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DOE OSTI2024

PSInet: a new global water potential network

Abstract Given the pressing challenges posed by climate change, it is crucial to develop a deeper understanding of the impacts of escalating drought and heat stress on terrestrial ecosystems and the vital services they offer. Soil and plant water potential play a pivotal role in governing the dynamics of water within ecosystems and exert direct control over plant function and mortality risk during periods of ecological stress. However, existing observations of water potential suffer from significant limitations, including their sporadic and discontinuous nature, inconsistent representation of relevant spatio-temporal scales and numerous methodological challenges. These limitations hinder the comprehensive and synthetic research needed to enhance our conceptual understanding and predictive models of plant function and survival under limited moisture availability. In this article, we present PSInet (PSI—for the Greek letter Ψ used to denote water potential), a novel collaborative network of researchers and data, designed to bridge the current critical information gap in water potential data. The primary objectives of PSInet are as follows. (i) Establishing the first openly accessible global database for time series of plant and soil water potential measurements, while providing important linkages with other relevant observation networks. (ii) Fostering an inclusive and diverse collaborative environment for all scientists studying water potential in various stages of their careers. (iii) Standardizing methodologies, processing and interpretation of water potential data through the engagement of a global community of scientists, facilitated by the dissemination of standardized protocols, best practices and early career training opportunities. (iv) Facilitating the use of the PSInet database for synthesizing knowledge and addressing prominent gaps in our understanding of plants’ physiological responses to various environmental stressors. The PSInet initiative is integral to meeting the fundamental research challenge of discerning which plant species will thrive and which will be vulnerable in a world undergoing rapid warming and increasing aridification.

Forestry↗

NASA NTRS1978

Contingency plans for chromium utilization. Publication NMAB-335

The United States depends entirely on foreign sources for the critical material, chromium, making it very vulnerable to supply disruptions. The effectiveness of programs such as stockpiling, conservation, and research and development for substitutes to reduce the impact of disruption of imports of chromite and ferrochromium are discussed. Alternatives for decreasing chromium consumption also are identified for chromium-containing materials in the areas of design, processing, and substitution.

Source record↗

DOE OSTI2024

Safe Operations at Roadway Junctions: Intelligent Roadway Infrastructure as Functional Interlocking

Automated vehicle (AV) technology is quickly maturing, and the corresponding infrastructure systems that evaluate traffic and communicate to vehicles requires sophisticated sensing and perception technologies, referred to as intelligent roadway infrastructure (IRI), to complement emerging AV capabilities. IRI provides signals to vehicles, indicating right-of-way for vehicles and communicating to approaching AVs that no other vehicle is failing to yield. This capability, denoted as safety-affirmative signaling, provides a green light or a green arrow as appropriate and affirms through communication links to connected vehicles when it is safe to proceed. About 36% of collisions occur at intersections, with most occurring upon left turns (22.2%) or crossing over (12.6%), and only a small percentage (1.2%) while turning right at an intersection. Of all intersection crashes about half (52.5%) of those vehicles were traveling through a signalized intersection 2. Safety-affirmative signaling would guarantee safety of AV fleet vehicles, by providing the interlocking principle, a term from automated train control that only allows progression through a railway intersection after affirming no opportunity for a crash exists. IRI through safety-affirmative signaling would bring performance and safety to complex roadway intersections where AV transit fleet service is most needed, as well as safety benefits to traditional, non-automated vehicles and vulnerable road users. The implementation of IRI has functional, programmatic, and technical challenges. Research work performed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in an integrative approach encapsulating these themes, and termed infrastructure perception and control (IPC) is motivated by improved performance (travel time), improved safety (reduced collisions), and improved energy efficiency (less fuel burned and minimized production of greenhouse gases). IPC is intended not only for roadway and intersection applications but also in extension to inform complementary buildings and grid systems to enable better co-management, as vehicles and their charging needs become increasingly integrated into the built environment. The NREL IPC project presents an open-source framework, architecture, and supporting technology to implement IRI, addressing critical issues such as fusion of data, reliability, standardization of data interfaces, and confidence of detection. The framework is informed by previous experience in U.S. Department of Defense research technology, specifically in the use of radar to detect, identify, and track aerial threats. These principles combined with multi-sensor fusion provides for a complete digital twin with known and measurable confidence and accuracy from which safety-affirmative signaling can be developed and deployed.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,MATHEMATICS AND COMPUT↗

DOE OSTI2025

Distribution System Resilience Assessment Considering PV Vulnerabilities for Hurricane Events

Distribution networks are increasingly vulnerable to damage and outages from extreme weather events. The integration of solar photovoltaics (PVs) further complicates resilience analysis due to its weather-dependent nature. However, limited research has examined the impacts of weather on PVs under severe events like hurricanes. This paper proposes a probabilistic framework to assess distribution system resilience considering PV vulnerabilities during hurricanes. The framework incorporates (i) a spatiotemporal fragility model to evaluate failure probabilities for distribution lines and PVs, and (ii) resilience indices at both system and component levels. The approach offers valuable insights into the resilience of modern distribution grids under extreme weather conditions. Numerical results on the unbalanced IEEE 123-bus test system validate the effectiveness of the framework.

