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At least 613 records · Page 34

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DOE OSTI2023

A 50 kA Superconducting Transformer for the Upcoming High-Field High-Current Testing Station at the BNL

Brookhaven national laboratory is upgrading its existing user facility to support R&D for High Energy Physics (HEP) and Fusion Energy Sciences (FES). The goal of this upgrade is to host the testing of the superconducting cables, conductors, joints and insert coils under high magnetic field (10 T), with currents up to 50 kA (present limit 20 kA) and at temperatures varying from 4 K to 40 K. To provide a current up to 50 kA to the sample, a superconducting core-less transformer is under construction. The superconducting transformer would additionally reduce the heat loss at the current leads at high currents. The SC transformer consists of two coaxial coils. The primary coil is inside the secondary coil. The primary coil consists of 3048 turns of rectangular wires (1.91 mm x 1.27 mm), wound in 24 layers. The secondary coil consists of 13 turns of the secondary cable (18.35 mm x 5.96 mm), wound in one layer. The parameters of the transformer are chosen to satisfy the space restrictions while using the available conductor. Here this paper presents the design of the 50-kA transformer.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

DOE OSTI2026

Testing of a 15 kA Superconducting Transformer

Here, the manufacturing of superconducting magnets for High Energy Physics (HEP) and Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) applications requires high-current conductors to generate stronger magnetic fields without increasing the inductance of the magnet. Increased inductance is undesirable due to the associated AC losses, which reduce the temperature margin; and the quench protection also becomes complicated. Testing high-current conductors with a direct current (DC) room temperature power supply is unfeasible for two primary reasons: 1) the limited capacity to supply large currents, and 2) the significant heat load losses at the current leads. A superconducting transformer offers a solution to both challenges. A 50-kA superconducting transformer is planned for manufacturing and commissioning at Brookhaven National Laboratory as part of its user facility upgrade. This transformer will facilitate the testing of superconducting cables, conductors, joints, and insert coils under high magnetic field conditions (10 T) and with currents up to 50-kA. To evaluate the manufacturing process and validate the theoretical models, the magnet division has developed and tested a 15-kA prototype transformer. A control loop has been implemented to ensure precise current delivery to the sample. This paper presents the coil design, manufacturing, and experimental results from the cold tests.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

DOE OSTI2014

Irradiation Testing of Ultrasonic Transducers

Ultrasonic technologies offer the potential for high accuracy and resolution in-pile measurement of a range of parameters, including geometry changes, temperature, crack initiation and growth, gas pressure and composition, and microstructural changes. Many Department of Energy-Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) programs are exploring the use of ultrasonic technologies to provide enhanced sensors for in-pile instrumentation during irradiation testing. For example, the ability of single, small diameter ultrasonic thermometers (UTs) to provide a temperature profile in candidate metallic and oxide fuel would provide much needed data for validating new fuel performance models. Other efforts include an ultrasonic technique to detect morphology changes (such as crack initiation and growth) and acoustic techniques to evaluate fission gas composition and pressure. These efforts are limited by the lack of existing knowledge of ultrasonic transducer material survivability under irradiation conditions. For this reason, the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) was awarded an Advanced Test Reactor National Scientific User Facility (ATR NSUF) project to evaluate promising magnetostrictive and piezoelectric transducer performance in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Reactor (MITR) up to a fast fluence of at least 1021 n/cm2 (E> 0.1 MeV). The goal of this research is to characterize magnetostrictive and piezoelectric transducer survivability during irradiation, enabling the development of novel radiation tolerant ultrasonic sensors for use in Material and Test Reactors (MTRs). As such, this test will be an instrumented lead test and real-time transducer performance data will be collected along with temperature and neutron and gamma flux data. The current work bridges the gap between proven out-of-pile ultrasonic techniques and in-pile deployment of ultrasonic sensors by acquiring the data necessary to demonstrate the performance of ultrasonic transducers.

