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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 55 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Investigating the effects of cooperative transmission expansion planning on grid performance during heat waves with varying spatial scales

There is growing recognition of the advantages of interregional transmission capacity to decarbonize electricity grids. A less explored benefit is potential performance improvements during extreme weather events. This study examines the impacts of cooperative transmission expansion planning using an advanced modeling chain to simulate power grid operations of the United States Western Interconnection in 2019 and 2059 under different levels of collaboration between transmission planning regions. Two historical heat waves in 2019 with varying geographical coverage are replayed under future climate change in 2059 to assess the transmission cooperation benefits during grid stress. The results show that cooperative transmission planning yields the best outcomes in terms of reducing wholesale electricity prices and minimizing energy outages both for the whole interconnection and individual transmission planning regions. Compared to individual planning, cooperative planning reduces wholesale electricity prices by 64.3 % and interconnection-wide total costs (transmission investments + grid operations) by 34.6 % in 2059. It also helps decrease greenhouse gas emissions by increasing renewable energy utilization. However, the benefits of cooperation diminish during the widespread heat wave when all regions face extreme electricity demand due to higher space cooling needs. Despite this, cooperative transmission planning remains advantageous, particularly for California Independent System Operator with significant diurnal solar generation capacity. This study suggests that cooperation in transmission planning is crucial for reducing costs and increasing reliability both during normal periods and extreme weather events. It highlights the importance of optimizing the strategic investments to mitigate challenges posed by wider-scale extreme weather events of the future.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2023

Dynamic scaling of order parameter fluctuations in model B

Brookhaven National Laboratory has performed a dedicated set of experiments, called the Beam Energy Scan (BES), with the goal of location a possible critical point in the phase diagram of nuclear matter, This point is analogous to the endpoint of the liquid-gas phase transition in water, where the liquid phase corresponds to a phase of hadrons, and the gas phase to a plasma of quarks and gluons. In order to describe the data generated by these experiments we have studied numerical simulations of the stochastic diffusion equation with a conserved charge. Here, we focus on the dynamics in the vicinity of a critical point in the Ising universality class. The model we consider is expected to describe the critical dynamics near a possible QCD critical point if the coupling of the order parameter to the momentum density of the fluid can be neglected. The simulations are performed on a spatial lattice, and the time evolution is performed using a Metropolis algorithm. We determine the dynamical critical exponent z ≃ 3.972(2), which agrees with predictions of the epsilon expansion. We also study non-equilibrium sweeps of the reduced temperature and observe approximate Kibble-Zurek scaling.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Impact of Porous Transport Layer In-Plane Conduction on Spatially Resolved Current and EIS Measurements in a Proton Exchange Membrane Water Electrolyzer

An XY segmented cell was developed for low temperature PEM water electrolysis (PEMWE). The system can assess the local performance by enabling in situ measurements of spatial currents and impedances. In this work, we show through experiments, as well as through modelling work, that the porous transport layer (PTL) must be segmented to eliminate crosstalk. Accurate measurements are only possible when crosstalk is fully eliminated. The XY segmented cell is applied to a case study characterizing the impact of a PTL platinum coating void on spatial performance. The localized performance impact of the coating void is found to be orientation specific: coating voids facing the catalyst layer reduce performance significantly more than coating voids facing the flow field. The results suggest that the tolerances for PTL coating uniformity can be lower at the side facing the flow field. The work showcases the feasibility of the XY segmented cell for impact assessment studies. The presented XY segmented cell enables the characterization of spatial phenomena in PEMWE devices and is envisioned to support modeling efforts and the investigation of manufacturing related tolerances for mass produced PEMWE devices.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2023

Characterization, comparison, and optimization of lattice light sheets

Lattice light sheet microscopy excels at the noninvasive imaging of three-dimensional (3D) dynamic processes at high spatiotemporal resolution within cells and developing embryos. Recently, several papers have called into question the performance of lattice light sheets relative to the Gaussian sheets most common in light sheet microscopy. Here, we undertake a theoretical and experimental analysis of various forms of light sheet microscopy, which demonstrates and explains why lattice light sheets provide substantial improvements in resolution and photobleaching reduction. The analysis provides a procedure to select the correct light sheet for a desired experiment and specifies the processing that maximizes the use of all fluorescence generated within the light sheet excitation envelope for optimal resolution while minimizing image artifacts and photodamage. We also introduce a new type of “harmonic balanced” lattice light sheet that improves performance at all spatial frequencies within its 3D resolution limits and maintains this performance over lengthened propagation distances allowing for expanded fields of view.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Achieving precise multiparameter measurements with distributed optical fiber sensor using wavelength diversity and deep neural networks

