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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 487 records · Page 27

ENERGY STAR for Tenants: An Online Energy Estimation Tool for Commercial Office Building Tenants

The commercial building sector consumes over 18% of the total energy in the United States. According to the 2012 Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), office buildings comprise nearly 16 billion square feet of floor space and consume 253 billion kWh of energy annually. Office buildings represent nearly one-fifth of the energy consumed by commercial buildings, more than any other building type. Therefore, monitoring and reducing energy consumption in office buildings has become an increasingly important focus across the United States. The goal of the ENERGY STAR for Tenants program is to recognize office building tenants who demonstrate commitment to energy efficiency and environmental stewardship. Tenants seeking recognition must complete five major steps: estimate energy use, meter energy use, use efficient lighting, use efficient equipment, and share data. NREL is responsible for the underlying analysis performed for step one, estimating energy use. An online survey was developed for tenants to input information about their office space and its internal loads. NREL performed a parametric analysis across a large parameter space of office buildings. The analysis results were processed to map the user inputs to output energy ranges. The mappings enable the web tool to provide users with instant energy usage estimates based on a limited number of inputs.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Impacts and Benefits of a Satellite Power System on the Electric Utility Industry

The purpose of this limited study was to investigate six specific issues associated with interfacing a Satellite Power System (5 GW) with large (by present standards) terrestrial power pools to a depth sufficient to determine if certain interface problems and/or benefits exist and what future studies of these problems are required. The issues investigated are as follows: (1) Stability of Power Pools Containing a 5 GWe SPS; (2) Extra Reserve Margin Required to Maintain the Reliability of Power Pools Containing a 5 GWe SPS; (3) Use of the SPS in Load Following Service (i.e. in two independent pools whose times of peak demand differ by three hours); (4) Ownership of the SPS and its effect on SPS Usage and Utility Costs; (5) Utility Sharing of SPS related RD and D Costs; (6) Utility Liability for SPS Related Hazards.

Winer, B. M.↗

Economical Implementation of a Filter Engine in an FPGA

A logic design has been conceived for a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that would implement a complex system of multiple digital state-space filters. The main innovative aspect of this design lies in providing for reuse of parts of the FPGA hardware to perform different parts of the filter computations at different times, in such a manner as to enable the timely performance of all required computations in the face of limitations on available FPGA hardware resources. The implementation of the digital state-space filter involves matrix vector multiplications, which, in the absence of the present innovation, would ordinarily necessitate some multiplexing of vector elements and/or routing of data flows along multiple paths. The design concept calls for implementing vector registers as shift registers to simplify operand access to multipliers and accumulators, obviating both multiplexing and routing of data along multiple paths. Each vector register would be reused for different parts of a calculation. Outputs would always be drawn from the same register, and inputs would always be loaded into the same register. A simple state machine would control each filter. The output of a given filter would be passed to the next filter, accompanied by a "valid" signal, which would start the state machine of the next filter. Multiple filter modules would share a multiplication/accumulation arithmetic unit. The filter computations would be timed by use of a clock having a frequency high enough, relative to the input and output data rate, to provide enough cycles for matrix and vector arithmetic operations. This design concept could prove beneficial in numerous applications in which digital filters are used and/or vectors are multiplied by coefficient matrices. Examples of such applications include general signal processing, filtering of signals in control systems, processing of geophysical measurements, and medical imaging. For these and other applications, it could be advantageous to combine compact FPGA digital filter implementations with other application-specific logic implementations on single integrated-circuit chips. An FPGA could readily be tailored to implement a variety of filters because the filter coefficients would be loaded into memory at startup.

Kowalski, James E.↗

Hydrogen station in situ back-to-back fueling data for design and modeling

Hydrogen technologies are rapidly spreading, with significant attention to the mobility sector requiring a robust and widespread fueling infrastructure. Hydrogen stations are indeed fundamental to transitioning from pilot projects towards large-scale implementation in many countries. Operating under extreme conditions, the new stations need more informed designs and equipment to meet the growing demand and their more frequent utilization. Via a set of experimental research activities and investigated scenarios carried out at the Cal State LA Hydrogen Research and Fueling Facility, here this paper shares a novel and comprehensive set of data collected over a period of one year on fueling events frequency and refueling process station behaviors. A performance evaluation of the station is presented under different load scenarios in severe conditions during "back-to-back fuelings", with monitoring of fundamental parameters for infrastructure sizing, including dynamic cooling response, pressure levels, thermodynamics, and the state of charge of the vehicle. The presented data analysis could surely contribute as closer-to-reality inputs for a variety of station performance modeling tools.