Vahedi, Soroush [University of Connecticut, Storrs↗

NASA NTRS2017

Coping with Higher Sea Levels and Increased Coastal Flooding in New York City

The 837 km New York City shoreline is lined by significant economic assets and dense population vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal flooding. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, New York City developed a comprehensive plan to mitigate future climate risks, drawing upon the scientific expertise of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), a special advisory group comprised of university and private-sector experts. This paper highlights current NPCC findings regarding sea level rise and coastal flooding, with some of the City's ongoing and planned responses. Twentieth century sea level rise in New York City (2.8 cm/decade) exceeded the global average (1.7 cm/decade), underscoring the enhanced regional risk to coastal hazards. NPCC (2015) projects future sea level rise at the Battery of 28 - 53 cm by the 2050s and 46 - 99 cm by the 2080s, relative to 2000 - 2004 (mid-range, 25th - 75th percentile). High-end SLR estimates (90th percentile) reach 76 cm by the 2050s, and 1.9 m by 2100. Combining these projections with updated FEMA flood return period curves, assuming static flood dynamics and storm behavior, flood heights for the 100-year storm (excluding waves) attain 3.9-4.5 m (mid-range), relative to the NAVD88 tidal datum, and 4.9 m (high end) by the 2080s, up from 3.4 m in the 2000s. Flood heights with a 1% annual chance of occurrence in the 2000s increase to 2.0 - 5.4% (mid-range) and 12.7% per year (high-end), by the 2080s. Guided by NPCC (2013, 2015) findings, New York City has embarked on a suite of initiatives to strengthen coastal defenses, employing various approaches tailored to specific neighborhood needs. NPCC continues its collaboration with the city to investigate vulnerability to extreme climate events, including heat waves, inland floods and coastal storms. Current research entails higher-resolution neighborhood-level coastal flood mapping, changes in storm characteristics, surge height interactions with sea level rise, and stronger engagement with stakeholders and community-based organizations.

Coastal flooding↗

DOE OSTI2024

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↗

DOE OSTI2026

Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems Cyber Range

As digital technologies expand to meet the needs of a more autonomous, interconnected, and advanced power system, new cybersecurity complexities and vulnerabilities arise. The ARIES Cyber Range enables the energy sector to evaluate these evolutions and validate cybersecurity solutions without impacting live systems. Combining power grid-scale hardware with emulation and simulation approaches, the ARIES Cyber Range can faithfully replicate modern energy systems - from grid physics to communication networks, and everything in between - with real-world fidelity. At NLR, researchers and partners are answering complex power system cybersecurity questions, examining emerging threats to the electric sector, and de risking new security technologies, all at a mission-relevant speed that keeps pace with rapidly evolving systems and hazards.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Hardware Fuzzing with An Emulator

Bugs in digital logic have led to some significant security vulnerabilities. Hardware bugs are particularly troublesome since they cannot be easily patched. Additionally, if the bug is in the root of trust, all trust built upon it can be vulnerable. Traditional testing either require a deep knowledge of the system, creative attack vectors and lots of human interaction. This is not scalable as there are very few engineers that can wear the hat of a designer, a verification engineer, and a cybersecurity expert. Hardware fuzzing is a relatively new research area in dynamic hardware testing. It has proven to be an effective method for discovering bugs, unexpected behaviors, and security vulnerabilities in software. While hardware fuzzing is new to the hardware domain, it has a strong track record in software testing. Fuzzing is a testing technique that randomly mutates the input data to uncover bugs or vulnerabilities in the design. It is especially good at finding corner cases that test engineers can not envision. Another advantage over other dynamic testing techniques is that, if done well, deep knowledge of the design is not required. Additionally, fuzzing scales well. If the system is set up correctly, it can run unsupervised for weeks if necessary. In this work, we propose using hardware fuzzing to improve the input vector generation for an information flow tracking tool. To get reasonable throughput of test vectors, an emulator is targeted as the execution platform. Efficient emulator execution has some specific requirements.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2025