The development of advanced distributed optical fiber sensing systems that are capable of performing accurate and spatially resolved multiparameter measurements is of great interest to a wide range of scientific and industrial applications. Here, in this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a wavelength diversity based advanced distributed optical fiber sensor system to accomplish multiparameter sensing while greatly enhancing measurement accuracy. A suite of deep neural network (DNN) algorithms are developed and verified for data denoising, rapid Brillouin frequency shift estimation, and vibration data event classification. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed advanced wavelength diversity distributed fiber sensor system assisted by DNN for simultaneous, independent measurements of static strain, temperature, and acoustic vibrations over a 25 km long sensing fiber at 3 m spatial resolution. These results suggest the potential for an intelligent multiparameter monitoring system with enhanced performance in advanced structural health monitoring applications.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2020

The Effect of Membrane Casting Irregularities on Initial Fuel Cell Performance

Membrane electrode assemblies (MEA) for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) may possess as-manufactured non-uniformities in any of its constituent components. This article studies casting irregularities located within the PEM to understand their potential impact on MEA initial performance. Membrane material was cast on a lab-scale polymer casting line operating either within or at the boundaries of the process window. The resulting membrane material was either pristine in the former case, or, in the latter case, contained air bubbles, cracks, and other irregularities, ranging in size from about 0.6 to 3 mm. Spatial polarization experiments were conducted using a 121-channel segmented fuel cell system, and thermal imaging was performed subsequently to map hydrogen crossover to spatial performance. While total-cell polarization data was minimally impacted by the irregularities, the spatial diagnostics showed local performance impacts that, in operation over time, could cause degradation in performance or earlier failure of the MEA. Such impacts could lead to these irregularities being classified as defects, i.e., manufacturing variations that should be identified and not included in a fuel cell stack. Classification of irregularities as defects will ultimately assist the industry by contributing to the development of threshold detection limits for in-line quality control diagnostics.

30 DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Direct numerical simulation of hypersonic turbulent boundary layers: effect of spatial evolution and Reynolds number

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) are performed to investigate the spatial evolution of flat-plate zero-pressure-gradient turbulent boundary layers over long streamwise domains ( >300δ i , with δ i the inflow boundary-layer thickness) at three different Mach numbers, 2.5, 4.9 and 10.9, with the surface temperatures ranging from quasiadiabatic to highly cooled conditions. The settlement of turbulence statistics into a fully developed equilibrium state of the turbulent boundary layer has been carefully monitored, either based on the satisfaction of the von Kármán integral equation or by comparing runs with different inflow turbulence generation techniques. The generated DNS database is used to characterize the streamwise evolution of multiple important variables in the high-Mach-number, cold-wall regime, including the skin friction, the Reynolds analogy factor, the shape factor, the Reynolds stresses, and the fluctuating wall quantities. The data confirm the validity of many classic and newer compressibility transformations at moderately high Reynolds numbers (up to friction Reynolds number Re τ ≈1200 ) and show that, with proper scaling, the sizes of the near-wall streaks and superstructures are insensitive to the Mach number and wall cooling conditions. The strong wall cooling in the hypersonic cold-wall case is found to cause a significant increase in the size of the near-wall turbulence eddies (relative to the boundary-layer thickness), which leads to a reduced-scale separation between the large and small turbulence scales, and in turn to a lack of an outer peak in the spanwise spectra of the streamwise velocity in the logarithmic region.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2023

