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DOE OSTI2014

Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program Operator Performance Metrics for Control Room Modernization: A Practical Guide for Early Design Evaluation

As control rooms are modernized with new digital systems at nuclear power plants, it is necessary to evaluate the operator performance using these systems as part of a verification and validation process. There are no standard, predefined metrics available for assessing what is satisfactory operator interaction with new systems, especially during the early design stages of a new system. This report identifies the process and metrics for evaluating human system interfaces as part of control room modernization. The report includes background information on design and evaluation, a thorough discussion of human performance measures, and a practical example of how the process and metrics have been used as part of a turbine control system upgrade during the formative stages of design. The process and metrics are geared toward generalizability to other applications and serve as a template for utilities undertaking their own control room modernization activities.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2017

High temperature ceramic heat exchanger for solid oxide fuel cell

A ceramic heat exchanger with high effectiveness and low-pressure drop has been developed for application as a cathode air preheater for a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC). At the operating conditions of SOFCs, typical metallic alloys as those used in commercial heat exchangers may undergo chromium volatilization, which is a known cathode degradation mechanism that reduces SOFC performance and life. Use of ceramics such as alumina or alumina-silicate instead of chromium-containing metal is one approach to eliminate the effects of chromium on the SOFC cathode. This project leverages the geometric design of a heat exchanger previously prototyped and tested [1] to fabricate a novel heat exchanger made from a ceramic material. All calculations of heat exchanger performance requirements are based on state of the art SOFC operating conditions. The alumina-silicate material selected to fabricate the modular prototype heat exchanger was made via a heat transfer based trade-off analysis that shows that for low pressure-drop devices, flow convection is the limiting heat transfer mechanism, and therefore wall conductivity becomes less relevant to heat transfer effectiveness. The modular design presented allows for incremental aggregation of modules to target a broad range of operating conditions typical of present and upcoming SOFC applications (e.g., 25 to 400 kWe). The completed prototype was subjected to a series of static leak/pressure tests, dynamic pressure drop tests both at ambient and realistic service temperature conditions, and finally to a matrix of heat transfer experiments to fully characterize its heat transfer effectiveness (including tests at hot gas temperatures up to 1033 K or 1400oF). The stand-alone system was demonstrated in the laboratory to successfully satisfy the design criteria at realistic operating conditions, showing a total pressure drop at the design flow of 8 g/sec of 6 kPa (vs. 3.45 kPa approximate requirement). It was also shown to have heat transfer effectiveness of 76% (with 73% being the design requirement). Moreover, the unit was shown to operate leak-free, and the ceramic elements and seals were capable of withstanding the thermal cycling resulting from the testing procedure. The heat exchanger was then integrated into a modified fuel cell test stand and tested at steady state operation. Unfortunately, the level of performance achieved was lower than expected based on laboratory performance tests. This appears to have been the result of an unforeseen loosening of a heat exchanger structural component, which resulted into a leak that prevented proper supply of hot gas to the heat exchanger. However, in general terms, the heat exchanger/fuel cell integration process provides confidence that a future application of the unit with a SOFC is feasible, assuming structural issues are addressed. It is considered that the difficulties encountered at the last stage of the program provided invaluable input in locating shortcomings of the mechanical design and integration approach. A portion of this work was presented at the ASME Power & Energy Conference, in Charlotte, NC, on June 28th 2016 in a paper entitled “Development of a Ceramic Heat Exchanger for Application as Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Cathode Air Preheater” and the corresponding paper was published in the Proceedings of the ASME 2016 Power & Energy Conference, Paper No.: PowerEnergy2016-59333 [8].

