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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 415 records · Page 23
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

New U.S. Data Tools are Playing a Crucial Role in Decarbonizing Buildings at Speed, Scale, and Low Cost

Preparing buildings for retrofits traditionally requires expensive on-site audits or timeintensive simulation models. As a result, the majority of buildings fail to pursue cost-saving retrofits. To address these barriers, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has introduced the Building Efficiency Targeting Tool for Energy Retrofits (BETTER)-a new, free, on-line tool that utilizes a data-driven analytical engine and user-friendly web interface to automatically analyze a building's monthly energy usage in response to weather conditions. The tool benchmarks a building's electric and fossil energy usage against peers; estimates energy, cost, and emissions reductions at the building and portfolio levels; recommends energy efficiency measures; and prioritizes buildings for net-zero energy retrofits. Thanks to interoperability with the DOE's Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) platform, BETTER is supporting U.S. jurisdictions to prepare buildings for retrofit at speed, scale, and low cost to comply with energy policies. This paper discusses the use of BETTER and SEED by one of the branches of the California state government to streamline a retrofit program across 455 public non-residential buildings to align with state goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It describes the organization's challenge to reduce energy consumption across a geographically diverse, aging portfolio; explores how BETTER and SEED improved workflow efficiency; presents preliminary results, including avoiding audit costs of $3.28 million and developing the groundwork for retrofit projects estimated to prevent emission of 2,271 t CO2e annually; and provides guidance for other jurisdictions seeking similar results.

BETTER↗
DOE OSTI2024

New U.S. Data Tools are Playing a Crucial Role in Decarbonizing Buildings at Speed, Scale, and Low Cost

Preparing buildings for retrofits traditionally requires expensive on-site audits or time- intensive simulation models. As a result, the majority of buildings fail to pursue cost-saving retrofits. To address these barriers, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has introduced the Building Efficiency Targeting Tool for Energy Retrofits (BETTER)—a new, free, on-line tool that utilizes a data-driven analytical engine and user-friendly web interface to automatically analyze a building’s monthly energy usage in response to weather conditions. The tool benchmarks a building’s electric and fossil energy usage against peers; estimates energy, cost, and emissions reductions at the building and portfolio levels; recommends energy efficiency measures; and prioritizes buildings for net-zero energy retrofits. Thanks to interoperability with the DOE’s Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) platform, BETTER is supporting U.S. jurisdictions to prepare buildings for retrofit at speed, scale, and low cost to comply with energy policies. This paper discusses the use of BETTER and SEED by one of the branches of the California state government to streamline a retrofit program across 455 public non-residential buildings to align with state goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It describes the organization’s challenge to reduce energy consumption across a geographically diverse, aging portfolio; explores how BETTER and SEED improved workflow efficiency; presents preliminary results, including avoiding audit costs of $3.28 million and developing the groundwork for retrofit projects estimated to prevent emission of 2,271 t CO2e annually; and provides guidance for other jurisdictions seeking similar results.

Li, han↗
DOE OSTI2025

Compressed Air Scoping Tool Teaches Energy Efficiency Best Practices

Standards and practices around compressed air systems are evolving as previous golden rules become outdated and unhelpful. One of the most referenced guidelines gives us the perfect example: The previous rule of thumb for compressed air storage – 1-3 gal/cfm1,2 – is now accepted to be 3-5 gal/cfm. This change in recommended storage is only one of many in the industry, resulting in industrial users lost in a sea of contradictory best practices. To help combat confusion and poor information sharing, a collaborative effort between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Better Plants program created the Compressed Air (CA) Scoping Tool with the most up-to-date best practices in the industry (as of 2023). It can be used as a nonbiased, one-stop shop for best practice recommendations. The Excelbased tool is designed to be an initial step in understanding the operation of a compressed air system, a baselining tool enabling users to comprehend various aspects of a facility’s system from the production of compressed air to its application by end users.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Methods and Tools To Assess Robustness of Nuclear Plant Outages

