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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 91 records · Page 5

Open-Source Steady-State Models for Integration of Wave Energy Converter into Microgrids

This paper proposes a software framework, WEC-Grid, for integrating wave energy converters (WECs) into power flow software, such as Siemens PSS®E, to aid the integration of alternative energy sources into Microgrids. While integrating alternative sources such as WECs presents specific challenges such as cost, power quality, and power variability, wave energy is a promising renewable energy resource. Evaluating the integration of WECs into the power grid is a complex and nuanced problem that requires seamless communication between a WEC model and power flow software. The presented WEC-Grid software framework bridges and extends the functionality of WEC-Sim, an open-source WEC modeling package for MATLAB, through a wave-to-wire (W2W) electro-mechanical power conversion and processing model. WEC-Grid acts as a software wrapper, handler, and communication layer between the W2W modeler and power flow software. The software is designed to represent each grid system as a class object, allowing power system operators to perform power system duties such as contingency planning and dispatch operations. The integration of WECs with PSS®E’s power flow calculations workflow is demonstrated with an IEEE RTS case study.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

Experience with a software engineering environment framework

Experience with a software engineering environment framework tool called the Automated Product Control Environment (APCE) is described. The goals of the framework design, an overview of the major functions and features of the framework, and implementation and use of the framework are presented. Aspects of the framework discussed include automation and control; portability, distributability, and interoperability; cost/benefit analysis; and productivity. Results of using the framework are discussed and the framework approach is briefly compared to other software development environment approaches.

Blumberg, R.↗

A Framework for Software Health Management Using Bayesian Statistics

Software Health Management (SWHM) must make sure that the software always remains in safe and healthy regions of the state space. Boundaries between healthy and unhealthy regions are important for the detection of violations and health management.In this position paper, we present a framework, which employs techniques from Bayesian statistical modeling and active learning to efficiently characterize health boundaries in high-dimensional spaces. We will discuss, how this framework supports SWHM during design time and during operation of learning/adapting software systems

software health management↗

Towards an Open, Distributed Software Architecture for UxS Operations

To address the growing need to evaluate, test, and certify an ever expanding ecosystem of UxS platforms in preparation of cultural integration, NASA Langley Research Center's Autonomy Incubator (AI) has taken on the challenge of developing a software framework in which UxS platforms developed by third parties can be integrated into a single system which provides evaluation and testing, mission planning and operation, and out-of-the-box autonomy and data fusion capabilities. This software framework, named AEON (Autonomous Entity Operations Network), has two main goals. The first goal is the development of a cross-platform, extensible, onboard software system that provides autonomy at the mission execution and course-planning level, a highly configurable data fusion framework sensitive to the platform's available sensor hardware, and plug-and-play compatibility with a wide array of computer systems, sensors, software, and controls hardware. The second goal is the development of a ground control system that acts as a test-bed for integration of the proposed heterogeneous fleet, and allows for complex mission planning, tracking, and debugging capabilities. The ground control system should also be highly extensible and allow plug-and-play interoperability with third party software systems. In order to achieve these goals, this paper proposes an open, distributed software architecture which utilizes at its core the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standards, established by the Object Management Group (OMG), for inter-process communication and data flow. The design decisions proposed herein leverage the advantages of existing robotics software architectures and the DDS standards to develop software that is scalable, high-performance, fault tolerant, modular, and readily interoperable with external platforms and software.

Cross, Charles D.↗

Energy Material Network Data Hubs

In early 2015 the United States Department of Energy conceived of a consortium of collaborative bodies based on shared expertise, data, and resources that could be targeted towards the more difficult problems in energy materials research. The concept of virtual laboratories had been envisioned and discussed earlier in the decade in response to the advent of the Materials Genome Initiative and similar scientific thrusts. To be effective, any virtual laboratory needed a robust method for data management, communication, security, data sharing, dissemination, and demonstration to work efficiently and effectively for groups of remote researchers. With the accessibility of new, easily deployed cloud technology and software frameworks, such individual elements could be integrated, and the required collaboration architecture is now possible. The developers have leveraged open-source software frameworks, customized them, and merged them into a platform to enable collaborative energy materials science, regardless of the geographic dispersal of the people and resources. After five years in operations, the systems are demonstratively an effective platform for enabling research within the Energy Material Networks (EMN). This paper will show the design and development of a secured scientific data sharing platform, the ability to customize the system to support diverse workflows, and examples of the enabled research and results connected with some of the Energy Material Networks.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

