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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 361 records · Page 20

Korean Power System Challenges and Opportunities, Priorities for Swift and Successful Clean Energy Deployment at Scale

With South Korea’s electricity demand expected to grow 30% by 2035, transitioning to clean energy resources will be critical in reducing the electric sector emissions and achieving national climate goals. Rapid technological improvements can help keep costs low and maintain grid reliability, if Korea’s government takes a coordinated approach to the clean energy transition. This policy brief identifies key barriers to Korea’s shift toward clean energy, based on the authors’ companion report (A Clean Energy Korea by 2035: Transitioning to 80% Carbon-Free Electricity Generation ), interviews with experts, and the most recent data and literature. It then explores policy solutions for overcoming these technological, economic, and institutional barriers, and suggests market transformation strategies to speed the adoption of clean energy technologies. Amid ongoing cost and technological improvements in wind, solar, and energy storage, advancing this report’s recommended policy actions with maximum coordination among government officials can meaningfully accelerate Korea’s clean energy transition.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Nion Swift FY2021 phase I Final Technical Report DE-SC0021546

Phase I of the project is an on-going success. The enhanced and extended new application programming interface (API) developed in Phase I is in use at customer sites around the world: Berlin, UK, US, China, France, Austria. The modules developed to demonstrate the new API features are in daily use at these sites for acquiring, processing, and analyzing microscopy data from 4D- and 5D-STEM to single-point spectroscopy at highest resolution.

Lovejoy, Tracy↗

Primer to SWIFt 2.0 Technical Information Sheets

More than 16,000 publicly owned municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in the U.S. treat a wide range of wastewater (WW) flows ranging from <0.5 to >200 MGD. Municipal WWTPs act as the last barrier before exposure to water-borne diseases and contaminants, thus serving as a critical infrastructure protecting human health and the environment. A recent survey by the American Society of Civil Engineers assigned the U.S.’s WW infrastructure a grade of D+ because of the number of improvements needed for end-of-life infrastructure with operating conditions being over or under design capacities. With increasing population growth and urbanization, the municipal WW sector needs to grow resiliently and sustainably to accommodate increasing sewer flows in the wake of new infrastructure needs and global priorities. In addition, this growth will be affected by rising concerns over constrained resources (e.g., electricity, energy, and water) and regulations. This necessitates molding the WW sector toward sustainability- and resiliency-related planning and innovations to address current and future needs while simultaneously producing profitable by-products.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Swift coalescence of supermassive black holes in cosmological mergers of massive galaxies

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are ubiquitous in galaxies with a sizable mass. It is expected that a pair of SMBHs originally in the nuclei of two merging galaxies would form a binary and eventually coalesce via a burst of gravitational waves. So far, theoretical models and simulations, focusing only on limited phases of the orbital decay of SMBHs under idealized conditions of the galaxy hosts, have been unable to directly predict the SMBH merger timescale from ab-initio galaxy formation theory. The predicted SMBH merger timescales are long, of order Gyrs, which could be problematic for future gravitational wave (GW) searches. Here, we present the first multi-scale ΛCDM cosmological simulation that follows the orbital decay of a pair of SMBHs in a merger of two typical massive galaxies at z∼3, all the way to the final coalescence driven by GW emission. The two SMBHs, with masses ∼10{sup 8} M{sub ⊙}, settle quickly in the nucleus of the merger remnant. The remnant is triaxial and extremely dense due to the dissipative nature of the merger and the intrinsic compactness of galaxies at high redshift. Such properties naturally allow a very efficient hardening of the SMBH binary. The SMBH merger occurs in only ∼10 Myr after the galactic cores have merged, which is two orders of magnitude smaller than the Hubble time.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

A broadband X-ray spectal study of the intermediate-mass black hold candidate M82 X-1 with NuSTAR, Chandra, AND Swift

M82 X-1 is one of the brightest ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) known, which, assuming Eddington-limited accretion and other considerations, makes it one of the best intermediate-mass black-hole (IMBH) candidates. However, the ULX may still be explained by super-Eddington accretion onto a stellar remnant black hole. We present simultaneous NuSTAR, Chandra, and Swift/XRT observations during the peak of a flaring episode with the aim of modeling the emission of M82 X-1 and yielding insights into its nature. We find that thin accretion disk models all require accretion rates at or above the Eddington limit in order to reproduce the spectral shape, given a range of black-hole masses and spins. Since at these high Eddington ratios the thin-disk model breaks down due to radial advection in the disk, we discard the results of the thin-disk models as unphysical. We find that the temperature profile as a function of disk radius (T(r)∝r{sup −p}) is significantly flatter (p=0.55{sub −0.04}{sup +0.07}) than expected for a standard thin disk (p = 0.75). A flatter profile is instead characteristic of a slim disk, which is highly suggestive of super-Eddington accretion. Furthermore, radiation hydrodynamical simulations of super-Eddington accretion have shown that the predicted spectra of these systems are very similar to what we observe for M82 X-1. We therefore conclude that M82 X-1 is a super-Eddington accretor. Our mass estimates inferred from the inner disk radius imply a stellar remnant black hole (M{sub BH} = 26{sub −6}{sup +9} M {sub ⊙}) when assuming zero spin and face-on inclination, or an IMBH for maximal spin and a highly inclined disk.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Magnetar Broadband X-Ray Spectra Correlated with Magnetic Fields: Suzaku Archive of SGRs and AXPs Combined with NuSTAR, Swift, and RXTE

The 1–70 keV persistent spectra of 15 magnetars, observed with Suzaku from 2006 to 2013, were studied as a complete sample. Combined with early NuSTAR observations of four hard X-ray emitters, nine objects showed a hard power-law emission dominating at ≳10 keV with the 15–60 keV flux of ∼1–11×10{sup −11} erg s{sup −1} cm{sup −2}. The hard X-ray luminosity L{sub h}, relative to that of a soft-thermal surface radiation L{sub s}, tends to become higher toward younger and strongly magnetized objects. Their hardness ratio, updated from a previous study and defined as ξ=L{sub h}/L{sub s}, is correlated with the measured spin-down rate P-dot as ξ=0.62×( P-dot /10{sup −11}ss{sup −1}){sup 0.72}, corresponding to positive and negative correlations with the dipole field strength B{sub d} (ξ∝B{sub d}{sup 1.41}) and the characteristic age τ{sub c} (ξ∝τ{sub c}{sup −0.68}), respectively. Among our sample, five transients were observed during X-ray outbursts, and the results are compared with their long-term 1–10 keV flux decays monitored with Swift/XRT and RXTE/PCA. Fading curves of three bright outbursts are approximated by an empirical formula used in the seismology, showing a ∼10–40 day plateau phase. Transients show the maximum luminosities of L{sub s} ∼ 10{sup 35} erg s{sup −1}, which are comparable to those of persistently bright ones, and fade back to ≲10{sup 32} erg s{sup −1}. Spectral properties are discussed in the framework of the magnetar hypothesis.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