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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 739 records · Page 41
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

NuSTAR tests of sterile-neutrino dark matter: New Galactic bulge observations and combined impact

In this work, we analyze two dedicated NuSTAR observations with exposure ~190 ks located ~10° from the Galactic plane, one above and the other below, to search for x-ray lines from the radiative decay of sterile-neutrino dark matter. These fields were chosen to minimize astrophysical x-ray backgrounds while remaining near the densest region of the dark matter halo. We find no evidence of anomalous x-ray lines in the energy range 5–20 keV, corresponding to sterile neutrino masses 10–40 keV. Interpreted in the context of sterile neutrinos produced via neutrino mixing, these observations provide the leading constraints in the mass range 10–12 keV, improving upon previous constraints in this range by a factor ~2. We also compare our results to Monte Carlo simulations, showing that the fluctuations in our derived limit are not dominated by systematic effects. An updated model of the instrumental background, which is currently under development, will improve NuSTAR’s sensitivity to anomalous x-ray lines, particularly for energies 3–5 keV.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Redshift-space streaming velocity effects on the Lyman- α forest baryon acoustic oscillation scale

The baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale acts as a standard ruler for measuring cosmological distances and has therefore emerged as a leading probe of cosmic expansion history. However, any physical effect that alters the length of the ruler can lead to a bias in our determination of distance and expansion rate. One of these physical effects is the streaming velocity, the relative velocity between baryons and dark matter in the early Universe, which couples to the BAO scale due to their common origin in acoustic waves at recombination. In this work, we investigate the impact of streaming velocity on the BAO feature of the Lyman- α forest auto-power spectrum, one of the main tracers being used by the recently commissioned Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). To do this, we develop a perturbative model for Lyman- α flux fluctuations which is complete to second order for a certain set of fields, and applicable to any redshift-space tracer of structure since it is based only on symmetry considerations. We find that there are 8 biasing coefficients through second order. We find streaming velocity-induced shifts in the BAO scale of 0.081%–0.149% (transverse direction) and 0.053%–0.058% (radial direction), depending on the model for the biasing coefficients used. These are smaller than, but not negligible compared to, the DESI Lyman- α BAO error budget, which is 0.46% on the overall scale. Overall, the sensitivity of these results to our choice of bias parameters underscores the need for future work to measure the higher-order biasing coefficients from simulations, especially for future experiments beyond DESI.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2018

Laser power meters as an X-ray power diagnostic for LCLS-II

For the LCLS-II X-ray instruments, laser power meters are being developed as compact X-ray power diagnostics to operate at soft and tender X-ray photon energies. These diagnostics can be installed at various locations along an X-ray free-electron laser (FEL) beamline in order to monitor the transmission of X-ray optics along the beam path. In addition, the power meters will be used to determine the absolute X-ray power at the endstations. Here, thermopile power meters, which measure average power, and have been chosen primarily for their compatibility with the high repetition rates at LCLS-II, are evaluated. Here, a number of characteristics in the soft X-ray range are presented including linearity, calibrations conducted with a photodiode and a gas monitor detector as well as ultra-high-vacuum compatibility tests using residual gas analysis. The application of these power meters for LCLS-II and other X-ray FEL sources is discussed.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2016

Raman Spectroscopy for Analysis of Thorium Compounds

The thorium fuel cycle is an alternative to the uranium fuel cycle in that when 232Th is irradiated with neutrons it is converted to 233U, another fissile isotope. There are several chemical forms of thorium which are used in the Th fuel cycle. Recently, Raman spectroscopy has become a very portable and facile analytical technique useful for many applications, including e.g. determining the chemical composition of different materials such as for thorium compounds. The technique continues to improve with the development of ever-more sensitive instrumentation and better software. Using a laboratory Fourier-transform (FT)-Raman spectrometer with a 785 nm wavelength laser, we were able to obtain Raman spectra from a series of thorium-bearing compounds of unknown origin. These spectra were compared to the spectra of in-stock-laboratory thorium compounds including ThO2, ThF4, Th(CO3)2 and Th(C2O4)2. The unknown spectra showed very good agreement to the known standards, demonstrating the applicability of Raman spectroscopy for detection and identification of these nuclear materials.