CFS Test Framework

NASA's Core Flight System (cFS) provides a generic flight software framework architecture for developing flight software. As the cFS framework has gained popularity over the years within the flight software community, supporting software tools have been developed to assist in the design, development, testing and verification of flight software. The cFS Test Framework (CTF) is a recently developed cFS tool with capabilities to develop and run automated test and verification scripts against flight software targets. The CTF tool parses and executes JSON-based test scripts containing test instructions, while logging and reporting the results. CTF utilizes a plugin-based architecture to allow developers to extend CTF with new test instructions, external interfaces, and custom functionality. To interface with flight software, CTF parses a set of CCSDS message definition files to create the necessary command and telemetry structures for use during the test run. Additionally, CTF also supports interfacing with multiple cFS instances, allowing a test script to verify requirements that involve multiple flight software targets. Lastly, CTF provides support for executing test scripts against FSW running on remote or embedded hardware. This allows CTF to execute the same test scripts across different target configurations throughout the development process. In this presentation, we will introduce the cFS Test Framework (CTF) architecture, discuss the history of cFS testing frameworks, and present the features and capabilities currently provided by CTF. Lastly, we will show a demo of the CTF tool being used to execute test scripts against flight software.

cfs↗

SEAS Communication Engine: An Extensible, Flexible Wrapper for Co-Simulation Agents

When modeling and analyzing the power grid and other large scale systems, researchers often express scenarios as optimization problems and feed them into advanced software solvers. In order to allow multiple solvers to communicate with each other and share data from different domains, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and associated Department of Energy (DOE) labs have developed a software framework called the Hierarchical Engine for Large-scale Infrastructure Co-Simulation (HELICS). HELICS allows cosimulation via a collection of client libraries for different languages that can be called from the appropriate optimization software. However, these client libraries do not provide a higher level of abstraction beyond reading and writing data off of the shared HELICS bus. In this paper, we describe a new software library called the SEAS Communication Engine that exposes a higher-level API for running cosimulation problems. The SEAS Engine provides a class-based abstraction on top of the Python HELICS client, in order to allow users to implement their domain-specific cosimulations without needing to interact with core HELICS primitives. This will make adoption of HELICS and cosimulation in general easier, by exposing a simpler API. In the second part of the paper, we validate our library on a collection of different simulation examples, including the canonical IEEE 13 Bus Feeder. Lastly, we demonstrate using the SEAS Engine to directly call domain-specific code written in the Julia programming language. Our hope is that this will serve as a template for easily calling software in different programming languages via the SEAS Engine, thereby avoiding code duplication and complexity.

co-simulation↗

Autonomous Coupler Alignment Using Position-Based Visual Servoing in a ROS 2 Framework

As robotic arms are becoming increasingly common alongside humans as collaborative robots, their high precision in motion enables tasks to be performed at significantly higher speeds with reduced disruption in the environment. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is exploring this application by incorporating a UR16e from Universal Robots in a cleanroom setting during assembly of couplers to superconducting radio frequency cavities as part of the PIP-II project. The goal of the robotic assembly process is to precisely position the UR16e robot so that the coupler flange, mounted on the robot’s end-effector, is accurately aligned with and pressed against the cavity flange, requiring only final fastening by a lab technician. This thesis builds upon an initial system in which the robotic process was limited to the alignment phase using position-based visual servoing with an eye-in-hand camera to only align the coupler to the cavity with an offset distance. The objective of this thesis is to further advance autonomous robotic assembly by extending the process. To this end, the entire software framework was reconstructed, as the previous development environment posed significant challenges in modifying the software and adapting to hardware changes. The main contributions of this thesis are as follows: (i) a modular and scalable software framework based on ROS~2 was developed to facilitate performance expansion and interchangeability of software and hardware components; (ii) the desired alignment position for position-based visual servoing was parameterized to enable flexible configuration; and (iii) a methodology was developed to close the offset distance between the coupler and cavity utilizing the internal force-torque sensing capability of the UR16e, as visual feedback is not available during the offset-closing phase. The proposed autonomous robotic assembly reduces assembly time and technician involvement, thereby minimizing the risk of airborne particulate contamination, which is essential in the cleanroom setting. Moreover, the ROS~2-based framework provides a foundation for further expansion and continued advancement of robotic automation in Fermilab.