08 HYDROGEN↗

Trends and source apportionment of aerosols in Europe during 1980-2018

Aerosols have significantly affected health, environment, and climate in Europe. Aerosol concentrations have been declining since the 1980s in Europe,mainly owing to a reduction of local aerosol and precursor emissions.Emissions from other source regions of the world, which have been changing rapidly as well, may also perturb the historical and future trends of aerosols and change their radiative impact in Europe. This study examines trends of aerosols in Europe during 1980–2018 and quantifies contributions from 16 source regions using the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 with Explicit Aerosol Source Tagging (CAM5-EAST). The simulated near-surface total mass concentration of sulfate, black carbon, and primary organic carbon had a 62 % decrease during 1980–2018. The majority of which was contributed to reductions of local emissions in Europe, and 8 %–9 % was induced by a decrease in emissions from Russia–Belarus–Ukraine. With the decreases in the fractional contribution of local emissions, aerosols transported from other source regions are increasingly important for air quality in Europe. During 1980–2018, the decrease in sulfate loading led to a warming effect of 2.0 W m –2 in Europe, with 12 % coming from changes in non-European sources, especially from North America and Russia–Belarus–Ukraine. According to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios, contributions to the sulfate radiative forcing over Europe from both local European emissions and non-European emissions should decrease at a comparable rate in the next 3 decades, suggesting that future changes in non-European emissions are as important as European emissions for causing possible regional climate change associated with aerosols in Europe.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Scheduling lessons learned from the Autonomous Power System

The Autonomous Power System (APS) project at NASA LeRC is designed to demonstrate the applications of integrated intelligent diagnosis, control, and scheduling techniques to space power distribution systems. The project consists of three elements: the Autonomous Power Expert System (APEX) for Fault Diagnosis, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR); the Autonomous Intelligent Power Scheduler (AIPS) to efficiently assign activities start times and resources; and power hardware (Brassboard) to emulate a space-based power system. The AIPS scheduler was tested within the APS system. This scheduler is able to efficiently assign available power to the requesting activities and share this information with other software agents within the APS system in order to implement the generated schedule. The AIPS scheduler is also able to cooperatively recover from fault situations by rescheduling the affected loads on the Brassboard in conjunction with the APEX FDIR system. AIPS served as a learning tool and an initial scheduling testbed for the integration of FDIR and automated scheduling systems. Many lessons were learned from the AIPS scheduler and are now being integrated into a new scheduler called SCRAP (Scheduler for Continuous Resource Allocation and Planning). This paper will service three purposes: an overview of the AIPS implementation, lessons learned from the AIPS scheduler, and a brief section on how these lessons are being applied to the new SCRAP scheduler.

Ringer, Mark J.↗

World Wide Web Metaphors for Search Mission Data

A software program that searches and browses mission data emulates a Web browser, containing standard meta - phors for Web browsing. By taking advantage of back-end URLs, users may save and share search states. Also, since a Web interface is familiar to users, training time is reduced. Familiar back and forward buttons move through a local search history. A refresh/reload button regenerates a query, and loads in any new data. URLs can be constructed to save search results. Adding context to the current search is also handled through a familiar Web metaphor. The query is constructed by clicking on hyperlinks that represent new components to the search query. The selection of a link appears to the user as a page change; the choice of links changes to represent the updated search and the results are filtered by the new criteria. Selecting a navigation link changes the current query and also the URL that is associated with it. The back button can be used to return to the previous search state. This software is part of the MSLICE release, which was written in Java. It will run on any current Windows, Macintosh, or Linux system.