harsh-environment sensors↗

DOE OSTI2013

Preliminary waste management plan of European spallation

The European Spallation Source (ESS) is the European common effort in designing and building a next generation large-scale user facility for studies of the structure and dynamics of materials. The proposed schematic layout of the ESS facility is based on a linear driver (linac) directing the proton beam (5 MW of 2.5 GeV) of 2.8 ms long pulses with a 20 Hz on a tungsten target where neutrons are produced via spallation reactions. Further the neutrons will be moderated to thermal and sub-thermal energies in a couple of moderators placed around the target. The moderators feed 22 beamlines guiding the neutrons to the scattering instruments, mainly for neutron scattering research, as has been previously mentioned. The objective of this work is to develop a waste management plan for ESS facility. In this respect two important aspects are analyzed. First the present status of the problem is outlined as follow. Estimate types and quantities of waste that the ESS project will generate at different stages: commission, operation, decommissioning were derived using: i) precise Monte Carlo calculations ii) scaling the activity from the operation experience of the existing spallation source installations for waste such it is difficult to predict level of activation or for components of the facility in stage of the preconceptual model. Associated waste treatment/conditioning options and final disposal route were further analyzed in order to define the waste type and packet descriptions in agreement with Swedish regulations and policy. It was found that the compilation of completely new waste type descriptions for qualification of the ESS waste for disposal will be necessary. Particular attention was devoted to 'problematic waste' as Beryllium reflector, C-14 from graphite used as core zone of the beam-dump and collimators or waste arising from the purification systems of both Helium and water cooling circuits. Management of waste on ESS site: collection/segregation systems, characterization system, storage options, is also described. In the second step, the acquired information is used for planning and implementing actions involving all participants (ESS, treatment facility operator, disposal operator, regulatory body and other authorized authorities). (authors)

07 ISOTOPE AND RADIATION SOURCES↗

DOE OSTI2018

Single-shot temporal characterization of kilojoule-level, picosecond pulses on OMEGA EP

To achieve a variety of experimental conditions, the OMEGA EP laser provides kilojoule-level pulses over a pulse-width range of 0.6 to 100 ps. Precise knowledge of the pulse width is important for laser system safety and the interpretation of experimental results. This paper describes the development and implementation of a single-shot, ultrashort-pulse measurement diagnostic, which provides an accurate characterization of the output pulse shape. We also present a brief overview of the measurement algorithm; discuss design considerations necessary for implementation in a complex, user-facility environment; and review the results of the diagnostic commissioning shots, which demonstrated excellent agreement with predictions.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2023

Optical damage considerations in the design of the matter in extreme condition upgrade (MEC-U) laser systems

The Matter in Extreme Conditions Upgrade (MEC-U) project is a major upgrade to the MEC instrument of the LINAC Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) user facility at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Here, the envisioned MEC upgrade will significantly enhance the capabilities of the pump laser sources in current MEC experimental station, boosting the energy of the nanosecond shock driver from 100 J to the kJ level, and increasing the power and repetition rate of the short pulse laser from 25 TW at 5 Hz to 1 PW at 10 Hz rate. Building such high energy/power pump laser systems presents challenges to minimize and mitigate against laser-induced optical damage. Here, as part of the system design, we have identified the optics at high-risk to damage and we have designed the laser systems to mitigate against these damage risks to ensure sustained facility operation.

Coating↗

DOE OSTI2017

FermiLib v0.1

FermiLib is an open source software package designed to facilitate the development and testing of algorithms for simulations of fermionic systems on quantum computers. Fermionic simulations represent an important application of early quantum devices with a lot of potential high value targets, such as quantum chemistry for the development of new catalysts. This software strives to provide a link between the required domain expertise in specific fermionic applications and quantum computing to enable more users to directly interface with, and develop for, these applications. It is an extensible Python library designed to interface with the high performance quantum simulator, ProjectQ, as well as application specific software such as PSI4 from the domain of quantum chemistry. Such software is key to enabling effective user facilities in quantum computation research.

MCCLEAN, JARROD↗

DOE OSTI2017

Template Interfaces for Agile Parallel Data-Intensive Science

Tigres provides a programming library to compose and execute large-scale data-intensive scientific workflows from desktops to supercomputers. DOE User Facilities and large science collaborations are increasingly generating large enough data sets that it is no longer practical to download them to a desktop to operate on them. They are instead stored at centralized compute and storage resources such as high performance computing (HPC) centers. Analysis of this data requires an ability to run on these facilities, but with current technologies, scaling an analysis to an HPC center and to a large data set is difficult even for experts. Tigres is addressing the challenge of enabling collaborative analysis of DOE Science data through a new concept of reusable "templates" that enable scientists to easily compose, run and manage collaborative computational tasks. These templates define common computation patterns used in analyzing a data set.