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗

DOE OSTI2014

Evaluation of Visual Analytics Environments: The Road to the Visual Analytics Science and Technology Challenge Evaluation Methodology

The evaluation of visual analytics environments was a topic in Illuminating the Path [Thomas 2005] as a critical aspect of moving research into practice. For a thorough understanding of the utility of the systems available, evaluation not only involves assessing the visualizations, interactions or data processing algorithms themselves, but also the complex processes that a tool is meant to support (such as exploratory data analysis and reasoning, communication through visualization, or collaborative data analysis [Lam 2012; Carpendale 2007]). Researchers and practitioners in the field have long identified many of the challenges faced when planning, conducting, and executing an evaluation of a visualization tool or system [Plaisant 2004]. Evaluation is needed to verify that algorithms and software systems work correctly and that they represent improvements over the current infrastructure. Additionally to effectively transfer new software into a working environment, it is necessary to ensure that the software has utility for the end-users and that the software can be incorporated into the end-user’s infrastructure and work practices. Evaluation test beds require datasets, tasks, metrics and evaluation methodologies. As noted in [Thomas 2005] it is difficult and expensive for any one researcher to setup an evaluation test bed so in many cases evaluation is setup for communities of researchers or for various research projects or programs. Examples of successful community evaluations can be found [Chinchor 1993; Voorhees 2007; FRGC 2012]. As visual analytics environments are intended to facilitate the work of human analysts, one aspect of evaluation needs to focus on the utility of the software to the end-user. This requires representative users, representative tasks, and metrics that measure the utility to the end-user. This is even more difficult as now one aspect of the test methodology is access to representative end-users to participate in the evaluation. In many cases the sensitive nature of data and tasks and difficult access to busy analysts puts even more of a burden on researchers to complete this type of evaluation. User-centered design goes beyond evaluation and starts with the user [Beyer 1997, Shneiderman 2009]. Having some knowledge of the type of data, tasks, and work practices helps researchers and developers know the correct paths to pursue in their work. When access to the end-users is problematic at best and impossible at worst, user-centered design becomes difficult. Researchers are unlikely to go to work on the type of problems faced by inaccessible users. Commercial vendors have difficulties evaluating and improving their products when they cannot observe real users working with their products. In well-established fields such as web site design or office software design, user-interface guidelines have been developed based on the results of empirical studies or the experience of experts. Guidelines can speed up the design process and replace some of the need for observation of actual users [heuristics review references]. In 2006 when the visual analytics community was initially getting organized, no such guidelines existed. Therefore, we were faced with the problem of developing an evaluation framework for the field of visual analytics that would provide representative situations and datasets, representative tasks and utility metrics, and finally a test methodology which would include a surrogate for representative users, increase interest in conducting research in the field, and provide sufficient feedback to the researchers so that they could improve their systems.

evaluation↗

DOE OSTI2015

Smart Grid Enabled EVSE

The combined team of GE Global Research, Federal Express, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Consolidated Edison has successfully achieved the established goals contained within the Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Capable Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment funding opportunity. The final program product, shown charging two vehicles in Figure 1, reduces by nearly 50% the total installed system cost of the electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) as well as enabling a host of new Smart Grid enabled features. These include bi-directional communications, load control, utility message exchange and transaction management information. Using the new charging system, Utilities or energy service providers will now be able to monitor transportation related electrical loads on their distribution networks, send load control commands or preferences to individual systems, and then see measured responses. Installation owners will be able to authorize usage of the stations, monitor operations, and optimally control their electricity consumption. These features and cost reductions have been developed through a total system design solution.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2024

Technical and Economic Assessment and Gap Analysis of Advanced Nuclear Reactor Integration with a Reference Oil Refinery