Norris, Jeffrey S.↗

Characterizing parallel file-access patterns on a large-scale multiprocessor

Rapid increases in the computational speeds of multiprocessors have not been matched by corresponding performance enhancements in the I/O subsystem. To satisfy the large and growing I/O requirements of some parallel scientific applications, we need parallel file systems that can provide high-bandwidth and high-volume data transfer between the I/O subsystem and thousands of processors. Design of such high-performance parallel file systems depends on a thorough grasp of the expected workload. So far there have been no comprehensive usage studies of multiprocessor file systems. Our CHARISMA project intends to fill this void. The first results from our study involve an iPSC/860 at NASA Ames. This paper presents results from a different platform, the CM-5 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The CHARISMA studies are unique because we collect information about every individual read and write request and about the entire mix of applications running on the machines. The results of our trace analysis lead to recommendations for parallel file system design. First the file system should support efficient concurrent access to many files, and I/O requests from many jobs under varying load conditions. Second, it must efficiently manage large files kept open for long periods. Third, it should expect to see small requests predominantly sequential access patterns, application-wide synchronous access, no concurrent file-sharing between jobs appreciable byte and block sharing between processes within jobs, and strong interprocess locality. Finally, the trace data suggest that node-level write caches and collective I/O request interfaces may be useful in certain environments.

Purakayastha, Apratim↗

Analysis of Measured and Predicted Acoustics From an XV-15 Flight Test

Flight acoustic and vehicle state data from an XV-15 acoustic flight test are examined. Flight predictions using TiltRotor Aeroacoustic Code (TRAC) are performed for a level flight (repeated) and four descent conditions (including a blade vortex interaction (BVI)). The assumptions and procedures used for TRAC flight predictions as well as the variability in flight measurements, which are used for input and comparison to predictions, are investigated in detail. Differences were found in the measured vehicle airspeed, altitude, glideslope, and vehicle orientation (yaw, pitch, and roll angle) between each of the repeat runs. These differences violate some of the prediction assumptions and significantly impacted the resulting acoustic predictions. Multiple acoustic pulses, with a variable time between the pulses, were found in the measured acoustic time histories for the repeat runs. These differences could be attributed in part to the variability in vehicle orientation. Acoustic predictions that used the measured vehicle orientation for the repeat runs captured this multiple pulse variability. Thickness noise was found to be dominant on approach for all the cases, except the BVI condition. After the aircraft passed overhead, broadband noise and low frequency loading noise were dominant. The predicted LowSPL time histories compared well with measurement on approach to the array for the non-BVI conditions and poorly for the BVI condition. Accurate prediction of the lift share between the rotor and fuselage must be known in order to improve predictions. At a minimum, measurements of the rotor thrust and tip-path-plane angle are critical to further develop accurate flight acoustic prediction capabilities.

Boyd, D. Douglas, Jr.↗

Analysis of Measured and Predicted Acoustics from an XV-15 Flight Test

Flight acoustic and vehicle state data from an XV-15 acoustic flight test are examined. Flight predictions using TRAC are performed for a level flight (repeated) and four descent conditions (including a BVI). The assumptions and procedures used for TRAC flight predictions as well as the variability in flight measurements, which are used for input and comparison to predictions, are investigated in detail. Differences were found in the measured vehicle airspeed, altitude, glideslope, and vehicle orientation (yaw, pitch and roll angle) between each of the repeat runs. These differences violate some of the prediction assumptions and significantly impacted the resulting acoustic predictions. Multiple acoustic pulses, with a variable time between the pulses, were found in the measured acoustic time histories for the repeat runs. These differences could be attributed in part to the variability in vehicle orientation. Acoustic predictions that used the measured vehicle orientation for the repeat runs captured this multiple pulse variability. Thickness noise was found to be dominant on approach for all the cases, except the BVI condition. After the aircraft passed overhead, broadband noise and low frequency loading noise were dominant. The predicted LowSPL time histories compared well with measurement on approach to the array for the non-BVI conditions and poorly for the BVI condition. Accurate prediction of the lift share between the rotor and fuselage must be known in order to improve predictions. At a minimum, measurements of the rotor thrust and tip-path-plane angle are critical to further develop accurate flight acoustic prediction capabilities.

Boyd, D. Douglas, Jr.↗

Charge-coupled-device parallel-to-serial converter

A CCD parallel-to-serial converter comprising two successions of charge transfer stages, recurrently side-loaded with respective ones of parallelly supplied charge packets, then serially unloaded by time-interleaved respective shift register operations. The charge packets converted to time-division-multiplexed serial form are supplied to a shared electrometer, and the electrometer response is de-multiplexed. Preferably, shift register operations are carried forward concurrently at the same rate, but with the final charge transfer stages clocked in phases staggered in time.