Giffen, Nickolas [Northern Illinois U.]↗

IRIS: A Performance-Portable Framework for Cross-Platform Heterogeneous Computing

From edge to exascale, computer architectures are becoming more heterogeneous and complex. The systems typically have fat nodes, with multicore CPUs and multiple hardware accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs, and DSPs. This complexity is causing a crisis in programming systems and performance portability. Several programming systems are working to address these challenges, but the increasing architectural diversity is forcing software stacks and applications to be specialized for each architecture. As we show, all of these approaches critically depend on their software framework for discovery, execution, scheduling, and data orchestration. To address this challenge, we believe that a more agile and proactive software framework is essential to increase performance portability and improve user productivity. To this end, we have designed and implemented IRIS: a performance-portable framework for cross-platform heterogeneous computing. IRIS can discover available resources, manage multiple diverse programming platforms (e.g., CUDA, Hexagon, HIP, Level Zero, OpenCL, OpenMP) simultaneously in the same execution, respect data dependencies, orchestrate data movement proactively, and provide for user-configurable scheduling. To simplify data movement, IRIS introduces a shared virtual device memory with relaxed consistency among different heterogeneous devices. IRIS also adds an automatic kernel workload partitioning technique using the polyhedral model so that it can resize kernels for a wide range of devices. Our evaluation on three architectures, ranging from Qualcomm Snapdragon to a Summit supercomputer node, shows that IRIS improves portability across a wide range of diverse heterogeneous architectures with negligible overhead.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Using the ATLAS experiment software on heterogeneous resources

With the large dataset expected from 2030 onwards by the HL-LHC at CERN, the ATLAS experiment is reaching the limits of the current data processing model in terms of traditional CPU resources based on x86_64 architectures and an extensive program for software upgrades towards the HL-LHC has been set up. The ARM CPU architecture is becoming a competitive and energy efficient alternative. Accelerators like GPUs are available in any recent HPC. In the past years ATLAS has successfully ported its full data processing and simulation software framework Athena to ARM and has invested significant effort in porting parts of the reconstruction and simulation algorithms to GPUs. We report on the successful usage of the ATLAS experiment offline and online software framework Athena on ARM and GPUs through the PanDA workflow management system at various WLCG sites. Furthermore we report on performance optimizations of the builds for ARM CPUs and the GPU integration efforts. We will discuss performance comparisons of different ARM and x86_64 architectures on WLCG resources and Cloud compute providers like GCP and AWS using ATLAS productions workflows as used in the Hep-Score23 benchmark suite.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Towards a Software Development Framework for Interconnected Science Ecosystems

The innovative science of the future must be multi-domain and interconnected to usher in the next generation of “self-driving” laboratories enabling consequential discoveries and transformative inventions. Such a disparate and interconnected ecosystem of scientific instruments will need to evolve using a system-of-systems (SoS) approach. The key to enabling application integration with such an SoS will be the use of Software Development Kits (SDKs). Currently, SDKs facilitate scientific research breakthroughs via algorithmic automation, databases and storage, optimization and structure, pervasive environmental monitoring, among others. However, existing SDKs lack instrument-interoperability and reusability capabilities, do not effectively work in an open federated architectural environment, and are largely isolated within silos of the respective scientific disciplines. Inspired by the scalable SoS framework, this work proposes the development of INTERSECT-SDK to provide a coherent environment for multi-domain scientific applications to benefit from the open federated architecture in an interconnected ecosystem of instruments. This approach will decompose functionality into loosely coupled software services for interoperability among several solutions that do not scale beyond a single domain and/or application. Furthermore, the proposed environment will allow operational and managerial inter-dependence while providing opportunities for the researchers to reuse software components from other domains and build universal solution libraries. We demonstrate this research for microscopy use-case, where we show how INTERSECT-SDK is developing the tools necessary to enable advanced scanning methods and accelerate scientific discovery.

