NANOCOMPOSITE ADVANCED SURFACE PROTECTION FOR SAFE AND EFFICIENT HYDROGEN TRANSPORT IN EXISTING STEEL PIPELINES
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The objective of this project is to advance our understanding of the ML approaches needed to find the most potent inhibitor through an AI guided search that simultaneously optimizes for limited off-target safety activity and desirable pharmacokinetics (PK) properties. The methods will be tested for inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 activity through inhibition of the main protease as a demonstration, but the methodology will be developed to apply to any biothreat target using a small-molecule protein binding-based intervention, with limited experimental data. Computational experiments are conducted using our ATOM generative molecular design (GMD) loop software, which is the implementation of our AI/ML drug design pipeline.
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Like many organizations and groups, the Department of Energy Environmental Management program and the nuclear industry are facing an aging employee population and record numbers of employee retirements. This 'silver tsunami' of retirees means the industry as a whole is recruiting graduates at a fast pace. So, how do we ensure the nuclear industry has a robust pipeline of graduates with the necessary background? Fluor Idaho's investment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs helps promote the next generation of technical professionals, benefiting both the company and the industry. Through community outreach initiatives and student mentoring programs, Fluor Idaho promotes kids' interest in STEM. The programs are designed to spark STEM interest in grade school and then foster and grow that interest through high school and higher education. After igniting student excitement about STEM topics in school, Fluor Idaho focuses on providing work-specific opportunities including mentoring and intern programs. These programs give students a better look at real-world job opportunities while still stimulating their interest in STEM. These programs ultimately provide career opportunities for the students and a pipeline of workers. Fluor Idaho's strategy for its summer interns has been to place students in a wide variety of projects - from the commissioning of a first-of-a-kind nuclear processing facility, to operating nuclear waste management facilities, to developing computer programs and applications - and give them responsibilities that make them feel like valued contributors. This approach has created a positive and rewarding summer-intern program experience for the students. Fluor Idaho's investment in its future today is reducing the knowledge gap - or cliff - that many contractors in the nuclear industry are facing. It's a worthwhile investment that is readily visible within its many cleanup projects. The next generation of technical professionals is making an impact now - benefiting both the company and the nuclear industry. This paper will review Fluor Idaho's programs, including STEM community outreach and education and mentoring programs. It will also present statistics about the reach of those programs and their successes. (authors)
In this work, we describe the survey design, calibration, commissioning, and emission-line detection algorithms for the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The goal of HETDEX is to measure the redshifts of over a million Lyα emitting galaxies between 1.88 < z < 3.52, in a 540 deg 2 area encompassing a comoving volume of 10.9 Gpc 3 . No preselection of targets is involved; instead the HETDEX measurements are accomplished via a spectroscopic survey using a suite of wide-field integral field units distributed over the focal plane of the telescope. This survey measures the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance, with a final expected accuracy of better than 1%. Additionally, we detail the project's observational strategy, reduction pipeline, source detection, and catalog generation, and present initial results for science verification in the Cosmological Evolution Survey, Extended Groth Strip, and Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North fields. We demonstrate that our data reach the required specifications in throughput, astrometric accuracy, flux limit, and object detection, with the end products being a catalog of emission-line sources, their object classifications, and flux-calibrated spectra.
From the beginning of the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s, the women of what would become Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) worked in technical positions alongside their male counterparts, played a key role as computers, and worked in administrative jobs as secretaries, phone operators, bookkeepers, and on behalf of the U.S. Army in the Women’s Army Corps. Throughout the history of the Laboratory, women experts at LANL helped establish and lead important national and international security programs, with careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Over time, the women of Los Alamos have come together under various Employee Resource Groups, such as the Atomic Women, to help the next generation succeed in their technical fields. The Laboratory’s commitment to diversity and inclusion continues to this day, with current Laboratory Director Thom Mason leading LANL as the first national laboratory to join the Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy.