Tower, John R.↗

Improving Large-scale Storage System Performance via Topology-aware and Balanced Data Placement

With the advent of big data, the I/O subsystems of large-scale compute clusters are becoming a center of focus, with more applications putting greater demands on end-to-end I/O performance. These subsystems are often complex in design. They comprise of multiple hardware and software layers to cope with the increasing capacity, capability and scalability requirements of data intensive applications. The sharing nature of storage resources and the intrinsic interactions across these layers make it to realize user-level, end-to-end performance gains a great challenge. We propose a topology-aware resource load balancing strategy to improve per-application I/O performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on an extreme-scale compute cluster, Titan, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). Our experiments with both synthetic benchmarks and a real-world application show that, even under congestion, our proposed algorithm can improve large-scale application I/O performance significantly, resulting in both the reduction of application run times and higher resolution simulation runs.

Wang, Feiyi↗

Multifunctional Heat Pump with Energy Storage Capability

Replacing gas furnaces with heat pumps on a large scale can pose challenges to the electrical grid. It will significantly increase the demand, strain the electrical grid, especially during peak usage times. To ensure that heat pumps contribute to reducing emissions, it's essential to increase the share of renewable energy in the grid. However, the supply of renewable energy is unstable. Large scale of electrification must address the concern of grid resilience to meet necessary heating/cooling demands and shift peak electric load. All these require future heat pumps having energy storage capability. These systems can store excess energy during low-demand periods and release it during high-demand periods, reducing stress on the grid. This paper will introduce an innovative configuration, control, and laboratory investigations of a multifunctional packaged heat pump. In addition to the original indoor and outdoor air coils, the heat pump has a parallel hydronic loop with a brazed plate heat exchanger (BHP). The hydronic loop circulates hot/chilled water to store heating/cooling energy in phase change material (PCM). It is capable of space cooling, space heating, cooling energy storage/defrosting, water heating/heating energy storage with outdoor air source or indoor air source, and cooling/heating energy free discharge. The laboratory studies and breadboard unit are presented. Additionally, building energy simulation demonstrates utility cost reduction potential via charging PCM panels/ceilings during off-peak hours and releasing the energy during peak hours to mitigate the peak power consumption.

Shen, Bo↗

How Improved Forecasting Can Increase the Bulk Power System Value of Price-Responsive Electric Vehicle Managed Charging

Personal light-duty vehicle (LDV) electric vehicle managed charging (EVMC) can reduce power system costs by better aligning electric vehicle (EV) charging with locations and times of low energy cost or infrastructure use. The need to coordinate charging demand across thousands to millions of vehicles while preserving mobility service is a barrier to realizing the value of EVMC. Price-responsive dispatch mechanisms like time-of-use rates (TOU) and hourly real-time prices (RTP) are attractive compared to direct load control (DLC) because they only require one-way communications and local controls. However, increasing participation in price responsive mechanisms can induce costly-to-serve spikes in load and otherwise increase, rather than decrease, production costs. We quantify the ability of improved EVMC forecasting to sustain savings from price responsive mechanisms beyond the limit of 14% of LDVs actively participating observed in previous work. Perfect forecasting of price-responsive EV load makes TOU and RTP value-competitive with a low-error DLC formulation with up to 27% (within-week flexibility) to 45% or more (within-session flexibility) of LDVs participating in EVMC in an envisioned New England power system with 84% clean energy. Additional costs of implementing DLC should be no more than tens of dollars per vehicle-year if DLC is to be value-competitive with accurately forecast price-responsive EVMC for double-digit percentage shares of LDVs participating.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

A Multi-Level Parallelization Concept for High-Fidelity Multi-Block Solvers

The integration of high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis tools with the industrial design process benefits greatly from the robust implementations that are transportable across a wide range of computer architectures. In the present work, a hybrid domain-decomposition and parallelization concept was developed and implemented into the widely-used NASA multi-block Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) packages implemented in ENSAERO and OVERFLOW. The new parallel solver concept, PENS (Parallel Euler Navier-Stokes Solver), employs both fine and coarse granularity in data partitioning as well as data coalescing to obtain the desired load-balance characteristics on the available computer platforms. This multi-level parallelism implementation itself introduces no changes to the numerical results, hence the original fidelity of the packages are identically preserved. The present implementation uses the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library for interprocessor message passing and memory accessing. By choosing an appropriate combination of the available partitioning and coalescing capabilities only during the execution stage, the PENS solver becomes adaptable to different computer architectures from shared-memory to distributed-memory platforms with varying degrees of parallelism. The PENS implementation on the IBM SP2 distributed memory environment at the NASA Ames Research Center obtains 85 percent scalable parallel performance using fine-grain partitioning of single-block CFD domains using up to 128 wide computational nodes. Multi-block CFD simulations of complete aircraft simulations achieve 75 percent perfect load-balanced executions using data coalescing and the two levels of parallelism. SGI PowerChallenge, SGI Origin 2000, and a cluster of workstations are the other platforms where the robustness of the implementation is tested. The performance behavior on the other computer platforms with a variety of realistic problems will be included as this on-going study progresses.

