer term, related methods could potentially be employed to improve protection and control.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Plant Single-Cell Solutions for Energy and the Environment (Second Workshop Report)

Plants are important sources of energy and materials, and they collectively represent a critical component of Earth’s ecosystem. With increasing environmental stresses due to climate change and intensive agricultural practices, the need for resilient plants is greater than ever before. To secure plant resources for bioenergy, biomaterials, food, and ecosystem adaptation, a deeper understanding of the fundamental biology of plants at a cellular level is urgently needed. Plants contain a multitude of specialized cell types that compose tissues and organs. Pathogens often target specific cell types within plants, and the response of one cell to a particular stimulus is likely to be distinct from its neighbor because of underlying molecular and contextual differences. Understanding how these responses are distributed among cells, the main goal of single-cell approaches, will substantially enhance our ability to use targeted engineering for improving plant productivity and resilience. Furthermore, single-cell approaches are necessary to understand the interactions between plants and other ecosystem members such as fungi, bacteria, and archaea. Unlocking these gene-response mechanisms at a cellular level can improve our ability to adapt plants to environmental stresses, increasing their utility as feedstocks for biomaterials and bioenergy. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing, mass spectrometry, microfluidics and miniaturization, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and bioinformatics have greatly improved our ability to detect and understand processes at a cellular level. In mammalian systems, single-cell transcriptomics has already led to many advances, such as newly identified cell types and cell-targeted treatment of diseases, and mass spectrometry-based single-cell proteomics has recently been demonstrated as a promising emerging technology. However, plant single-cell omics has lagged behind mammalian approaches due to the high cost of the technologies relative to available resources and to the innate biological features of plants, including the complexity of the cell wall and polyploidy. To better understand how single-cell methods could enable plant science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) hosted a workshop on April 29, 2021, that brought together a diverse group of leaders in plant and/or single-cell biology. Attendees represented federal research programs and domestic and international academic institutions. During the workshop, three presenters described the current state of research in both experimental and computational approaches. While the focus of the workshop was on factors preventing plant biology researchers from fully adopting single-cell methodologies, workshop participants agreed that most barriers could be overcome with focused, strategic investment and coordinated efforts among institutions leading to significant scientific discoveries that would be difficult to obtain using more conventional technologies.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Unified Language Frontend for Physic-Informed AI/ML

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are becoming important tools for scientific modeling and simulation as in several other fields such as image analysis and natural language processing. ML techniques can leverage the computing power available in modern systems and reduce the human effort needed to configure experiments, interpret and visualize results, draw conclusions from huge quantities of raw data, and build surrogates for physics based models. Domain scientists in fields like fluid dynamics, microelectronics and chemistry can automate many of their most difficult and repetitive tasks or improve the design times by use of the faster ML-surrogates. However, modern ML and traditional scientific highperformance computing (HPC) tend to use completely different software ecosystems. While ML frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow provide Python APIs, most HPC applications and libraries are written in C++. Direct interoperability between the two languages is possible but is tedious and error-prone. In this work, we show that a compiler-based approach can bridge the gap between ML frameworks and scientific software with less developer effort and better efficiency. We use the MLIR (multi-level intermediate representation) ecosystem to compile a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) in PyTorch to freestanding C++ source code in the Kokkos programming model. Kokkos is a programming model widely used in HPC to write portable, shared-memory parallel code that can natively target a variety of CPU and GPU architectures. Our compiler-generated source code can be directly integrated into any Kokkosbased application with no dependencies on Python or cross-language interfaces.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Technical Characterization and Benefit Evaluation of 5G-Enabled Grid Data Transport and Applications

This report summarizes the Year 1 work of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL’s) 5G Fabricated Resource and Asset Management Encompassment for energy infrastructure (Energy FRAME) project funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program. 5G is a breakthrough technology that enables a fully mobile and connected society, and a 5G-enabled digital continuum will be one of the critical foundations for a clean energy economy and grid modernization. In collaboration with PNNL’s Advanced Wireless Communication team and Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation team, the project team has been evaluating the system performance of 5G testbeds in the PNNL 5G Innovation Studio, and has formulated a co-simulation test case of power system transmission, distribution, and communication (T&D&C) networks considering 5G technology and high penetration of distributed energy resources. The methodology developed in the 5G Energy FRAME project can be customized to fit different future grid scenarios to evaluate multiple (dynamic) configurations (computing, sensing, communication, environment) for different stakeholders. In summary, our main technical highlights in project Year 1 are as follows: 1) Technical characterization of 5G standalone architectures, 2) Formulation of co-simulation test case of T&D&C networks embedded with 5G, 3) Initial benefit evaluation of 5G communication platform for grid use cases, and 4) Additional extended discussions on edge computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and high-performance computing and cloud computing adoptions. In addition, a collection of system performance data is shared through the publicly available weblink, https://www.pnnl.gov/projects/5g-energy-frame/publications

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Workflows Community Summit 2022: A Roadmap Revolution

Scientific workflows have become integral tools in broad scientific computing use cases. Science discovery is increasingly dependent on workflows to orchestrate large and complex scientific experiments that range from the execution of a cloud-based data preprocessing pipeline to multi-facility instrument-to-edge-to-HPC computational workflows. Given the changing landscape of scientific computing (often referred to as a computing continuum) and the evolving needs of emerging scientific applications, it is paramount that the development of novel scientific workflows and system functionalities seek to increase the efficiency, resilience, and pervasiveness of existing systems and applications. Specifically, the proliferation of machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) workflows, need for processing large-scale datasets produced by instruments at the edge, intensification of near real-time data processing, support for long-term experiment campaigns, and emergence of quantum computing as an adjunct to HPC, have significantly changed the functional and operational requirements of workflow systems. Workflow systems now need to, for example, support data streams from the edge-to-cloud-to-HPC, enable the management of many small-sized files, allow data reduction while ensuring high accuracy, orchestrate distributed services (workflows, instruments, data movement, provenance, publication, etc.) across computing and user facilities, among others. Further, to accelerate science, it is also necessary that these systems implement specifications/standards and APIs for seamless (horizontal and vertical) integration between systems and applications, as well as enable the publication of workflows and their associated products according to the FAIR principles.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