Ramakrishnan, Lavanya↗

DOE OSTI2024

Arroyo Stream Processing Toolset (arroyopy) v0.1.0

Processing event or streaming data presents several technological challenges. A variety of technologies are often used by scientific user facilities. ZMQ is used to stream data and messages in a peer-to-peer fashion. Message brokers like Kafka, Redis Pubsub, EPICS PVA and RabbitMQ are often employed to route and pass messages from instruments to processing workflows. Arroyopy provides an API and structure to flexibly integrate with these tools and incorporate arbitrarily complex processing workflows, letting the hooks to the workflow code be independent of the connection code and hence reusable at a variety of instruments.

Chavez Esparza, Tanny Andrea [Lawrence Berkeley Na↗

DOE OSTI2026

Lightfall v0.0.1

Lightfall is a desktop application for synchrotron beamline instrument control, data acquisition, and live analysis at the Advanced Light Source (ALS). Built on Python and Qt, it provides a native graphical interface for operating beamline hardware, configuring and executing experimental scans, and visualizing results in real time. Key features include direct integration with EPICS control systems, a built-in electronic logbook, remote beamline access over secure tunnels, and an interprocess communication (IPC) architecture that coordinates with external analysis applications via ZMQ and EPICS process variables. This IPC approach allows Lightfall to orchestrate specialized analysis tools—including GPU-accelerated streaming correlators—without embedding them, avoiding the dependency conflicts common in monolithic scientific software platforms. Compared to prior approaches such as Xi-CAM's plugin-based architecture, Lightfall's design cleanly separates instrument control from domain-specific analysis, enabling feedback-driven acquisition where live analysis results can adjust scan parameters during an experiment. Its native Qt interface provides responsive performance for real-time data visualization that web-based alternatives struggle to match. Lightfall is designed for use by beamline scientists and staff operating synchrotron instruments at national user facilities.

Pandolfi, Ronald [Lawrence Berkeley National Labor↗

DOE OSTI2023

ARMing the Edge: Designing Edge Computing–Capable Machine Learning Algorithms to Target ARM Doppler Lidar Processing

Abstract There is a need for long-term observations of cloud and precipitation fall speeds in validating and improving rainfall forecasts from climate models. To this end, the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility Southern Great Plains (SGP) site at Lamont, Oklahoma, hosts five ARM Doppler lidars that can measure cloud and aerosol properties. In particular, the ARM Doppler lidars record Doppler spectra that contain information about the fall speeds of cloud and precipitation particles. However, due to bandwidth and storage constraints, the Doppler spectra are not routinely stored. This calls for the automation of cloud and rain detection in ARM Doppler lidar data so that the spectral data in clouds can be selectively saved and further analyzed. During the ARMing the Edge field experiment, a Waggle node capable of performing machine learning applications in situ was deployed at the ARM SGP site for this purpose. In this paper, we develop and test four algorithms for the Waggle node to automatically classify ARM Doppler lidar data. We demonstrate that supervised learning using a ResNet50-based classifier will classify 97.6% of the clear-air images and 94.7% of cloudy images correctly, outperforming traditional peak detection methods. We also show that a convolutional autoencoder paired with k -means clustering identifies 10 clusters in the ARM Doppler lidar data. Three clusters correspond to mostly clear conditions with scattered high clouds, and seven others correspond to cloudy conditions with varying cloud-base heights.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2020

The ARM Data-oriented Metrics and Diagnostics Package for Climate Models - A New Tool for Evaluating Climate Models with Field Data