Efforts to identify the most-economic methods to decarbonize several sectors of the U.S. economy are underway. Industrial processes such as crude-oil refining rely heavily on energy-dense and easily stored and transported fossil fuels for powering their operations. Refineries use large amounts of energy, primarily derived from fossil sources to separate crude-oil components, break down heavier hydrocarbons into lighter compounds, remove impurities, reform hydrocarbon molecules, and generate steam and electricity for pumps and compressors and other various auxiliary systems. Crude-oil refining operations such as distillation, cracking, desulfurization, reforming, utilities systems and some offsite facilities collectively account for most of the energy consumption. Other operations such as hydrocracking or hydrotreating also require hydrogen for developing hydrogenation reactions which involve substantial heating to keep the reactors at high-temperature and pressure levels. All heat and energy demands are typically provided by natural gas (NG), oil, or other fuels, which makes refinery industry one of the most-difficult sectors to decarbonize. Nuclear power is a viable and energy-dense source of clean electricity, heat, and hydrogen to provide the large, sustainable energy supply that the refining industry demands. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Integrated Energy Systems (IES) program is working to perform research and development, design, economic siting, and risk analysis. This state-of-the-art work will enable the first on-site demonstrations and commercial deployments of advanced small modular nuclear reactors (SMNRs) integrated with industries such as chemical production, refining, iron and steel making, and more. IES seeks to demonstrate the ability of advanced nuclear reactors to meet the heat and power demands of these industries while reducing carbon emissions in a sustainable and cost-competitive way. The primary objective of this research effort is to analyze industrial-scale SMNR integration intended to decarbonize refining facilities. The foreseen outcome is the provision of reliable, cost-competitive, and sustainable clean energy, alongside a reduction of carbon emissions. Specifically, the focus of this work lies on meeting the reference facilities’ heat and electricity demands with nuclear power while also supplying clean hydrogen via integrated high-temperature steam electrolysis (HTSE). This report presents a comprehensive technical and economic assessment of the integration of advanced nuclear reactors into a reference refinery, leveraging financial incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The evaluation aims to explore the potential economic benefits and challenges associated with incorporating advanced nuclear reactors into refinery operations, particularly in terms of energy efficiency, economic implications and environmental impact. By examining both the technical feasibility and economic viability, this analysis seeks to identify existing gaps and propose solutions for successful nuclear integration implementation. The findings are intended to provide valuable insights for stakeholders considering the adoption of advanced nuclear reactors in the refining sector. A refinery reference-plant was developed, using an open-source refinery model, Petroleum Refinery Lifecycle Inventory Model (PRELIM) and expert assessment, as a base case for comparison with various nuclear integration options. The capacity of 100 kbd/day (KBD) of heavy crude-oil feed was selected to represent a general coking-type refinery with deep conversion capabilities (incorporating heavy-oil upgrading with FCC, coking, and associated hydrotreating process units), using a heavy crude-oil feed, which represents about 70% of U.S. refineries configurations. A summary of all cases considered in this study is shown in Table 1.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

Prototype and Codesign of Nascent Flexible Wave Energy Converter Concepts

Prevailing mainstream ocean wave energy converter (WEC) archetypes are often relatively large monolithic rigid bodies with singular means of power take-off (e.g., relative motion between rigid bodies) and solo prime mover mechanisms (e.g. a rotary generator, a hydraulic piston). These mainstream WEC archetypes have existed for decades with some having histories spanning more than a century of significant investments and interests. As an alternative to the domain of mainstream WEC archetypes is the domain of distributed embedded energy converter technologies (also known as DEEC-Tec). Use of DEEC-Tec to create WECs - often called flexWECs - is a nascent domain of research and development that centers itself upon the interconnection of many relatively small energy converters - very small energy transducers - that interconnect and combine to create a much larger, overall, energy converting structure. The DEEC-Tec domain enables promising possibilities such as: direct in situ ocean wave energy harvesting and conversion throughout the volume of an entire flexWEC; inherent broad-banded ocean wave energy capture and conversion arising from near semi-continuous structural degrees of freedom; an innate absence of focusing and concentrating of ocean wave energy into a single prime mover and/or transmission system; and built-in implicit redundancy. As such, the DEEC-Tec domain could revolutionize how we conceptualize ocean wave energy conversion - both in terms of ocean wave energy converter design and what we view as viable environments and circumstances for ocean wave energy conversion. The research and development opportunities for the DEEC-Tec domain, therefore, are vast compared to the prevailing mainstream ocean wave energy converter domain. Correspondingly, there are ample opportunities to invest time and money into the DEEC-Tec domain with an aim to enable a paradigm shift in how ocean waves can be utilized as a more viable form of renewable energy. To that end, two seedling efforts have been enacted providing a very cursory investigation into the DEEC-Tec domain: (1) a preliminary simple fabrication/prototyping effort and (2) a preliminary co-design effort. The prototype seedling centers upon the design of a fabrication and evaluation rig for individual DEEC-Tec transducers; e.g., dielectric elastomer generators. The co-design seedling centers upon the analysis of those methods suitable for DEEC-Tec, ocean wave energy conversion, and fluid-structure interaction co-design efforts.