Malviya, Addi Thakur↗

cFS Test Framework (CTF)

NASA's Core Flight System (cFS) provides a generic flight software framework architecture for developing flight software. As the cFS framework has gained popularity over the years within the flight software community, supporting software tools have been developed to assist in the design, development, testing and verification of flight software. The cFS Test Framework (CTF) is a recently developed cFS tool with capabilities to develop and run automated test and verification scripts against flight software targets. The CTF tool parses and executes JSON-based test scripts containing test instructions, while logging and reporting the results. CTF utilizes a plugin-based architecture to allow developers to extend CTF with new test instructions, external interfaces, and custom functionality. To interface with flight software, CTF parses a set of CCSDS message definition files to create the necessary command and telemetry structures for use during the test run. Additionally, CTF also supports interfacing with multiple cFS instances, allowing a test script to verify requirements that involve multiple flight software targets. Lastly, CTF provides support for executing test scripts against FSW running on remote or embedded hardware. This allows CTF to execute the same test scripts across different target configurations throughout the development process. In this presentation, we will introduce the cFS Test Framework (CTF) architecture, discuss the history of cFS testing frameworks, and present the features and capabilities currently provided by CTF. Lastly, we will show a demo of the CTF tool being used to execute test scripts against flight software.

Aly I Shehata↗

AEcroscopy: A Software–Hardware Framework Empowering Microscopy Toward Automated and Autonomous Experimentation

Microscopy has been pivotal in improving the understanding of structure-function relationships at the nanoscale and is by now ubiquitous in most characterization labs. However, traditional microscopy operations are still limited largely by a human-centric click-and-go paradigm utilizing vendor-provided software, which limits the scope, utility, efficiency, effectiveness, and at times reproducibility of microscopy experiments. Here, in this work, a coupled software–hardware platform is developed that consists of a software package termed AEcroscopy (short for Automated Experiments in Microscopy), along with a field-programmable-gate-array device with LabView-built customized acquisition scripts, which overcome these limitations and provide the necessary abstractions toward full automation of microscopy platforms. The platform works across multiple vendor devices on scanning probe microscopes and electron microscopes. It enables customized scan trajectories, processing functions that can be triggered locally or remotely on processing servers, user-defined excitation waveforms, standardization of data models, and completely seamless operation through simple Python commands to enable a plethora of microscopy experiments to be performed in a reproducible, automated manner. This platform can be readily coupled with existing machine-learning libraries and simulations, to provide automated decision-making and active theory-experiment optimization to turn microscopes from characterization tools to instruments capable of autonomous model refinement and physics discovery.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Robust framework and software implementation for fast speciation mapping

One of the greatest benefits of synchrotron radiation is the ability to perform chemical speciation analysis through X-ray absorption spectroscopies (XAS). XAS imaging of large sample areas can be performed with either full-field or raster-scanning modalities. A common practice to reduce acquisition time while decreasing dose and/or increasing spatial resolution is to compare X-ray fluorescence images collected at a few diagnostic energies. In this work, several authors have used different multivariate data processing strategies to establish speciation maps. Furthermore, the theoretical aspects and assumptions that are often made in the analysis of these datasets are focused on. A robust framework is developed to perform speciation mapping in large bulk samples at high spatial resolution by comparison with known references. Two fully operational software implementations are provided: a user-friendly implementation within the MicroAnalysis Toolkit software, and a dedicated script developed under the R environment. The procedure is exemplified through the study of a cross section of a typical fossil specimen. Additionally, the algorithm provides accurate speciation and concentration mapping while decreasing the data collection time by typically two or three orders of magnitude compared with the collection of whole spectra at each pixel. Whereas acquisition of spectral datacubes on large areas leads to very high irradiation times and doses, which can considerably lengthen experiments and generate significant alteration of radiation-sensitive materials, this sparse excitation energy procedure brings the total irradiation dose greatly below radiation damage thresholds identified in previous studies. This approach is particularly adapted to the chemical study of heterogeneous radiation-sensitive samples encountered in environmental, material, and life sciences.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Rapid Lightweight Firmware Architecture of the Mobile Metamaterial Internal Co-Integrator Robot

The Mobile Metamaterial Internal Co-Integrator (MMIC-I) is a structure assembly and servicing robot for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing of primary structures and infrastructure. MMIC-I is a battery-powered crawling robot that can travel through periodic structures such as trusses and open framework mechanical metamaterials. It does this through sequences of component extension, contraction, and gripping. This paper provides a detailed discussion of MMIC-I’s lightweight and rapidly developed firmware architecture, to enable demonstration of robot locomotion, secondary operations, and communications with a central command source. The rationale for the lightweight rapid development approach is to allow for assessment of long term system requirements in parallel with the mechatronics development, including optimization of system and subsystem power densities, to inform a future choice of flight ready software frameworks. MMIC-I system computing and I/O requirements are much lower than what is provided by proven baseline computing hardware for existing flight ready software frameworks such as the core Flight System, F prime, and the Robot Operating System. Development of earth gravity ground demonstration of the robotic systems is greatly benefited by limited power and mass factors for computing hardware. Here, we implement inter-process communication, commanding, and telemetry with the Espressif ESP32 module running the Arduino OS.