V-INT: Automated Vulnerability Intelligence and Risk Assessment

The project team, including the University of Arkansas (UA) as the lead, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), Network Perception (NP), and Bastazo, has successfully researched, developed, and demonstrated the V-INT toolset, and also integrated it into the commercial products of NP (i.e., NP-View) and Bastazo (i.e., Spartan). The end product is a cybersecurity software tool for energy utilities that can automatically assess the risks of software vulnerabilities in an organization’s assets considering the organization’s firewall policies. It allows security operators to identify the small portion of vulnerabilities that poses true threats to their system (i.e., those that are not protected by firewall policies) and prioritize the mitigation of these vulnerabilities to minimize risks. It also allows security operators to identify the vulnerability-induced attack paths under their organization’s firewall policy, providing effective decision supports for mitigating potential attacks.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2025

A distributed voltage inference framework for cyber-physical attacks detection and localization in active distribution grids

The transition to active distribution grids with real-time monitoring and control depends on the proliferation of advanced communication networks and devices. This paradigm shift towards a cyber-physical architecture also introduces new vulnerabilities for adversaries to exploit and launch sophisticated cyber-physical attacks targeting grid observability. Current research highlights the challenges in distinguishing attacks on voltage phasor or nodal injection measurements and isolating multi-source attack locations in a multiphase distribution grid. The attack detection and localization methods in literature face accuracy issues, applications across diverse attack scenarios, or scalability limits. Here, to bridge these gaps, this paper proposes a distributed Voltage Inference framework for real-time detection and localization of cyber-physical attacks, addressing scalability, adaptability, and accuracy challenges in state-of-the-art methods. The proposed methodology leverages the distributed nature of the Voltage Inference framework through a two-step process of prediction and correction, together with a tractable graph partitioning approach, providing a reliable solution to identify compromised measurement sources and facilitate isolation. Extensive testing on IEEE 13 and 123-node distribution feeders underscores the algorithm’s efficacy, enhancing the security and resilience of active distribution grids against evolving cyber threats. Additionally, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) implementation validates the proposed strategy’s practical applicability in real-world scenarios.

active distribution grids↗

DOE OSTI2025

Unraveling the Noise: An Investigation Plan for Signal Interference in Hearing Aids

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has revolutionized the performance of hearing aids with functionalities like seamless audio streaming and enhanced auditory functions. However, BLE operates within the highly congested 2.4 GHz frequency band, making it susceptible to signal interference that can degrade performance, reduce audio quality, and impact user experience. This paper documents interference patterns in BLE communication and introduces practical mitigation techniques aimed at improving the reliability of hearing aids. Attack vectors associated with Bluetooth enabled hearing aids include communication jamming, the interception of data between target devices, and GATT handle exploitation. Attackers could also use the vulnerabilities to block communications or intercept sensitive audio streams, posing significant security and privacy risks. These threats compromise two critical components of the CIA triad: (1) availability, by causing persistent connectivity issues, and (2) integrity, by enabling unauthorized data modifications. It is necessary to deal with these problems to ensure hearing aids work well and safely. This study investigates the impact of BLE signal interference on hearing aids, using tools such as HackRF [1], a Python tool to simulate interference scenarios, and Ubertooth [2] to sniff Bluetooth traffic between hearing aids and the device with the application. This paper investigates testing of BLE traffic in search of specific interference patterns that would impact the functionality of hearing aids, including jamming and flooding. This research focuses on developing robust mitigation techniques with the aim of securing BLE-enabled hearing aids against those vulnerabilities.

Baldwin, David [Savannah River National Laboratory↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NSCOR for Evaluating Risk Factors and Biomarkers for Adaptation and Resilience to Spaceflight: Emotional Valence and Social Processes in ICC/ICE Environments