The Project objectives of this work were focused on the need to develop, investigate, and validate for field and commercial deployment robust pipeline surface treatments to prevent / minimize hydrate and other flow assurance solids deposition in subsea oil flowlines. A robust pipeline treatment that can prevent hydrate and wax/asphaltene adhesion/deposition will be a major fundamental breakthrough in hydrate and flow assurance science and engineering, and to critical Deepwater field operations. The project addressed the current major outstanding issue of mitigating gas hydrate and other solids deposition in different pipeline conditions, a major outstanding issue that has not been solved to-date, despite previous attempts/studies. The major goal of this project was to develop and investigate for deployment robust pipeline coatings to mitigate gas hydrate deposition in Deepwater oil flowlines, which will be critical in offshore leak and spill prevention. As oil and gas production wells mature, the water content and oil composition can change and increase the risk of gas hydrate, wax, and asphaltene deposition and blockages in flowlines, with the cost of complete inhibition becoming prohibitive. The ability to mitigate flow assurance risks in maturing flowlines can extend the life of the field, significantly reduce operational costs from inhibitor injection and prevent potential safety hazards to personnel and equipment and can prevent potential environmental hazards leading to catastrophic hydrocarbon emissions. This research allows for a novel, cost-effective method of mitigating gas hydrate and other pipeline solids deposition/blockages in flowlines, extending the life of the field while being minimally disruptive to normal flowline operation. The omniphobic surface treatment developed in this work can significantly improve the economics of energy transport by providing flow assurance and limiting catastrophic blowouts.
Understanding pitting corrosion is critical, yet its kinetics and morphology remain challenging to study from X-ray computed tomography (XCT) due to manual segmentation barriers. To address this, an automated pipeline leveraging deep learning for efficient large-scale XCT analysis is developed, revealing new corrosion insights. The pipeline enables pit segmentation, 3D reconstruction, statistical characterization, and a topological transformation for visualization. Here, the pipeline is applied to 87 648 XCT images capturing commercial purity aluminum (1100 Al) wire exposed to sodium chloride (NaCl) salt particles over a period of 122 h. The pipeline achieves complete feature extraction and statistical quantification across the entire XCT dataset, leveraging distributed computing environment for high efficiency. Global growth kinetics such as high-level stepwise sigmoidal volume loss patterns and granular individual pit developments are both captured for 36 detected pits. By combining automation, computer vision, and extensive XCT datasets, this research accelerates precise corrosion assessment to enable materials science discoveries at scale.
A de-centralized, peer-to-peer AI metadata framework is demonstrated which can enable end-to-end metadata & lineage tracking for distributed Machine Learning pipelines spanning edge, High Performance Computing, and cloud environments. With a specific example of end-to-end microscopy algorithm and datasets, the proposed method shows how to enable reproducibility, audit trail, provenance of metadata artifacts. The emerging needs of automation in experimental sciences, ML-centric workflows, and FAIR metadata management across federated compute environments is addressed.
The lack of data on the impact of utility-scale solar facilities on avian species and populations adds to the cost of siting and operation. As much as 32 percent of the avian biological material (feathers and carcasses) recovered from solar facilities remain unidentified, because they often take the form of “feather spots”. Feather spots are remains of impacted animals that can be separated into two broad categories: 1) those remains that may be visually identified to a species, or 2) those that cannot be visually identified to a species due to degradation from the environment and/or scavenger activity (listed as “unknown”). Even when feather spots can be identified to species, they cannot be visually assigned to particular breeding populations. In some cases, it is unknown whether multiple feather spots represent single or multiple individuals. This project’s objectives were to: 1. Use a developed, genetic-based technique to identify and determine the species, population of origin, and number of individuals found in feather spots recovered from solar facilities. 2. Implement collected data and resulting analyses to develop a publicly accessible web-based decision-making tool that can be used by the solar industry, regulators and other stakeholders to inform siting, mitigation, and conservation management efforts. 3. Establish a not-for-profit fee-for-service center at UCLA to ensure collection and identification of feather spots continue after the project period of performance. During the Project Period, we proposed to establish a pipeline for collecting, transporting, and storing of avian biological material collected at solar facilities and the collection and identification of feather spots to species and individual. We proposed the development of a genetic-based framework that would recover viable DNA from feather spots, amplify this DNA (i.e., make millions of copies of the original DNA), and use it to match the resulting sequences to a national database of known species of birds. The result would be the identification of feathers spots that were previously unidentified, and the incorporation of these samples into a larger database that included all samples recovered from solar facilities. The resulting report (below) details the result of this work and its alignment with proposed activities. We proposed the use of the data collected to assess the comparative risk to specific species or populations of species from solar facilities. For some species, we have already identified genomic markers of specific breeding populations and developed “genoscapes,” maps of unique genetic variation across the full breeding range of a species. We used these (previously and newly developed) genoscapes to probabilistically link a feather spot to the specific breeding populations from which it originated (assignment probabilities range from 75%-100% depending on species and population groups). For those species without genoscapes, we developed a vulnerability and susceptibility estimate that determines the relative local and regional risk to populations that are in geographic proximity to solar facilities, using citizen science data (Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) and eBird). These two feather spot processing pipelines (see Figure 1 below) provide quantitative estimates as to the numbers of individuals from a given population of origin that are affected by solar facilities, and ultimately can reduce costs to the consumer by reducing the industry costs associated with mitigation and siting strategies for future solar energy development.