50 EE - Wind and Water Power Program - Water (EE-4↗

DOE OSTI2023

USE OF NOVEL REFRACTORY DESIGN AND INSTALLATION TECHNIQUES FOR IMPROVED ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN IRON AND STEEL AND OTHER ENERGY INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES

This work describes a US Department of Energy funded program which unites key players to develop and deploy new technologies aimed at increasing energy efficiencies while reducing their overall energy and environmental footprint. The research brings together a vertically integrated collaborative team consisting of the end user (US Steel), material producers/suppliers (Allied Mineral Products and Reno Refractories), raw material suppliers (American Metallurgical Services, Minerals Manufacturing), and research organizations (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Energy Technology Laboratory and University of Alabama-Birmingham) with the objective of designing and producing new refractory materials. Design and production criteria are based on novel aggregates, improved particle packing, and engineered surface textures. In addition, the recycling and use of spent refractory materials has been investigated resulting in development of a novel installation technique that utilizes additive manufacturing technology and existing refractory shotcrete technology. The combination of these new technologies will improve the energy, environmental, and economic efficiencies of the steel industry while reducing the environmental footprint. The developed technology is potentially applicable to additional energy intensive industries including cement, glass, pulp and paper, and non-ferrous metals processing.

Hemrick, James↗

DOE OSTI2018

Battery and backup generator sizing for a resilient microgrid under stochastic extreme events

Owing to the recent power outages caused by extreme events, installing battery energy storage and backup generators is important to improve resiliency for a grid-tied microgrid. In the design stage, the event occurrence time and duration, which are highly uncertain and cannot be effectively predicted, may affect the needed battery and backup generator capacity but are usually assumed to be pre-determined in utility planning tools. This study investigates the optimal battery and backup generator sizing problem considering the stochastic event occurrence time and duration for the grid-tied microgrid under islanded operation. The reliability requirement is quantified by the mean value of the critical customer interruption time in each stochastic islanding time window (ITW), whose length is the duration and the centre is the occurrence time. The stochastic ITW constraint is then transformed to a probability-weighted expression to derive an equivalent Mixed Integer Linear Programming model. Numerical simulations on a realistic grid-tied PV-based microgrid demonstrate that the total cost is reduced by 11.5% considering the stochastic ITW, compared with the deterministic ITW under the same reliability requirement.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2021

A Configuration Based Pumped Storage Hydro Model in the MISO Day-Ahead Market

Pumped storage hydro units (PSHU) can provide flexibility to power systems. This becomes particularly valuable in recent years with the increasing shares of intermittent renewable resources. However, due to emphasis on thermal generation in the current market practices, the flexibility from PSHUs have not been fully explored and utilized. This paper proposes a configuration based pumped storage hydro (PSH) model for the day-ahead market, in order to enhance the use of PSH resources in the system. A strategic design of incorporating and fully optimizing PSHUs in the day-ahead market is presented. Here, we show the compactness of the proposed model. Numerical studies are presented in an illustrative test system and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) system.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2016