Space exploration class missions, such as a mission to Mars, will require optimization of human performance, adaptability, and resilience. This NASA Specialized Center of Research (NSCOR) utilizes the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework to identify biological and behavioral markers of individual social adaptation and emotional resilience (as well as vulnerability) to spaceflight-relevant stressors such as living in extended isolation. The overarching goal of this NSCOR is to obtain novel information to help identify biomarkers of individuals who are resilient and/or adaptable to the stressors of isolated, confined, and controlled (ICC) and isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) environments.A total of N=90 healthy adult astronaut surrogates are being studied in three spaceflight-analog environments: (1) n=40 healthy adults in the Isolation and Confinement Analog Research Unit (ICARUS), an ICC at the University of Pennsylvania, during 7-day missions, for a target total of 280 subject days; (2) n=32 healthy adult astronaut surrogates studied in NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA), an ICC at Johnson Space Center during 45-day missions, for a target total of 2,112 subject days; and (3) n=18 healthy adults in the Alfred-Wegener-Institute’s Neumayer Station III, an ICE in Antarctica, during 14-month missions, for a target total of 7,560 subject days. Dr. Nindl’s Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh is analyzing a priori selected protein biomarkers in blood, saliva, and urine. Complementary rodent models of exposure to early life stressors, confinement, and isolation are being evaluated at Dr. Hensch’s Laboratory to further validate the neurobehavioral and biological findings from the human studies.Given the inconsistency and varied definition of resilience/adaptation in the scientific literature, the NSCOR team developed a composite resilience/adaptation measure that reflects the most relevant outcomes to resilience/adaptation across psychosocial and neurobehavioral functions, as well as neurocognitive and spaceflight-relevant operational performance. To achieve this, group consensus was attained from subject matter experts to produce a rank-order of importance for each input variable. The final resilience/adaptation score included 36 variables that were collected across spaceflight analogs. As of 10/1/2021, the NSCOR project acquired data on n=27 subjects at ICARUS, n=16 at HERA, and n=18 at Neumayer. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed data acquisition at ICARUS and HERA.Among subjects studied to date, 99% of neural and neurobehavioral data (e.g., neuroimaging for structure and function, behavioral measures) as well as blood, saliva, and urine for biochemical assays have been acquired. For rodent models, Dr. Hensch’s laboratory has established biochemical and behavioral parameters reflecting confinement stress in social networks of mice for comparison to stress responses in the human spaceflight analog environments.Group social behaviors were measured with a Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach to define objective parameters associated with sociability and its plasticity by sex. This analytic approach may help identify a network of individuals who are more effective teammates or more likely to generate new social relationships. Data acquisition, biomarker assessment, and data quality control will continue through September 2022.

D F Dinges↗

DOE OSTI2025

Pulsar Movement Animation and its Corresponding Signal Visualization for Timing Source

The global positioning system, widely used for synchronization in energy systems, faces vulnerabilities, while Pulsars—natural cosmic clocks—offer long-term stability as potential backup timing sources. Existing research lacks sufficient exploration of Pulsar signal animation under astrophysical factors, limiting practical applications. This study establishes a mathematical model based on the rotation dynamics of dual-beam Pulsars and implements dynamic signal visualization through MATLAB. The model dynamically illustrates the relative motion between Pulsar beams and observers via timeline calculations, beam intensity modeling, and rotation matrix derivation. A case study on the millisecond Pulsar J1939+2134 reveals that observer angles influence signal peak timing, while beam widths determine signal duration, highlighting the critical role of parameter calibration for timing accuracy. Open-source code and animation results are publicly shared, providing tools for interdisciplinary research. This study validates the feasibility of Pulsar-based timing in energy systems, offering new insights to enhance synchronization robustness.

Wu, Ori [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000326723410)↗

NASA NTRS2016

Building Climate Resilience at NASA Ames

NASA Ames Research Center, located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay (SFB) estuary has identified three primary vulnerabilities to changes in climate. The Ames Climate Adaptation Science Investigator (CASI) workgroup has studied each of these challenges to operations and the potential exposure of infrastructure and employees to an increased frequency of hazards. Sea level rise inundation scenarios for the SFB Area generally refer to projected scenarios in mean sea level rather than changes in extreme tides that could occur during future storm conditions. In the Summer of 2014, high resolution 3-D mapping of the low lying portion of Ames was performed. Those data are integrated with improved sea level inundation scenarios to identify the buildings, basements and drainage systems potentially affected. We will also identify the impacts of sea level and storm surge effects on transportation to and from the Center. This information will help Center Management develop future Master Plans. Climate change will also lead to changes in temperature, storm frequency and intensity. These changes have potential impacts on localized floods and ecosystems, as well as on electricity and water availability. Over the coming decades, these changes are going to be imposed on top of ongoing land use and land cover changes, especially those deriving from continued urbanization and increase in impervious surface areas. These coupled changes have the potential to create a series of cascading impacts on ecosystems, including changes in primary productivity and disturbance of hydrological properties and increased flood risk.The majority of the electricity used at Ames is supplied by hydroelectric dams, which will be influenced by reductions in precipitation or changes in the timing or phase of precipitation which reduces snow pack. Coupled with increased demand for summertime air conditioning and other cooling needs, NASA Ames is at risk for electricity shortfalls. To assess the anticipated energy usage as climate changes, the Ames CASI team is collecting historical energy usage data from Ames facilities, historical weather data, and projected future weather parameters from the CASI Climate subgroup. This data will be incorporated into the RETScreen model to predict how energy usage at Ames will change over the coming century.