Contemporary computation is expensive, with large language models and artificial intelligence becoming more common in daily life. However, high-performance computing is reaching the limits in speed and energy expenditure, and domain science requires ever-increasing computational capacity, with simulations and data analysis pipelines ever-growing in complexity. As we progress towards post-exascale computation, with the associated high energy costs, new methods of energy-conscious computation are required. Novel analog and hybrid digital-analog systems can overcome these challenges, and chemical reactions offer a promising avenue. Computers based on chemistry can provide compact desktop devices with immense computational power. These devices are readily scalable by considering greater reaction systems or vessels, meeting the high-performance requirements for scientific workflows. In this article, we present ChemComp, a compilation pipeline for the conversion of ordinary differential equations into implementable chemical reactions. We then demonstrate the solving capabilities of ChemComp by emulating a potential chemical reservoir device. We leverage the multi-layer intermediate representation (MLIR) compiler framework to implement an expressive chemical reaction abstraction and propose a path for chemical reaction networks (CRNs) to represent mathematical problems effectively. Combined, we demonstrate a potential workflow that can harness chemistry’s computing power to create energy-efficient, high-performance computation systems for contemporary computing needs.
Internal corrosion is an issue that affects natural gas pipelines, a significant part of the United States’ energy infrastructure. Over time, this corrosion has worn away longstanding pipelines due to the original construction materials used for the lines and impurities in the gas and liquid streams flowing through them. The main impurities in natural gas are H2O, CO2, H2S, and O2. One of the leading causes of corrosion is the CO2 dissolved in water, giving rise to carbonic acid formation, which can further dissolve the steel pipe. The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has been studying different solutions to this problem. One potential answer is a self-healing sacrificial metallic coating applied by a novel cold spray technique. This study explored the impact of flow on corrosion with this coating and carbon steel when exposed to a saturated CO2 environment by simulating the pipeline flow profile in a small-scale lab setting. The samples were evaluated using multiple electrochemical techniques that found corrosion rates and were backed up with surface analysis to conclude the behavior of the corrosion mechanisms. The cold spray coating exhibited steel corrosion protection under flow conditions. This study has significantly advanced our understanding of CO2 corrosion, particularly in the context of natural gas pipelines and coating design.
Presented and discussed here is the implementation of a software solution that provides prompt X-ray diffraction data analysis during fast dynamic compression experiments conducted within the dynamic diamond anvil cell technique. It includes efficient data collection, streaming of data and metadata to a high-performance cluster (HPC), fast azimuthal data integration on the cluster, and tools for controlling the data processing steps and visualizing the data using the DIOPTAS software package. This data processing pipeline is invaluable for a great number of studies. The potential of the pipeline is illustrated with two examples of data collected on ammonia–water mixtures and multiphase mineral assemblies under high pressure. The pipeline is designed to be generic in nature and could be readily adapted to provide rapid feedback for many other X-ray diffraction techniques, e.g. large-volume press studies, in situ stress/strain studies, phase transformation studies, chemical reactions studied with high-resolution diffraction etc.
While numerous computational frameworks and workflows are available for recovering prokaryote and eukaryote genomes from metagenome data, only a limited number of pipelines are designed specifically for viromics analysis. With many viromics tools developed in the last few years alone, it can be challenging for scientists with limited bioinformatics experience to easily recover, evaluate quality, annotate genes, dereplicate, assign taxonomy, and calculate relative abundance and coverage of viral genomes using state-of-the-art methods and standards. Here, we describe Modular Viromics Pipeline (MVP) v.1.0, a user-friendly pipeline written in Python and providing a simple framework to perform standard viromics analyses. MVP combines multiple tools to enable viral genome identification, characterization of genome quality, filtering, clustering, taxonomic and functional annotation, genome binning, and comprehensive summaries of results that can be used for downstream ecological analyses. Overall, MVP provides a standardized and reproducible pipeline for both extensive and robust characterization of viruses from large-scale sequencing data including metagenomes, metatranscriptomes, viromes, and isolate genomes. As a typical use case, we show how the entire MVP pipeline can be applied to a set of 20 metagenomes from wetland sediments using only 10 modules executed via command lines, leading to the identification of 11,656 viral contigs and 8,145 viral operational taxonomic units (vOTUs) displaying a clear beta-diversity pattern. Further, acting as a dynamic wrapper, MVP is designed to continuously incorporate updates and integrate new tools, ensuring its ongoing relevance in the rapidly evolving field of viromics. MVP is available at https://gitlab.com/ccoclet/mvp and as versioned packages in PyPi and Conda.