Su, Yin-Fong↗
DOE OSTI2018

Phase Mapper: Accelerating Materials Discovery with AI

From the stone age, to the bronze, iron age, and modern silicon age, the discovery and characterization of new materials has always been instrumental to humanity's progress and development. With the current pressing need to address sustainability challenges and find alternatives to fossil fuels, we look for solutions in the development of new materials that will allow for renewable energy. To discover materials with the required properties, materials scientists can perform high-throughput materials discovery, which includes rapid synthesis and characterization via X-ray diffraction (XRD) of thousands of materials. A central problem in materials discovery, the phase map identification problem, involves the determination of the crystal structure of materials from materials composition and structural characterization data. This analysis is traditionally performed mainly by hand, which can take days for a single material system. In this work we present Phase-Mapper, a solution platform that tightly integrates XRD experimentation, AI problem solving, and human intelligence for interpreting XRD patterns and inferring the crystal structures of the underlying materials. Phase-Mapper is compatible with any spectral demixing algorithm, including our novel solver, AgileFD, which is based on convolutive non-negative matrix factorization. AgileFD allows materials scientists to rapidly interpret XRD patterns, and incorporates constraints to capture prior knowledge about the physics of the materials as well as human feedback. With our system, materials scientists have been able to interpret previously unsolvable systems of XRD data at the Department of Energy’s Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, including the Nb-Mn-V oxide system, which led to the discovery of new solar light absorbers and is provided as an illustrative example of AI-enabled high throughput materials discovery

Computer Science↗
DOE OSTI2017

SAM Theory Manual

The System Analysis Module (SAM) is an advanced and modern system analysis tool being developed at Argonne National Laboratory under the U.S. DOE Office of Nuclear Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program. SAM development aims for advances in physical modeling, numerical methods, and software engineering to enhance its user experience and usability for reactor transient analyses. To facilitate the code development, SAM utilizes an object-oriented application framework (MOOSE), and its underlying meshing and finite-element library (libMesh) and linear and non-linear solvers (PETSc), to leverage modern advanced software environments and numerical methods. SAM focuses on modeling advanced reactor concepts such as SFRs (sodium fast reactors), LFRs (lead-cooled fast reactors), and FHRs (fluoride-salt-cooled high temperature reactors) or MSRs (molten salt reactors). These advanced concepts are distinguished from light-water reactors in their use of single-phase, low-pressure, high-temperature, and low Prandtl number (sodium and lead) coolants. As a new code development, the initial effort has been focused on modeling and simulation capabilities of heat transfer and single-phase fluid dynamics responses in Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) systems. The system-level simulation capabilities of fluid flow and heat transfer in general engineering systems and typical SFRs have been verified and validated. This document provides the theoretical and technical basis of the code to help users understand the underlying physical models (such as governing equations, closure models, and component models), system modeling approaches, numerical discretization and solution methods, and the overall capabilities in SAM. As the code is still under ongoing development, this SAM Theory Manual will be updated periodically to keep it consistent with the state of the development.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2023

Development of Transmission Measurements Capability at VISION Spectrometer [Slides]

This presentation covers the development of transmission measurements capability at VISION Spectrometer. Main takeaways include that INS and transmission measurements are and should be the most significant part of TSL validation, as they are the fundamental quantities used by Monte Carlo neutronics codes. Additionally, the development of transmission capability at VISION instrument has commenced. Promising first results have been obtained with a big impact by the use of the collimators. Finally, Areas of improvement have been identified and new measurements are planned for June.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2024

Cold Plasma Measurements

We have continued the simulation campaign in support of our ongoing magnetospheric cold plasma research project. This project aims to develop the next-generation particle instruments to measure the properties of the cold particle populations in the Earth’s magnetosphere. For this purpose, simulations have been performed with a Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code called the Curvilinear PIC (CPIC). The code is formulated in curvilinear geometry and couples the standard PIC algorithm with algorithms for the generation and adaptation of the underlaying computational mesh. It conforms to complex objects like spacecraft and it can place more grid points in regions where higher resolution is needed. The code also features a scalable solver based on the multigrid algorithm and it is fully parallelized via domain decomposition and MPI.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Equitable Strategies for Residential Building Energy Efficiency and Electrification in San José, California

