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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 433 records · Page 24

How to GAN Higher Jet Resolution

QCD-jets at the LHC are described by simple physics principles. We show how super-resolution generative networks can learn the underlying structures and use them to improve the resolution of jet images. We test this approach on massless QCD-jets and on fat top-jets and find that the network reproduces their main features even without training on pure samples. In addition, we show how a slim network architecture can be constructed once we have control of the full network performance.

Baldi, Pierre↗

INTERSECT Architecture Specification: System-of-Systems Architecture (V.0.9)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)’s Self-driven Experiments for Science / Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) architecture project, titled “An Open Federated Architecture for the Laboratory of the Future”, creates an open federated hardware/software architecture for the laboratory of the future using a novel system of systems (SoS) and microservice architecture approach, connecting scientific instruments, robot-controlled laboratories and edge/center computing/data resources to enable autonomous experiments, “self-driving” laboratories, smart manufacturing, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven design, discovery and evaluation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The emergent photophysics and photochemistry of molecular polaritons: a theoretical and computational investigation (Final Technical Report)

When molecules are placed between closely spaced mirrors, they interact strongly with the photons that are trapped between them, generating new quantum states which are no longer exclusively material nor photonic alone, but rather, coherent superpositions of both. These hybrid states are known as molecular polaritons, given that they arise from the strong interaction between the electric field of light and the electrical polarization of the molecules. Recently, experimental advances in nano‐ and microfabrication of molecular polariton architectures have successfully demonstrated their feasibility to control the rate and outcome of a certain class of chemical reactions in condensed phases. Importantly, these reactions proceed in strongly dissipative environments such as liquid solvents and lossy mirrors that allow for photons to escape from their confinement. The purpose of this research is to formulate quantum mechanical theories and computational tools that can elucidate the origin of these intriguing phenomena and simultaneously predict capabilities that this new generation of molecular materials affords. Attention is placed on harnessing polaritons to carry out photophysics and photochemistry that challenge currently existing paradigms, such as the optimization of energy conversion processes in organic solar cell or light‐emitting devices, or unconventional phenomena such as long‐range excitation energy transfer, remote control of chemical reactions, and a new quantum mechanical regime of chemical reactivity due to wavefunction overlaps amongst a large number of molecular polaritons (Bose condensation). This research explores a frontier of Chemistry and Physics where electrons, vibrations, and photons interact strongly with each other to generate emergent behavior that can be creatively exploited to address contemporary challenges in Basic Energy Sciences.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Unconventional compute methods and future challenges for superconducting digital computing

Superconducting digital computing (SDC) based on Josephson junctions (JJs) offers significant potential for enhancing compute throughput and reducing energy consumption compared to conventional room-temperature CMOS-based approaches. Current superconducting logic families exhibit diverse characteristics in clocking strategies, power management, and information encoding techniques. This paper reviews recent advancements in unconventional computing methods specifically designed for superconducting digital circuits, emphasizing temporal computing and pulse-train representations. Notable techniques include race logic (RL), temporal pulse train computing (U-SFQ), and temporal multipliers, each offering unique performance and area advantages suited to superconducting implementations. Additionally, this paper reviews innovations in superconducting coarse-grain reconfigurable architectures (CGRA), superconducting-specific on-chip communication architectures, cryogenic sensor interfaces, and quantum computing control electronics. Finally, we highlight research challenges that should be addressed to facilitate the widespread adoption of superconducting digital computing.

EDA tools↗

CyberStrike STORMCLOUD

This presentation will be shared at the "Securing Solar for the Grid (S2G)" workshop at RE+ 2023. It provides an overview of the work INL and Sandia have done to develop CyberStrike STORMCLOUD, a training program was designed to enhance the ability of renewable energy and operators to prepare for a cyber incident impacting industrial control systems with specific considerations of the architectures and limitations of renewable energy.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Capabilities for Water Sector Infrastructure Resilience - Prioritizing RD&D in a Target Rich, Resource Poor Sector

WSTB & Water Sector Security Program Expansion Objective: Incubate and shepherd a public-private consortium of joint seal US government sponsors and industry stakeholders to build out industrial control system (ICS) and operational technology (OT) architecture of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Water Security Test Bed (WSTB) asset to enable research, testing, and cyber workforce training related to evolving cyber-physical and physical vulnerabilities and threats in the water sector.