Refueling outages are one of the most challenging phases in a nuclear power plant (NPP) operating cycle. Refueling outages are extremely costly for an NPP due to the large amount of required resources and because of lost revenue due to plant being off the grid. Outage durations have steadily decreased across the industry over that last few decades primarily due to improved planning and coordination, but there are still many plants that struggle to meet the performance metrics accomplished by other utilities. Schedule resilience is one of the issues. NPP outages require scheduling thousands of activities within 30 days on average. Despite detailed planning, once the outage starts, numerous emergent issues typically appear along with schedule delays requiring continuous replanning and adjustment. When schedule disruption occurs during an outage, plant staff make urgent efforts to recover but are often not able to maintain the planned outage duration. These outage delays can cost a utility several million dollars per day. Tools that could help outage schedulers create a more resilient schedule and allow them to optimally reschedule emergent work could significantly reduce outage delays. One key aspect of creating a resilient schedule is to have accurate estimates for activity duration. Another important outage scheduling capability is the ability to schedule emergent work with minimal disruption. This paper focuses on developing tools and methods to support NPPs with outage schedule optimization and it describes the initial development of tools to support outage management that leverage computational and machine learning methods.

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Advanced Interactive 3D Visualization Tool for Customizable Analyses of Tomography Datasets in Material Science

Current methods for visualizing and analyzing 3D tomography datasets in materials science often lack the interactivity and depth required for detailed structural insights. This limitation restricts a researchers' ability to accurately interpret complex data, which is critical for advancing material innovations and understanding structural properties. To address this issue, we have developed a novel, web-based interactive 3D visualization and analysis tool from the Trame framework that offers customizable features to enhance data interpretability. The tool allows users to adjust parameters such as visible range, slice planes, data rotation, and layering, providing a more detailed and dynamic view of complex structures. Its user-friendly web interface increases the accessibility and ease of use for both novice and experienced researchers, to visualize large volumetric datasets. The tool supports a diverse range of data formats, making it versatile for various research applications. Unique capabilities include real-time data manipulation, automated feature detection, context-sensitive feedback, and real-time volume calculations and distributions per sliced region or layer, alongside the ability to quickly generate high-quality screenshots and videos for presentations and reports. These advancements offer a comprehensive solution for enhanced 3D data exploration, significantly improving the analysis process and communication of results in materials science.

36 - MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2023

Counter Unmanned Aircraft System Metrics Tool

SAND2023-05387O The Counter Unmanned Aircraft System (CUAS) Metrics Tool consists of three applications: • The Data Collection Tool is designed to be used during testing and captures details that can be imported into the Figure Creator application. • The Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Log Converter converts different UAS logs into a standardized hierarchical data format with a timeline of geospatial data. • The Figure Creator develops relevant images for the test event. The application includes logic to ingest and correlate data from the Data Collection Tool and the UAS Log Converter to produce the chosen figures. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Mayle, Ashley↗
DOE OSTI2024

A structural equation modeling approach to leveraging the power of extant sentiment analysis tools

Machine-derived sentiment analysis has become a pervasive and useful tool to address a wide array of issues in natural language processing. Leading technology companies such as Google now provide sentiment analysis tools (SATs) as readily accessible online products. Academic researchers develop and make available SATs to support the research enterprise. One of the major challenges with SATs is the inconsistencies in results among the various SATs. Consequently, the selection of a SAT for a specific purpose may significantly impact the application. This study addresses the foregoing problem by utilizing structural equation modeling to merge the outputs of SATs to develop a combined sentiment metric without the need for a labeled training dataset. This method is applicable to a wide range of text-based problems, is data-driven, and replicable. It was tested using three publicly available datasets and compared against seven different SATs. The results indicate that as a continous measure, the proposed method outperformed other SATs in the movie reviews and SemEval datasets, and achieved a tie for first place with IBM Watson on the Sentiment 140 dataset. Also, compared to the published major alternatives, the arithmetic mean solution, this approach performed better across these three datasets.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Developing a Power Plant Suitability Model for the Energy Zones Mapping Tool

This report provides an example of designing, developing, and running a power plant suitability model in the Energy Zones Mapping Tool (EZMT), a public, web-based mapping tool with a large spatial database focused on energy infrastructure, energy resources, and related siting factors. The example focuses on natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plants, which have several unique and interesting characteristics. NGCC plants typically provide peaking power to the electrical grid. Such plants can be started or stopped relatively quickly and are often used to supplement base load plants (such as nuclear or coal) during times of peak electrical consumption or to counterbalance lulls in variable power generation (such as wind or solar). Due to these and other factors, NGCC plants have been projected to increase in number under energy planning studies such as Hadley et al. The scope of the Hadley et. al. study is the Eastern Interconnection (EI), the electrical transmission grid serving much of the United States and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains. Results in the study are organized according to 22 Multi-region National—North American Electricity and Environment Model (NEEM) regions within the EI. NGCC plants usually have lower water requirements than other thermoelectric power plants they may replace; therefore, they are expected to have an interesting role in reducing the overall water requirements of energy generation.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Kentucky: Using LEAD Tool Data to Fund Energy Efficiency Programs