Hotter summers, heat waves, wildfires, and droughts are already affecting San Jose residents, with historically marginalized communities impacted first and worst. The City of San Jose has ambitious goals to make the city climate-neutral by 2030 and serve as an example for cities to accelerate climate action around the world. Electrifying and decarbonizing residential buildings are important priorities to achieve San Jose's plans to reach carbon neutrality while enabling residents to live the "Good Life 2.0" - a vision that aligns with community-identified priorities of safety, health, freedom, community, and positive experiences. This technical assistance built upon the Electrify San Jose: Framework for Existing Building Electrification to identify actionable strategies to make single- and multi-family buildings both energy-efficient and all-electric. This report is intended to provide the San Jose Climate Smart team and their partners with relevant data, insights, and actionable analysis to aid in-depth and nuanced engagements with key stakeholders. In particular, the findings in this report highlight opportunities and challenges for San Jose City Council, residents, building owners, developers, financial institutions, and utility partners instrumental in building support and earning buy-in for energy efficiency and electrification upgrades in existing buildings.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Equitable Strategies for Residential Building Energy Efficiency and Electrification in San José, California [Slides]

Hotter summers, heat waves, wildfires, and droughts are already affecting San Jose residents, with historically marginalized communities impacted first and worst. The City of San Jose has ambitious goals to make the city climate-neutral by 2030 and serve as an example for cities to accelerate climate action around the world. Electrifying and decarbonizing residential buildings are important priorities to achieve San Jose's plans to reach carbon neutrality while enabling residents to live the "Good Life 2.0" - a vision that aligns with community-identified priorities of safety, health, freedom, community, and positive experiences. This technical assistance built upon the Electrify San Jose: Framework for Existing Building Electrification to identify actionable strategies to make single- and multi-family buildings both energy-efficient and all-electric. This report is intended to provide the San Jose Climate Smart team and their partners with relevant data, insights, and actionable analysis to aid in-depth and nuanced engagements with key stakeholders. In particular, the findings in this report highlight opportunities and challenges for San Jose City Council, residents, building owners, developers, financial institutions, and utility partners instrumental in building support and earning buy-in for energy efficiency and electrification upgrades in existing buildings.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Cold Plasma IC Report

This past year we completed the simulation campaign in support of our magnetospheric cold plasma research project. This project aimed to develop the next-generation particle instruments to measure the properties of the cold particle populations in the Earth’s magnetosphere.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Early_Commisioning_Data

This is very early commissioning data (2019) from the newly established APPL facility at ORNL. Instruments, and technologies are in active development at this stage.

APPL↗
DOE OSTI2024

X-ray Fluorescence Microscopy to Develop Elemental Classifiers and Investigate Elemental Signatures in BALB/c Mouse Intestine a Week after Exposure to 8 Gy of Gamma Rays

Iron redistribution in the intestine after total body irradiation is an established phenomenon. However, in the literature, there are no reports about the use of X-ray fluorescence microscopy or equivalent techniques to generate semi-quantitative 2D maps of iron in sectioned intestine samples from irradiated mice. In this work, we used X-ray fluorescence microscopy (XFM) to map the elemental content of iron as well as phosphorus, sulfur, calcium, copper and zinc in tissue sections of the small intestine from eight-week-old BALB/c male mice that developed gastrointestinal acute radiation syndrome (GI-ARS) in response to exposure to 8 Gray of gamma rays. Seven days after irradiation, we found that the majority of the iron is localized as hot spots in the intercellular regions of the area surrounding crypts and stretching between the outer perimeter of the intestine and the surface cell layer of villi. In addition, this study represents our current efforts to develop elemental cell classifiers that could be used for the automated generation of regions of interest for analyses of X-ray fluorescence maps. Once developed, such a tool will be instrumental for studies of effects of radiation and other toxicants on the elemental content in cells and tissues. While XFM studies cannot be conducted on living organisms, it is possible to envision future scenarios where XFM imaging of single cells sloughed from the human (or rodent) intestine could be used to follow up on the progression of GI-ARS.