99 - GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Grid Integration of Small-Scale Photovoltaic Systems in Secondary Distribution Network—A Review

The relative share of renewable energy, specifically the solar photovoltaic (PV), is increasing exponentially in the world electric energy sector. This is a cumulative result of reduction in the cost of solar panels, improvement in the panel efficiency, and advancement in the associated power electronics. Among different types of PV plants, installation of small-scale rooftop PV is growing rapidly due to direct end-user benefits and lucrative governmental incentives. There are various standards developed in regards to grid integration of PVs and other distributed generations (DGs). Different power converter topologies are developed to interface the PV panel with the utility grid. To keep up with the stringent regulations imposed by the standards, various control strategies and grid synchronization methods have been developed. This review article amalgamates and summarizes all of the aforementioned aspects of a grid-integrated PV system including various standards, power stage architectures, grid synchronization methods, operation under extreme events, and control methodologies, pertaining to small-scale PV plants. This article will help freshman researchers to gain some familiarity with the topic and introduce them to some of the key issues encountered in this field.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

A Hybrid Optimization and Deep Learning Algorithm for Cyber-Resilient DER Control

With the proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) in the distribution grid, it is a challenge to effectively control a large number of DERs resilient to the communication and security disruptions, as well as to provide the online grid services, such as voltage regulation and virtual power plant (VPP) dispatch. To this end, a hybrid feedback-based optimization algorithm along with deep learning forecasting technique is proposed to specifically address the cyber-related issues. The online decentralized feedback-based DER optimization control requires timely, accurate voltage measurement from the grid. However, in practice such information may not be received by the control center or even be corrupted. Therefore, the long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning algorithm is employed to forecast delayed/missed/attacked messages with high accuracy. The IEEE 37-node feeder with high penetration of PV systems is used to validate the efficiency of the proposed hybrid algorithm. The results show that 1) the LSTM-forecasted lost voltage can effectively improve the performance of the DER control algorithm in the practical cyber-physical architecture; and 2) the LSTM forecasting strategy outperforms other strategies of using previous message and skipping dual parameter update.

cyber-resilient algorithm↗

Upgrade of hardware controls for the STAR experiment at RHIC

The STAR experiment has been delivering significant physics results for more than 20 years. Stable operation of the experiment was achieved by using a robust controls system based on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). Now an object-oriented approach with Python libraries, adapted for EPICS software, is going to replace the procedural-based EPICS C libraries previously used at STAR. Advantages of the new approach include stability of operation, code reduction and straightforward project documentation. The first two sections of this paper introduce the STAR experiment, give an overview of the EPICS architecture, and present the use of Python for controls software. Therefore, specific examples, as well as upgrades of user interfaces, are outlined in the following sections.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Primary Frequency Control Using Motor Drives for Short Term Grid Disturbances

Industrial motor systems make up a quarter of all electric sales in the United States. Variable speed drives (VSDs) can provide energy efficiency savings to the customer by regulating motor speed based on specific and varying needs. In addition to the benefits provided to the customer, VSDs can provide support to the grid through ancillary services. The Center for Ultra-Wide-Area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks (CURENT) developed a power electronics converter-based grid emulator to allow testing of various power system architectures and demonstration of key technologies in monitoring, control, actuation, and visualization. This paper proposes using an active front-end VSD's connected motor load to provide frequency regulation to a large scale power grid. Each part of the emulator is described including motor and power electronics model and control. The proposed frequency regulation is implemented in VSDs and modeled in both a transmission system in EMTDC/PSCAD and verified on CURENT's hardware testbed.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

High-Power Electric Vehicle Charging Hub Integration Platform (eCHIP): Site Energy Management System Platform Development

A site energy management system is a critical component of future high-power EV charging hubs. It monitors and supervises all inter-hub operations, coordinates grid interactions, and implements energy management strategies and load-sharing controls at various levels and time scales. This report provides a comprehensive high-level overview and guidelines on the essential elements of such energy management systems. These elements primarily focus on the core functions, architecture, and monitoring aspects of site energy management. The core functions define the grid services and operational objectives that a charging hub is expected to provide and achieve. The architectural section investigates the coordination between hub assets, different control schemes, and their potential benefits and drawbacks. Lastly, the report discusses the needs, types, and functionalities of a monitoring and visualization system.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

LC-Opt: Benchmarking Reinforcement Learning and Agentic AI for End-to-End Liquid Cooling Optimization in Data Centers

Liquid cooling is critical for thermal management in high-density data centers with the rising AI workloads. However, machine learning-based controllers are essential to unlock greater energy efficiency and reliability, promoting sustainability. We present LC-Opt, a Sustainable Liquid Cooling (LC) benchmark environment, for reinforcement learning (RL) control strategies in energy-efficient liquid cooling of high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Built on the baseline of a high-fidelity digital twin of Oak Ridge National Lab's Frontier Supercomputer cooling system, LC-Opt provides detailed Modelica-based end-to-end models spanning site-level cooling towers to data center cabinets and server blade groups. RL agents optimize critical thermal controls like liquid supply temperature, flow rate, and granular valve actuation at the IT cabinet level, as well as cooling tower (CT) setpoints through a Gymnasium interface, with dynamic changes in workloads. This environment creates a multi-objective real-time optimization challenge balancing local thermal regulation and global energy efficiency, and also supports additional components like a heat recovery unit (HRU). We benchmark centralized and decentralized multi-agent RL approaches, demonstrate policy distillation into decision and regression trees for interpretable control, and explore LLM-based methods that explain control actions in natural language through an agentic mesh architecture designed to foster user trust and simplify system management. LC-Opt democratizes access to detailed, customizable liquid cooling models, enabling the ML community, operators, and vendors to develop sustainable data center liquid cooling control solutions.