The Kentucky Office of Energy Policy (OEP) applied the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) web-based Low-Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool to identify areas of their state with energy affordability needs. Kentucky OEP staff used the LEAD Tool to identify counties in Kentucky with the highest energy burden, which is the percentage of household income spent on energy. With this knowledge, Kentucky OEP staff allocated funds to relevant nonprofit organizations that provide home repairs, weatherization upgrades, and other solutions in areas where these services have the highest potential energy saving benefits and can reduce energy burden.

Low-Income Energy Affordability Data Tool, LEAD To↗
DOE OSTI2020

A case study of replacing pneumatic tools with battery-powered ones at an automobile assembly plant

Compressed air is ubiquitous in manufacturing facilities and vital for the proper operation of numerous types of manufacturing equipment and processes, but compressed air systems are highly inefficient. One way of reducing compressed air usage and the associated electricity consumption is to replace pneumatic tools with battery-powered ones. This paper studied the energy cost savings and return on investment (ROI) of replacing pneumatic torque wrenches with battery-powered ones at a typical automobile assembly plant. With a total triggered time of 400.6 hours and an assumed electricity rate of $0.10/kWh, the annual energy cost savings was estimated to be $104/year per tool. The simple payback period and ROI were 5.8 years and 17.3%, respectively.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

Hybrid metal additive/subtractive machine tools and applications

Additive manufacturing creates parts by depositing a preform, typically layer by layer. Subtractive manufacturing involves removing material from a preform to create parts. Hybrid machine tools combine both additive and subtractive processes in the same workspace. They can be used to create parts that meet functional tolerance and surface finish requirements, or to create features that are difficult to produce using additive or subtractive processes alone. Here, this paper describes hybrid metal additive/subtractive machine tools. It covers design considerations, sensors and controls, process management, programming and software, and the impact on the design space. It also identifies future research challenges.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2026

A framework and tool for designing cost-effective, resilient, and circular net-zero supply chains under uncertainty with an application to multilayer plastic films

While 55% of Fortune 500 companies have committed to achieving net-zero emissions and/or zero-waste operations by 2035, only 2% are currently on track, revealing a critical gap between ambition and action. Designing supply chains that reduce both emissions and waste is a complex non-intuitive, multi-objective challenge, compounded by the high costs of new technologies and the need for resilient, profitable solutions. This paper aims to address this challenge by presenting a generic framework and multi-objective optimization formulation for designing cost-effective, circular, and resilient supply chains under uncertainty, implemented through a user-friendly decision-support tool with intuitive data visualization capabilities, enabling communication of results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. We demonstrate the application of this framework in the context of multilayer plastic films (barrier films), which are widely used in food packaging and composite materials. The model quantifies trade-offs across three objectives: minimizing global warming potential, maximizing circularity, and minimizing cost. A key contribution of this work is the explicit modeling of technological resilience, the ability of supply chains to maintain function under disruption. In the cost-minimization case, the resilience constraint makes the design approximately three times more expensive in the short-term metric, but shifts the system from relying on a single recovery pathway to a portfolio of four recovery pathways, improving the robustness of the optimization solution under uncertainty. Lastly, we introduce TranZero, a decision-support tool that integrates material flow analysis, hotspot identification, and optimization-based scenario planning to support net-zero and circularity decisions.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

High temperature tensile properties of H13 tool steel fabricated via binder jet additive manufacturing

H13 is one of the most used steels for hot work tooling applications like die casting. Binder jet additive manufacturing (BJAM) offers a cost-effective solution to fabricate tools with performance enhancing features like internal cooling channels. While full densification of BJAM H13 has been demonstrated in the literature, the room and high temperature tensile properties of the material, and the effect of post-process treatments like hot isostatic pressing (HIP), and heat treatment (HT) are unknown. Here we use HIP+HT to obtain a combination of ultimate tensile strength (UTS) and elongation to failure that is superior to H13 fabricated via laser powder bed fusion and wire arc additive manufacturing. HIP+HT BJAM H13 has a superior UTS (1836 MPa) compared with conventionally processed (1671 MPa) H13 but has lower plastic elongation. We report that as-sintered samples have an extensive network of continuous grain boundary (GB) carbides that contribute to brittle fracture. HIP+HT results in partial dissolution of GB carbides and formation of a fine martensitic microstructure resulting in superior tensile strength and elongation compared with as-sintered H13. We use thermo-kinetic calculations to rationalize the effects of HIP+HT on microstructure and properties.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

srlife : A software tool for estimating the life of high temperature concentrating solar receivers. Part II – Ceramic receivers

As Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies aim for higher operating temperatures to enhance efficiency and meet industrial process heat demands, high-temperature metallic materials, including nickel-based superalloys, face challenges in maintaining structural integrity. Advanced ceramics offer a promising alternative due to their superior high-temperature strength. However, accurately assessing the performance of ceramic components requires a fundamentally different approach from that used for metallic components. This Part II of a two-part paper describes the integration of ceramic statistical failure models within srlife – an open-source tool for predicting the life of high-temperature CSP receivers. These models account for the inherent variability in ceramic strength, as well as the effects of subcritical crack growth (SCG) under high temperature cyclic loads. Here, the paper includes an example problem that demonstrate the process of evaluating ceramic receivers using srlife. Part I details the life estimation process for metallic receivers (i.e. creep-fatigue life) along with input and output data structure, thermohydraulic analysis, and structural analysis. The complete tool is available as open-source software at https://github.com/srlife-project/srlife and can be installed via the PyPi package manager (https://pypi.org). By supporting both ceramic and metallic receiver analyses, srlife facilitates fair comparisons between competing metallic and ceramic designs, enabling accurate evaluations of plant efficiency and the economic benefits of ceramic solar receivers and other components.

High temperature ceramic receivers↗
DOE OSTI2025

Leveraging public AI tools to explore systems biology resources in mathematical modeling

Predictive mathematical modeling is an essential part of systems biology and is interconnected with information management. Systems biology information is often stored in specialized formats to facilitate data storage and analysis. These formats are not designed for easy human readability and thus require specialized software to visualize and interpret results. Therefore, comprehending modeling and underlying networks and pathways is contingent on mastering systems biology tools, which is particularly challenging for users with no or little background in data science or system biology. To address this challenge, we investigated the usage of public Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in exploring systems biology resources in mathematical modeling. We tested public AI’s understanding of mathematics in models, related systems biology data, and the complexity of model structures. Our approach can enhance the accessibility of systems biology for non-system biologists and help them understand systems biology without a deep learning curve.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

On-Line Prediction of Resistant Force During Soil–Tool Interaction

For off-road vehicles such as excavators and wheel loaders, a large portion of energy is consumed to overcome the soil resistant force in the digging process. For optimal control of the digging tool, a high-fidelity model of the soil–tool interaction force is important to reduce energy consumption. Here, in this paper, an on-line soil resistant force prediction method is proposed. In this method, a hybrid model, which combines a physical model and a data-driven model, is used for the force prediction. In addition, the parameters of the hybrid model can be updated on-line based on real-time data. Comparisons with experimental data demonstrate that the proposed prediction method has an average error of around 12.7%.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Puerto Rico Energy Efficiency Scenario Analysis Tool (PREESAT)

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) developed the Puerto Rico Energy Efficiency Scenario Analysis Tool (PREESAT) to allow stakeholders to estimate the long-term aggregate electricity consumption impacts of various energy efficiency measures in Puerto Rico’s residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. PREESAT is an energy accounting framework that addresses electricity use. This report provides an overview of the tool and serves as a user manual with instructions for users.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

GeoRePORT Protocol Volume II: Geological Assessment Tool

The GeoRePORT System is based on the concept that a geothermal system can be described both in terms of the quality of the geothermal resource as it relates to the potential to extract heat (resource grade) and the progress of research and development over the lifetime of the project (project readiness level). By assessing the major characteristics of a geothermal resource and categorizing the techniques used and how well the research technique was implemented, users can report a resource grade. The resource grade covers multiple geological, technological, and socioeconomic attributes that can be compared across play types and geothermal areas. Resource grade and project readiness level are reported for three assessment categories: geological, technical, and socioeconomic. This protocol document applies to the Geologic Assessment Tool and is intended for use with an excel-based spreadsheet tool, published separately.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