Engineering Super–Poissonian Photon Statistics of Spatial Light Modes

The nature of light sources is defined by the statistical fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. As such, the photon statistics of light sources are typically associated with distinct emitters. Here, the possibility of producing light beams with various photon statistics through the spatial modulation of coherent light is demonstrated. This is achieved by the sequential encoding of controllable Kolmogorov phase screens in a digital micromirror device. Interestingly, the flexibility of this scheme allows for the shaping of spatial light modes with engineered photon statistics at different spatial positions. The performance of this scheme is assessed through the photon-number-resolving characterization of different families of spatial light modes with engineered photon statistics. Furthermore, it is believed that the possibility of controlling the photon fluctuations of the light field at arbitrary spatial locations has important implications for quantum spectroscopy, sensing, and imaging.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2023

A species’ response to spatial climatic variation does not predict its response to climate change

The dominant paradigm for assessing ecological responses to climate change assumes that future states of individuals and populations can be predicted by current, species-wide performance variation across spatial climatic gradients. However, if the fates of ecological systems are better predicted by past responses to in situ climatic variation through time, this current analytical paradigm may be severely misleading. Empirically testing whether spatial or temporal climate responses better predict how species respond to climate change has been elusive, largely due to restrictive data requirements. Here, we leverage a newly collected network of ponderosa pine tree-ring time series to test whether statistically inferred responses to spatial versus temporal climatic variation better predict how trees have responded to recent climate change. When compared to observed tree growth responses to climate change since 1980, predictions derived from spatial climatic variation were wrong in both magnitude and direction. This was not the case for predictions derived from climatic variation through time, which were able to replicate observed responses well. Future climate scenarios through the end of the 21st century exacerbated these disparities. These results suggest that the currently dominant paradigm of forecasting the ecological impacts of climate change based on spatial climatic variation may be severely misleading over decadal to centennial timescales.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Space-Time Reduced-Order Modeling for Uncertainty Quantification

This work focuses on the space-time reduced-order modeling (ROM) method for solving large-scale uncertainty quantification (UQ) problems with multiple random coefficients. In contrast with the traditional space ROM approach, which performs dimension reduction in the spatial dimension, the space-time ROM approach performs dimension reduction on both the spatial and temporal domains, and thus enables accurate approximate solutions at a low cost. We incorporate the space-time ROM strategy with various classical stochastic UQ propagation methods such as stochastic Galerkin and Monte Carlo. Numerical results demonstrate that our methodology has significant computational advantages compared to state-of-the-art ROM approaches. By testing the approximation errors, we show that there is no obvious loss of simulation accuracy for space-time ROM given its high computational efficiency.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

A two-stage optical fusion framework for wildfire severity mapping across the conterminous United States

Accurate wildfire severity mapping (WSM) is essential for post-fire recovery planning, erosion risk assessment, ecosystem monitoring, and disaster risk reduction. Although Landsat and Sentinel optical imagery have been widely used for burn severity assessment, the added value of fusing multiple optical sensors has not been sufficiently quantified across diverse fire events, particularly since the launch of Landsat-9. This study evaluates whether multisensor optical fusion improves wildfire severity mapping relative to single-sensor baselines using Sentinel-2, Landsat-8, and Landsat-9 imagery across 40 wildfire events in the conterminous United States. We tested a two-stage fusion framework that combines feature-level fusion with pixel-level dimensionality reduction. First, feature-level fused datasets were created through early fusion by combining standardized post-fire bands from each sensor into a single predictor stack. Both raw reflectance bands and pairwise spectral transforms were retained to capture within- and cross-sensor spectral interactions. Second, Linear Discriminant Analysis was applied to both single-sensor and fused datasets to produce comparable low-dimensional feature spaces. Six machine-learning classifiers were then used to benchmark model performance with repeated spatially buffered train–test splits. Results show that Landsat-9 was the strongest single-sensor baseline. Among the fusion strategies, Sentinel-2 + Landsat-9 produced the most consistent improvement and reduced performance variability. Landscape-condition analysis further showed that this fusion was most beneficial in shrubland-dominated and high-terrain fires, where it achieved the highest overall mean accuracy and the fewest failures. In contrast, its benefits were less reliable in evergreen forests, mixed vegetation, and low- to moderate-elevation terrain. In operational settings, the Sentinel-2 + Landsat-9 configuration offers a practical solution for post-fire recovery planning, erosion-risk assessment, watershed management, and ecological monitoring when field observations are available and timely satellite-based information is needed.