Naug, Avisek [Hewlett Packard Enterprise]↗

Information and Collaboration Levels in Vehicular Strings: A Comparative Study

The potential safety, productivity, and energy benefits of automated vehicles have driven a surge of research interest in their algorithms. Even within single-lane driving, control engineers now have a profusion of approaches available to them. Algorithm classes include classical controllers, receding horizon controllers, and constrained eco-driving formulae based on Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle. Differing connectivity architectures and collaboration levels further differentiate algorithms from one another. This study evaluated six controllers in two drive cycle-based scenarios using an electric powertrain model for energy analysis. Individual-vehicle and string performance were examined, including string stability and length. Algorithms with greater access to information generally performed best. Although collaboration affected energy use only slightly, it made a greater impact on string length.

Dollar, R. Austin↗

Controlling Mineralization with Protein–Functionalized Peptoid Nanotubes

Sequence-defined foldamers that self-assemble into well-defined architectures are promising scaffolds to template inorganic mineralization. However, it has been challenging to achieve robust control of nucleation and growth without sequence redesign or extensive experimentation. Here, peptoid nanotubes functionalized with a panel of solid-binding proteins are used to mineralize homogeneously distributed and monodisperse anatase nanocrystals from the water-soluble TiBALDH precursor. Crystallite size is systematically tuned between 1.4 and 4.4 nm by changing protein coverage and the identity and valency of the genetically engineered solid-binding segments. The approach is extended to the synthesis of gold nanoparticles and, using a protein encoding both material-binding specificities, to the fabrication of titania/gold nanocomposites capable of photocatalysis under visible-light illumination. Here, beyond uncovering critical roles for hierarchical organization and denticity on solid-binding protein mineralization outcomes, the strategy described herein should prove valuable for the fabrication of hierarchical hybrid materials incorporating a broad range of inorganic components.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Land-Based Wind Reference Architecture

This report describes a summary and the final deliverables for the Wind Reference Architecture project funded by the Department of Energy's (DOE) Wind Energy Technology Office (WETO). The project objective was to further refine the reference architecture of the existing wind power plant reference architecture developed by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) by expanding the wind turbine generator (WTG) into a separate individual wind turbine reference architecture. Additional details regarding the wind turbine system and how it integrates with a wind power plant were researched and reflected in the reference architecture. This addition is important because it allows researchers to understand the components and devices in a wind turbine, how they function and how a wind turbine integrates into a wind power plant to be able to perform cybersecurity evaluations on the system. The communication and control systems were the focus while developing this reference architecture to understand the cybersecurity posture of a wind turbine and power plant. The information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems perspective are integral in helping improve the cybersecurity posture by creating a starting point to study how wind energy can be safely designed and deployed in our power grid from an integrated systems standpoint. A holistic wind power plant and turbine reference architecture and simulation was developed and made open-sourced for further research efforts.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

A Framework for Neural Network Inference on FPGA-Centric SmartNICs

FPGA-based SmartNICs offer great potential to significantly improve the performance of high-performance computing and warehouse data processing by tightly coupling support for reconfigurable data-intensive computation with cross-node communication, thereby mitigating the von Neumann bottleneck. Existing work, however, has been generally been limited in that it assumes an accelerator model where kernels are offloaded to SmartNICs, but most control tasks are left to the CPUs. This leads to frequent waiting, inferior performance, and scaling challenges. In this work, we propose a new distributive data-centric computing framework, named FCsN, for reconfigurable SmartNIC-based systems. Through a lightweight task circulation execution model and its implementation architecture, FCsN allows the complete detaching of kernel execution, control logic, system scheduling, and network communication to the SmarNICs. This boosts performance by: (i) avoiding the control dependency with CPUs and (ii) supporting streaming kernel execution and network communication at line rate and in a very fine-grained manner. We demonstrate the efficiency and flexibility of FCsN using various types of neural network applications including graph neural networks; as these last are both irregular and data intensive they offer an especially robust demonstration. Evaluations using commonly-used neural network models and graph datasets show that a system with the support of FCsN can achieve, on average, 144 speedups over the MPI-based standard CPU baselines.

Guo, Anqi↗