climate↗

NASA NTRS2017

Climate Limits Across Space and Time on European Forest Structure

The impact climate has on forests has been extensively studied. However, the large scale effect climate has on forest structures, such as average diameters, heights and basal area are understudied in a spatially explicit manner. The limits, tipping points and thresholds that climate places on forest structures dictate the services a forest may provide, the vulnerability of a forest to mortality and the potential value of the timber there within. The majority of current research either investigates climate impacts on forest pools and fluxes, on a tree physiological scale or on case studies that are used to extrapolate results and potential impacts. A spatially explicit study on how climate affects forest structure over a large region would give valuable information to stakeholders who are more concerned with ecosystem services that cannot be described by pools and fluxes but require spatially explicit information - such as biodiversity, habitat suitability, and market values. In this study, we quantified the limits that climate (maximum, minimum temperature and precipitation) places on 3 forest structures, diameter at breast height, height, and basal area throughout Europe. Our results show clear climatic zones of high and low upper limits for each forest structure variable studied. We also spatially analyzed how climate restricts the potential bio-physical upper limits and creates tipping points of each forest structure variable and which climate factors are most limiting. Further, we demonstrated how the climate change has affected 8 individual forests across Europe and then the continent as a whole. We find that diameter, height and basal area are limited by climate in different ways and that areas may have high upper limits in one structure and low upper limits in another limited by different climate variables. We also found that even though individual forests may have increased their potential upper limit forest structure values, European forests as a whole have lost, on average, 5.0%, 1.7% and 6.5% in potential mean forest diameter, height and basal area, respectively.

Moreno, Adam La Salle↗

DOE OSTI2026

Supporting U.S. National Security Through Cybersecurity Partnerships

At NLR, we're studying energy evolutions and threats to understand the challenges they pose and uncover ways to leverage grid advancements to achieve more secure, defensible, and reliable systems. Our integrated research approach bridges the gap between cyber threats and real-world consequences to deliver actionable solutions that reduce vulnerabilities and help strengthen U.S. national security.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

NASA NTRS2016

Technical Reference Suite Addressing Challenges of Providing Assurance for Fault Management Architectural Design

Research into complexities of software systems Fault Management (FM) and how architectural design decisions affect safety, preservation of assets, and maintenance of desired system functionality has coalesced into a technical reference (TR) suite that advances the provision of safety and mission assurance. The NASA Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Program, with Software Assurance Research Program support, extracted FM architectures across the IV&V portfolio to evaluate robustness, assess visibility for validation and test, and define software assurance methods applied to the architectures and designs. This investigation spanned IV&V projects with seven different primary developers, a wide range of sizes and complexities, and encompassed Deep Space Robotic, Human Spaceflight, and Earth Orbiter mission FM architectures. The initiative continues with an expansion of the TR suite to include Launch Vehicles, adding the benefit of investigating differences intrinsic to model-based FM architectures and insight into complexities of FM within an Agile software development environment, in order to improve awareness of how nontraditional processes affect FM architectural design and system health management. The identification of particular FM architectures, visibility, and associated IV&V techniques provides a TR suite that enables greater assurance that critical software systems will adequately protect against faults and respond to adverse conditions. Additionally, the role FM has with regard to strengthened security requirements, with potential to advance overall asset protection of flight software systems, is being addressed with the development of an adverse conditions database encompassing flight software vulnerabilities. Capitalizing on the established framework, this TR suite provides assurance capability for a variety of FM architectures and varied development approaches. Research results are being disseminated across NASA, other agencies, and the software community. This paper discusses the findings and TR suite informing the FM domain in best practices for FM architectural design, visibility observations, and methods employed for IV&V and mission assurance.

Fitz, Rhonda↗

NASA NTRS1991

Signal Isolators

The City of Dubuque, Iowa's new Water Division computer system was experiencing failures of the analog inputs ranging from signals out of tolerance by more than 30 percent to intermittent and sometimes complete loss of signals. The problem stemmed from a lack of signal isolation of the analog input cards, which made the inputs vulnerable to interference from storms and machinery. Electronic technician Bob Ervolino read an article in Tech Briefs describing an Ames Research Center solution to a similar problem. He studied the Technical Support Package and contacted the vendor; the information saved the Water Division more than 50 percent of the cost of commercial isolators.

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