Landsat↗
DOE OSTI2022

An optimized approach and inflation media for obtaining complimentary mass spectrometry-based omics data from human lung tissue

Human disease states are biomolecularly multifaceted and can span across phenotypic states, therefore it is important to understand diseases on all levels, across cell types, and within and across microanatomical tissue compartments. To obtain an accurate and representative view of the molecular landscape within human lungs, this fragile tissue must be inflated and embedded to maintain spatial fidelity of the location of molecules and minimize molecular degradation for molecular imaging experiments. Here, we evaluated agarose inflation and carboxymethyl cellulose embedding media and determined effective tissue preparation protocols for performing bulk and spatial mass spectrometry-based omics measurements. Mass spectrometry imaging methods were optimized to boost the number of annotatable molecules in agarose inflated lung samples. This optimized protocol permitted the observation of unique lipid distributions within several airway regions in the lung tissue block. Laser capture microdissection of these airway regions followed by high-resolution proteomic analysis allowed us to begin linking the lipidome with the proteome in a spatially resolved manner, where we observed proteins with high abundance specifically localized to the airway regions. We also compared our mass spectrometry results to lung tissue samples preserved using two other inflation/embedding media, but we identified several pitfalls with the sample preparation steps using this preservation method. Overall, we demonstrated the versatility of the inflation method, and we can start to reveal how the metabolome, lipidome, and proteome are connected spatially in human lungs and across disease states through a variety of different experiments.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

Brine Availability Test in Salt, a Heated Borehole Experiment at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, New Mexico, USA - 20233

The Brine Availability Tests in Salt is a US Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy supported activity as part of the Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Campaign where we are performing simultaneous heated and control experiments in adjacent horizontal boreholes in the WIPP Salt Disposal Investigation drifts as part of experimental Phase 1. Phase 1a of BATS, a low-cost, small spatial-scale experiment performed in order to design instrumentation and methods for further experimentation in the URL, has been completed (June 2018 - May 2019) and is described elsewhere. In coincidence with multiple physical parameters that will be measured over the duration of the experiment, we will be measuring the liquid and vapor phases of H{sub 2}O as well as its isotopic content (not measured in Phase 1a). Three different forms of water occur in natural salts: as fluid in macro scale (mm size) inclusions, as intergranular free H{sub 2}O and as H{sub 2}O incorporated in hydrous minerals. Each of these forms has potentially different stable isotope signatures and will be influenced differentially by heat induced transport and by interaction with introduced tracers. Continuous measurement of vapor phase H{sub 2}O isotopes during borehole heating will be impacted by several effects: 1) evaporation as liquid brine flows into the borehole and evaporates completely or partially into the dry N{sub 2} stream; 2) steam from dehydration of hydrous minerals, that may enter the borehole; and 3) hydrous minerals that may form in the borehole (preferentially incorporating heavier isotopes). The continuous time series collected over the course of the heating test will be combined with analyses of pre-test and post-test collected samples of test site salt to investigate the contributions of each of the three water types as H{sub 2}O is mobilized due to the effects of heating. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2022

Fast Gaussian Process Estimation for Large-Scale In Situ Inference using Convolutional Neural Networks

Exascale computing will bring with it significant I/O limitations. One foreseeable consequence of such restrictions is that the user can save only a small fraction of complex simulation data to disk for subsequent analysis. An alternative is to fit statistical models to data in situ, that is, inside the simulation as it runs. This option requires extremely fast statistical estimation to avoid slowing down the simulation. Gaussian processes (GPs) have state-of-the-art predictive performance for modeling spatial data. However, standard estimation methods for GPs scale quite poorly to large data sets as parameter estimation requires inverting a covariance matrix to the size of the data set. In the presented work, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict the GP parameters for a spatial data set, from a simulation or otherwise, rather than optimize the parameters directly. Here, our presented case study models spatial data from E3SM, the Department of Energy’s Exascale climate model. The CNN is trained on synthetic data simulated from GP models with known parameters and then applied to data from the climate simulation. In the presented examples, the neural network scheme produces parameter estimates that compare well with standard methods such as maximum likelihood estimation in predictive performance but is obtained four orders of magnitude faster.