Hatay, Ferhat F.↗

In Situ Neutron Scattering Studies on the Oxidation and Reduction of CeO 2 and Pt–CeO 2 Nanorods

The oxygen vacancy structure of ceria plays a key role in its performance as a favored material for catalysis applications. Here, in this work, we develop an understanding of the effects of Pt loading on the structural evolution of ceria nanorods under redox gas environments that mimic real automotive catalytic converters. In situ neutron scattering studies under redox flow reveal that both CeO 2 and Pt–CeO 2 nanorods share a bulk fluorite structure with the presence of surface Frenkel-type oxygen defects. However, Pt–CeO 2 nanorods are more easily reducible than CeO 2 rods as evidenced by an increased concentration of Ce 3+ , determined by NAP-XPS. Importantly, this work finds no evidence of oxygen vacancy ordered surface reconstruction which has been reported in earlier ex situ investigations. Thus, this work highlights the discrepancy between ex situ and in situ structural observations and emphasizes the need for robust in situ investigations of catalysts to develop industrially relevant materials.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Improving large-scale storage system performance via topology-aware and balanced data placement

With the advent of big data, the I/O subsystems of large-scale compute clusters are becoming a center of focus. More applications are putting greater demands on end-to-end I/O performance. These subsystems are often complex in design. They comprise of multiple hardware and software layers to cope with the increasing capacity, capability, and scalability requirements of data intensive applications. However, the sharing nature of storage resources and the intrinsic interactions across these layers make it a great challenge to realize end-to-end performance gains. This paper proposes a topology-aware strategy to balance the load across resources, to improve the per-application I/O performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on an extreme-scale compute cluster, Titan, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). Our experiments with both synthetic benchmarks and a real-world application show that, even under congestion, our proposed algorithm can improve large-scale application I/O performance significantly, resulting in both a reduction in application run time as well as a higher resolution of simulation run.

Wang, Feiyi↗

Simulation of high-frequency dissolved oxygen dynamics in a shallow estuary, the Corsica River, Chesapeake Bay

Understanding shallow water biogeochemical dynamics is a challenge in coastal regions, due to the presence of highly variable land-water interface fluxes, tight coupling with sediment processes, tidal dynamics, and diurnal variability in biogeochemical processes. While the deployment of continuous monitoring devices has improved our understanding of high-frequency (12 - 24 hours) variability and spatial heterogeneity in shallow regions, mechanistic modeling of these dynamics has lagged behind conceptual and empirical models. The inherent complexity of shallow water systems is represented in the Corsica River estuary, a small basin within the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, where abundant monitoring data have been collected from long-term monitoring stations, continuous monitoring sensors, synoptic sensor surveys, and measurements of sediment-water fluxes. A state-of-the-art modeling system, the Semi-implicit Cross-scale Hydroscience Integrated System Model (SCHISM), was applied to the Corsica domain with a high-resolution grid and nutrient loads from the most recent version of the Chesapeake Bay watershed model. The Corsica SCHISM model reproduced observed high-frequency variability in dissolved oxygen, as well as seasonal variability in chlorophyll-a and sediment-water fluxes. Time-series signal analyses using Empirical Model Decomposition and spectral analysis revealed that the diurnal and M2 tide frequencies are the dominant high-frequency modes and physical transport contributes a larger share to dissolved oxygen budgets than biogeochemical processes on an hourly time scale. Heterogeneity and patchiness in dissolved oxygen resulting from phytoplankton distributions and geometry-driven eddies amplify the physical transport effect, and on longer time scales oxygen is controlled more by photosynthesis and respiration. Our simulation demonstrates that interactions among physical and biological dynamics generate complex high-frequency variability in water quality and non-linear reposes to nutrient loading and environmental forcing in shallow water systems.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