X-ray fluorescence microscopy↗
DOE OSTI2020

PSF–NET: A Nonparametric Point-spread Function Model for Ground-based Optical Telescopes

Ground-based optical telescopes are seriously affected by atmospheric turbulence induced aberrations. Understanding properties of these aberrations is important both for instrument design and image restoration method development. Because the point-spread function can reflect performance of the whole optic system, it is appropriate to use the point-spread function to describe atmospheric turbulence induced aberrations. Assuming point-spread functions induced by the atmospheric turbulence with the same profile belong to the same manifold space, we propose a nonparametric point-spread function—PSF–NET. The PSF–NET has a cycle convolutional neural network structure and is a statistical representation of the manifold space of PSFs induced by the atmospheric turbulence with the same profile. Testing the PSF–NET with simulated and real observation data, we find that a well trained PSF–NET can restore any short exposure images blurred by atmospheric turbulence with the same profile. Besides, we further use the impulse response of the PSF–NET, which can be viewed as the statistical mean PSF, to analyze interpretation properties of the PSF–NET. We find that variations of statistical mean PSFs are caused by variations of the atmospheric turbulence profile: as the difference of the atmospheric turbulence profile increases, the difference between statistical mean PSFs also increases. The PSF–NET proposed in this paper provides a new way to analyze atmospheric turbulence induced aberrations, which would benefit the development of new observation methods for ground-based optical telescopes.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Completion of Milestone M3CT-21IN0702028 - Receive Welding Module from IFE (Halden, Norway)

Prior to 2018, the U.S. DOE and the commercial nuclear industry relied upon the Halden Reactor Project’s capability to refabricate and reinstrument previously irradiated fuel rods. This capability has now been lost. This activity is key to recovering that capability and enabling the continuation of critical research on commercial and advanced LWR fuels. This welding module completes the three-module suite the Institute For Energy (IFE) was contracted to deliver to INL. This equipment will be used in FY22 to practice techniques developed at IFE for refabricating and instrumenting prototypical fuel rods.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2017

Human factors engineering process to support human-system interface design in control room modernization - 351

The primary objective of the United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program is to sustain operation of the existing commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs) through a multi-pathway approach in conducting research and development (R and D). The Advanced Instrumentation, Information, and Control (II and C) System Technologies pathway conducts targeted R and D to address aging and reliability concerns with legacy instrumentation and control (I and C) and other information systems in existing U.S. NPPs. Control room modernization is an important part following this pathway, and human factors experts at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have been involved in conducting R and D to support migration of new digital main control room (MCR) technologies from legacy analog and legacy digital I and C. This paper describes a human factors engineering (HFE) process that supports human-system interface (HSI) design in MCR modernization activities, particularly with migration of old digital to new digital I and C. The process described in this work is an expansion from the LWRS Report INL/EXT-16-38576, and is a requirements-driven approach that aligns with NUREG-0711 requirements. The work described builds upon the existing literature by adding more detail around key tasks and decisions to make when transitioning from HSI Design into Verification and Validation (V and V). The overall objective of this process is to inform HSI design and elicit specific, measurable, and achievable human factors criteria for new digital technologies. Upon following this process, utilities should have greater confidence with transitioning from HSI design into V and V. (authors)

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Development of an update to ISA S67.04 and RP 67.04: 'Setpoints for Nuclear Safety-Related Instrumentation for Nuclear Power Plants' - 146

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the update to International Society of Automation (ISA) Standard ISA S67.04 - 2006, 'Setpoints for Nuclear Safety-Related Instrumentation for Nuclear Power Plants', and ISA RP 67.04-2000, 'Methodologies for Determination of Setpoints for Nuclear Safety-Related Instrumentation'. Significant advances have occurred on the utility, Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) vendor, and regulatory side, related to improved techniques for analysis and monitoring. These and other changes, including those related to Technical Specifications and surveillance interval extensions, are being included in the latest update to this primary standard for setpoint control in nuclear plants in the U.S. and around the world. In 2016, the ISA S67.04 Committee agreed to proceed with a revision to this Standard and Recommended Practice, with major updates in the following areas: 1. Definitions - Updates for improved definitions based on TSTF-493, Rev 4, RIS-2006-17 and NRC updated Regulatory Guide (RG) 1.105 2. 95/95 - Updates based on improved guidance on the development of component input data and analysis techniques for 95% probability/95% confidence calculations 3. TSTF-493, RIS 2006-17 updates for Technical Specification input and to support changes 4. NRC input from updates in the Regulatory Guide 1.105 and Branch Technical Position BTP-7-12 revision process. 5. Improved guidance from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in References 7, 8 and 9. These standards are being updated with a new version anticipated to be issued as a draft in 2017 and submitted for ISA approval in 2019. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