Galaxy–galaxy strong gravitational lenses can constrain dark matter models and the Lambda cold dark matter cosmological paradigm at subgalactic scales. Currently, there is a dearth of images of these rare systems with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and angular resolution. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (hereafter Roman), scheduled for launch in late 2026, will play a transformative role in strong-lensing science with its planned wide-field surveys. With its remarkable 0.281 square degree field of view and diffraction-limited angular resolution of ~0$^{''}_.$1, Roman is uniquely suited to characterizing dark matter substructure from a robust population of strong lenses. We present a yield simulation of detectable strong lenses in Roman’s planned High Latitude Wide Area Survey (HLWAS). We simulate a population of galaxy–galaxy strong lenses across cosmic time with cold dark matter subhalo populations, select those detectable in the HLWAS, and generate simulated images accounting for realistic Wide Field Instrument detector effects. For a fiducial case of single 146 s exposures, we predict around 160,000 detectable strong lenses in the HLWAS, of which about 500 will have sufficient SNR to be amenable to detailed substructure characterization. We investigate the effect of variation of the point-spread function across Roman’s field of view on detecting individual subhalos and the suppression of the subhalo mass function at low masses. Our simulation products are available to support strong-lens science with Roman, such as training neural networks and validating dark matter substructure analysis pipelines.
Abstract Background Sequence alignment lies at the heart of genome sequence annotation. While the BLAST suite of alignment tools has long held an important role in alignment-based sequence database search, greater sensitivity is achieved through the use of profile hidden Markov models (pHMMs). Here, we describe an FPGA hardware accelerator, called HAVAC, that targets a key bottleneck step (SSV) in the analysis pipeline of the popular pHMM alignment tool, HMMER. Results The HAVAC kernel calculates the SSV matrix at 1739 GCUPS on a $$\sim$$ ∼ $3000 Xilinx Alveo U50 FPGA accelerator card, $$\sim$$ ∼ 227× faster than the optimized SSV implementation in nhmmer . Accounting for PCI-e data transfer data processing, HAVAC is 65× faster than nhmmer’s SSV with one thread and 35× faster than nhmmer with four threads, and uses $$\sim$$ ∼ 31% the energy of a traditional high end Intel CPU. Conclusions HAVAC demonstrates the potential offered by FPGA hardware accelerators to produce dramatic speed gains in sequence annotation and related bioinformatics applications. Because these computations are performed on a co-processor, the host CPU remains free to simultaneously compute other aspects of the analysis pipeline.
The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) requires calibration products that provide uniform, stable, and accurate photometric and astrometric performance across the 3.2 gigapixel focal plane and throughout the 10-year survey. This paper details the algorithms and workflows used to produce instrument calibrations and remove instrumental artifacts for Data Preview 2 (DP2)---the first end-to-end processing demonstration using on-sky data with the LSST Camera (LSSTCam). We describe the verification, acceptance, and certification framework used to assess calibration quality and quantify residual systematics. We show baseline metrics on calibrated science images to evaluate the robustness of the calibration and instrument signature removal (ISR) data processing pipelines for DP2. Finally, we summarize the known limitations observed in DP2 production and outline expected algorithmic improvements for the first public LSST data release (Data Release~1, DR1).
The 2nd Aquatic Ecosystem Modeling-Junior (AEMON-J) Hacking Limnology Workshop and 3rd Virtual Summit: Incorporating Data Science and Open Science in the Aquatic Sciences (DSOS) took place on 25–29 July 2022. These virtual events were developed to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds to share developments in data-intensive research in the aquatic sciences and train participants in cutting-edge data analysis methods related to remote sensing, data pipelines, and modeling of aquatic ecosystems.