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program User Facility produces ground-based long-term continuous unique measurements for atmospheric state, precipitation, turbulent fluxes, radiation, aerosol, cloud and the land surface, which are collected at multiple sites. These comprehensive datasets have been widely used to calibrate climate models and are proven to be invaluable for climate model development and improvement. This article introduces an evaluation package to facilitate the use of ground-based ARM measurements in climate model evaluation. The ARM data-oriented metrics and diagnostics package (ARM-DIAGS) includes both ARM observational datasets and a Python-based analysis toolkit for computation and visualization. The observational datasets are compiled from multiple ARM data products and specifically tailored for use in climate model evaluation. In addition, ARM-DIAGS also includes simulation data from models participating the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP), which will allow climate-modeling groups to compare a new, candidate version of their model to existing CMIP models. The analysis toolkit is designed to make the metrics and diagnostics quickly available to the model developers.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2023

The Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) Campaign

The science of mountainous hydrology spans the atmosphere through the bedrock and inherently crosses physical and disciplinary boundaries: land-atmosphere interactions in complex terrain enhance clouds and precipitation, while watersheds retain and release water over a large range of spatial and temporal scales. Limited observations in complex terrain challenge efforts to improve predictive models of the hydrology in the face of rapid changes. The Upper Colorado River exemplifies these challenges, especially with ongoing mismatches between precipitation, snowpack, and discharge. Consequently, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility has deployed an observatory to the East River Watershed near Crested Butte, Colorado between September 2021 and June 2023 to measure the main atmospheric drivers of water resources, including precipitation, clouds, winds, aerosols, radiation, temperature and humidity. This effort, called the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL), is also working in tandem with DOE-sponsored surface and subsurface hydrologists and other federal, state, and local partners. SAIL data can be benchmarks for model development by producing a wide range of observational information on precipitation and its associated processes, including those processes that impact snowpack sublimation and redistribution, aerosol direct radiative effects in the atmosphere and in the snowpack, aerosol impacts on clouds and precipitation, and processes controlling surface fluxes of energy and mass. Preliminary data from SAIL’s first year showcase the rich information content in SAIL’s many data-streams and support testing hypotheses that will ultimately improve scientific understanding and predictability of Upper Colorado River hydrology in 2023 and beyond.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2020

Contributions to the Surface Downwelling Longwave Irradiance during Arctic Winter at Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska

Intrusions of warm, moist air into the Arctic during winter have emerged as important contributors to Arctic surface warming. Previous studies indicate that temperature, moisture, and hydrometeor enhancements during intrusions all make contributions to surface warming via emission of radiation down to the surface. Here, datasets from instrumentation at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) for the six months from November through April for the six winter seasons of 2013/14–2018/19 were used to quantify the atmospheric state. These datasets subsequently served as inputs to compute surface downwelling longwave irradiances via radiative transfer computations at 1-min intervals with different combinations of constituents over the six winter seasons. The computed six winter average irradiance with all constituents included was 205.0 W m −2 , close to the average measured irradiance of 206.7 W m −2 , a difference of −0.8%. During this period, water vapor was the most important contributor to the irradiance. The computed average irradiance with dry gas was 71.9 W m −2 . Separately adding water vapor, liquid, or ice to the dry atmosphere led to average increases of 2.4, 1.8, and 1.6 times the dry atmosphere irradiance, respectively. During the analysis period, 15 episodes of warm, moist air intrusions were identified. During the intrusions, individual contributions from elevated temperature, water vapor, liquid water, and ice water were found to be comparable to each other. These findings indicate that all properties of the atmospheric state must be known in order to quantify the radiation coming down to the Arctic surface during winter.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2025

Spatial and Temporal Variability of Vertical Velocity under Shallow Cumulus

Vertical velocity distribution below cloud is one of the key determinants of cloud life cycle, but observations of this variable are extremely sparse in space. Doppler lidar retrievals and large-eddy simulations at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility Southern Great Plains site are used to determine whether vertical velocity statistics from temporally dense profiles at a single location can be substituted for spatial vertical velocity statistics. We show that even a small number (five) of widely distributed [ O (1°) latitude/longitude spacing] lidars is sufficient sampling to reconstruct domainwide spatial vertical velocity variance, but not higher moments of the vertical velocity distribution. Spatial and temporal vertical velocity variances in the Doppler lidar observations are nearly interchangeable as long as the spatial variance is temporally averaged and the temporal variance is averaged across lidars. This is true even though the dominant spatial scales of vertical velocity variability are ≲ 3 km, more than an order of magnitude smaller than the spacing between the lidars. Further, in the limit where the temporal variance does not vary across a spatial domain (e.g., if the meteorological and surface forcing of the atmospheric turbulence is homogeneous across the domain) and the domain-mean vertical velocity is zero, the commonly available retrieval of temporal vertical velocity variance at one site is equivalent to the spatial variance over the domain. We use an updraft parcel model to show that substituting temporal for spatial vertical velocity statistics will have a relatively minor effect on cloud droplet number concentrations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2023