Damiana Catanoso↗

Enabling Pulse-level Programming, Compilation, and Execution in XACC

Noisy gate-model quantum processing units (QPUs) are currently available from vendors over the cloud, and digital quantum programming approaches exist to run low-depth circuits on physical hardware. These digital representations are ultimately lowered to pulse-level instructions by vendor quantum control systems to affect unitary evolution representative of the submitted digital circuit. Vendors are beginning to open this pulse-level control system to the public via specified interfaces. Robust programming methodologies, software frameworks, and backend simulation technologies for this analog model of quantum computation will prove critical to advancing pulse-level control research and development. Prototypical use cases for this include error mitigation, optimal pulse control, and physics-inspired pulse construction. Here we present an extension to the XACC quantum-classical software framework that enables pulse-level programming for superconducting, gate-model quantum computers, and a novel, general, and extensible pulse-level simulation backend for XACC that scales on classical compute clusters via MPI. Our work enables custom backend Hamiltonian definitions and gate-level compilation to available pulses with a focus on performance and scalability. We end with a demonstration of this capability, and show how to use XACC for pertinent pulse-level programming tasks.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Economic Assessment of Nuclear Hybrid Energy Systems: Nuclear-Renewable-Water Integration in Arizona

One of the goals of the Nuclear-Renewable Hybrid Energy Systems (N-R HES) modeling and simulation (M&S) project is to assess the economic viability of N-R HES in a market that contains Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) sources like solar. The N-R HES M&S project is a multi-laboratory effort, led by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and supported by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Development of the N-R HES software framework was initiated at INL in 2016 [1] and has reached some level of maturity such that it can be applied to more than simple demonstration cases, e.g. real industry problems. Nevertheless, more capabilities are constantly added to accommodate the special needs of challenging, real-life problems. The N-R HES framework is built on the Risk Analysis Virtual ENvironment (RAVEN) code [2], which it uses as a driver and workflow manager for all calculations. There are four main cornerstones of the N-R HES simulation framework: 1) The generation of stochastic synthetic time series. 2) A set of probabilistic analysis and optimization algorithms available in RAVEN. 3) A set of models for representing the physical behavior of N-R HES. These can be reduced-order models or high-fidelity Modelica [3] models. 4) The RAVEN plug-in called CashFlow [4] that maps physical performance into economic performance. Within this framework, a broad spectrum of questions related to N-R HES can be addressed. One of the challenges currently of high interest is the increasing penetration of VRE altering the profile of the net demand (demand after removing all non-curtailable renewable energy sources, e.g. rooftop solar). The N-R HES software framework is capable of analyzing the potential feasibility of mitigating the resultant volatility in the net electricity demand. One possible solution to manage net demand volatility is adding stabilizing loads to the grid. These loads can be external industrial processes that are able to ramp production up and down quickly, or for regulated markets, adding variable internal loads that will effectively increase the baseload of the power plant and therefore reduce the risk of internal demand that is lower than the capacity of the power plant. The latter is a possible solution currently being considered by Arizona Public Service (APS), the operating owner of the Palo Verde (PV) Nuclear Power Plant (NPP).

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Summary Describing Integration of ERM Methodology into Supervisory Control Framework with Software Package Documentation; Advanced Reactor Technology Milestone: M4AT-16PN2301052

This project involved the development of enhanced risk monitors (ERMs) for active components in Advanced Reactor (AdvRx) designs by integrating real-time information about equipment condition with risk monitors. Health monitoring techniques in combination with predictive estimates of component failure based on condition and risk monitors can serve to indicate the risk posed by continued operation in the presence of detected degradation. This combination of predictive health monitoring based on equipment condition assessment and risk monitors can also enable optimization of maintenance scheduling with respect to the economics of plant operation. This report summarizes PNNL’s multi-year project on the development and evaluation of an ERM concept for active components while highlighting FY2016 accomplishments. Specifically, this report provides a status summary of the integration and demonstration of the prototypic ERM framework with the plant supervisory control algorithms being developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and describes additional case studies conducted to assess sensitivity of the technology to different quantities. Supporting documentation on the software package to be provided to ONRL is incorporated in this report.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