big data↗
DOE OSTI2021

Reduced order models for Lagrangian hydrodynamics

It is reported, as a mathematical model of high-speed flow and shock wave propagation in a complex multimaterial setting, Lagrangian hydrodynamics is characterized by moving meshes, advection-dominated solutions, and moving shock fronts with sharp gradients. These challenges hinder the existing projection-based model reduction schemes from being practical. We develop several variations of projection-based reduced order model techniques for Lagrangian hydrodynamics by introducing three different reduced bases for position, velocity, and energy fields. A time-windowing approach is also developed to address the challenge imposed by the advection-dominated solutions. Lagrangian hydrodynamics is formulated as a nonlinear problem, which requires a proper hyper-reduction technique. Therefore, we apply the over-sampling DEIM and SNS approaches to reduce the complexity due to the nonlinear terms. Finally, we also present both a posteriori and a priori error bounds associated with our reduced order model. We compare the performance of the spatial and time-windowing reduced order modeling approaches in terms of accuracy and speed-up with respect to the corresponding full order model for several numerical examples, namely Sedov blast, Gresho vortices, Taylor-Green vortices, and triple-point problems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Photoacoustic 3-D imaging of polycrystalline microstructure improved with transverse acoustic waves

Non-invasive fast imaging of grain microstructure of polycrystalline ceria with sub-micrometric spatial resolution is performed via time-domain Brillouin scattering. The propagation of a nanoacoustic pulse is monitored down to 8 µm deep in a 30 × 30 µm2 area. Grains boundaries are reconstructed in three-dimensions via a twostep processing method, relying on the wavelet synchro-squeezed transform and the alpha shape algorithm. Imaging contrast is improved by taking advantage of stronger sensitivity to anisotropy of transverse acoustic waves, compared with longitudinal waves. Utilization of transverse waves in the image processing reveals additional boundaries that are not discerned using longitudinal waves, confirmed by an electron backscattering diffraction pattern. A buried inclined interface between differently oriented grains is identified by monitoring changes in amplitude (phase) of the portion of the signal associated with transverse (longitudinal) waves. Estimates of the inclination angle of this interface prove the sensitivity of our laser ultrasonic method to image inclined boundaries.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Operando Neutron Imaging of Reaction Extent and Particle Swelling Informs Limiting Factors for Salt Hydrate Thermochemical Energy Storage

Salt hydrates are a promising thermochemical energy storage medium that stores heat through the reversible uptake (hydration) and release (dehydration) of water vapor. Our study deploys operando neutron imaging to investigate salt hydrate performance with high spatial resolution (42 μm pixels). For flow over a packed bed with diffusion-driven transport, measurements reveal the formation of a solid diffusion layer due to particle swelling for the pure SrBr2 salt. In contrast, the SrBr2–vermiculite composite exhibits significantly less swelling and more than a 2-fold increase in the apparent water vapor diffusivity. For axial flow through a packed bed, neutron imaging confirms theoretically predicted transitions from a moving reaction front to a homogeneous profile with an increase in humid air flow rate. Our study establishes neutron imaging as a powerful technique to advance fundamental understanding of thermochemical systems and help guide composite material design.

Kinzer, Bryan [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000337804910)↗
DOE OSTI2021

Modelling Airborne Transmission and Ventilation Impacts of a COVID-19 Outbreak in a Restaurant in Guangzhou, China

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling was performed to simulate spatial and temporal airborne pathogen concentrations during an observed COVID-19 outbreak in a restaurant in Guangzhou, China. The reported seating configuration, overlap durations, room ventilation, layout, and dimensions were modelled in the CFD simulations to determine relative exposures and probabilities of infection. Results showed that the trends in the simulated probabilities of infection were consistent with the observed rates of infection at each of the tables surrounding the index patient. Alternative configurations that investigated different boundary conditions and ventilation conditions were also simulated. Increasing the fresh-air percentage to 10%, 50%, and 100% of the supply air reduced the accumulated pathogen mass in the room by an average of ~30%, ~70%, and ~80%, respectively, over 73 min. Overall, the probability of infection was reduced by ~10%, 40%, and 50%, respectively.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