Methods for Continuously Resolving Spectral Shifts in Distributed Optical Fiber Sensors Irradiated to Extreme Neutron Fluence

Optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) is a technique for interrogating distributed optical fiber sensors (DOFS) and involves correlating changes in the Rayleigh backscatter fingerprint for a fiber under test (FUT) with a reference measurement. Recently, under the WIRE-21 experiment sponsored by Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) and performed at the High-Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), silica optical fibers were irradiated to a fast neutron fluence of 1x10^21 n/cm^2/s at temperatures from 200--400 C. As in the cases of high-temperature and high-strain conditions, such high levels of neutron bombardment result in a highly dynamic RBS that evades analysis with conventional methods. This work describes the further development and application of graphical signal processing techniques applied to OFDR-based distributed optical fiber sensors specifically deployed in in-pile applications. While the signal processing techniques developed in this work are applied to DOFS in nuclear environments, they provide a general framework for the analysis of OFDR measurements and a tangible method to yield higher quality data, without imposing additional hardware requirements.

Sweeney, Dan↗

DOE OSTI2020

NSUF Rad-AFM: Nanoscale Material Property Measurements of Radioactive Materials

Many advances in our understanding of radiation induced damage mechanisms are due to imaging techniques including transmission electron microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. However, the effect of these radiation induced defects characterized on the atomic to micrometer scale are often interpreted by changes in bulk material properties measured in the hundreds of microns to cm scale. In order to bridge this gap, additional tools need to be developed for use with radioactive materials. To this end a new Asylum Infinity multimodal atomic force microscope (AFM) has been added to the library of Nuclear Science User Facility (NSUF) instruments for use on radioactive materials. This instrument is housed in the Radiochemical Processing Laboratory (RPL) which is a Department of Energy Hazard Category II Non-Reactor Nuclear Facility operated by Battelle at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This allows for the handling, sample preparation, and characterization of highly radioactive materials providing a unique capability to understand fundamental properties of nuclear materials and the effects of radiation induced damage.

Riechers, Shawn L.↗

DOE OSTI2017

High-speed, two-dimensional synchrotron white-beam x-ray radiography of spray breakup and atomization

High-speed, two-dimensional synchrotron x-ray radiography and phase-contrast imaging are demonstrated in propulsion sprays. Measurements are performed at the 7-BM beamline at the Advanced Photon Source user facility at Argonne National Laboratory using a recently developed broadband x-ray white beam. This novel enhancement allows for high speed, high fidelity x-ray imaging for the community at large. Quantitative path-integrated liquid distributions and spatio-temporal dynamics of the sprays were imaged with a LuAG:Ce scintillator optically coupled to a high-speed CMOS camera. Images are collected with a microscope objective at frame rates of 20 kHz and with a macro lens at 120 kHz, achieving spatial resolutions of 12 μm and 65 μm, respectively. Imaging with and without potassium iodide (KI) as a contrast-enhancing agent is compared, and the effects of broadband attenuation and spatial beam characteristics are determined through modeling and experimental calibration. In addition, phase contrast is used to differentiate liquid streams with varying concentrations of KI. The experimental approach is applied to different spray conditions, including quantitative measurements of mass distribution during primary atomization and qualitative visualization of turbulent binary fluid mixing. High-speed, two-dimensional synchrotron white-beam x-ray radiography of spray breakup and atomization. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312567827_High-speed_two-dimensional_synchrotron_white-beam_x-ray_radiography_of_spray_breakup_and_atomization [accessed Aug 31, 2017].

Halls, Benjamin R.↗