TU-FG-201-07: Development of SRS Conical Collimator Collision Prediction Software for Radiation Treatment Safety

Purpose: Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) treatments using conical collimators can potentially result in gantry collision with treatment table due to limited collision-clear spaces. An in-house software was developed to help the SRS treatment planner mitigate potential SRS conical collimator (Varian Medical System, Palo Alto, CA) collisions with the treatment table. This software was designed to remove treatment re-planning secondary to unexpected collisions. Methods: A BrainLAB SRS ICT Frameless Extension used for SRS treatments in our clinic was mathematically modelled using surface points registered to the 3D co-ordinate space of the couch extension. The surface points are transformed based on the treatment isocenter point and potential collisions are determined in 3D space for couch and gantry angle combinations. The distance between the SRS conical collimators and LINAC isocenter is known. The collision detection model was programmed in MATLAB (Mathwork, Natick, MA) to display graphical plots of the calculations, and the plotted data is used to avoid the gantry and couch angle combinations that would likely result in a collision. We have utilized the cone collision tool for 23 SRS cone treatment plans (8 retrospective and 15 prospective for 10 patients). Results: Twenty one plans strongly agreed with the software tool prediction for collision. However, in two plans, a collision was observed with a 0.5 cm margin when the software predicted no collision. Therefore, additional margins were added to the clearance criteria in the program to achieve a lower risk of actual collisions. Conclusion: Our in-house developed collision check software successfully avoided SRS cone re-planning by 91.3% due to a reduction in cone collisions with the treatment table. Future developments to our software will include a CT image data set based collision prediction model as well as a beam angle optimization tool to avoid normal critical tissues as well as previously treated lesions.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2017

GATEWAY Demonstrations: Tuning Hospital Lighting: Evaluating Tunable LED Lighting at the Swedish Hospital Behavioral Health Unit in Seattle

The GATEWAY program evaluated a tunable LED lighting system installed in the new Swedish Medical Behavioral Health Unit in Seattle that incorporates color-tunable luminaires in common areas, and uses advanced controls for dimming and color tuning, with the goal of providing a better environment for staff and patients. The report reviews the design of the tunable lighting system, summarizes two sets of measurements, and discusses the circadian, energy, and commissioning implications as well as lessons learned from the project.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2018

Utilization of Renewable Energy to Meet New National Challenges in Energy and Climate Change

The project aims to design a microgrid system to promote utilization of renewable energy resources such as wind and solar to address the national challenges in energy and climate change. Different optimization techniques and simulation software are used to study the performance of the renewable energy system under study. A series of research works performed under the grant Department of Energy (DOE) is presented. This grant opportunity affords Howard faculty, students, graduates, undergraduates, K-12, postdocs and visiting scholars to benefit state of the art research work. The research work has led to improve or advance understanding of new hardware technologies, software development and engineering optimization methods necessary and sufficient for handling probabilistic models and real-time computation and functions necessary for development of microgrid system. Consistent with State of Project Objective Howard University has partitioned the task into the following integrated activities: 1. Stochastic Model for RER and Load • Development of modeling Renewable Energy Resources (RER) and load which is used to perform distribution power flow study which leads to publication in refereed journals and conferences. The work was also published at the IEEE conference. 2. Stochastic optimization for voltage/Var • The development of voltage VAr optimization based on a review of existing knowledge in optimization led to the use of stochastic program and evolution of programming optimization method for V/VAr optimization. Papers were presented at the North America Power Systems Conference and the IEEE PES general meeting. 3. Modeling RER and Storage • Extending the concept of optimization method an RER with storage, such as the development of microgrid V/VAr and storage is performed. Several papers were published at the North America Power Systems Conference and the IEEE PES general meeting. 4. Power Game • Development of power game experiment using Labvolt to allow for hands on understanding of design and development of microgrid functions is performed. Publication were done by students at the end of their summer program. 5. Designing Microgrid Testbed • Example microgrid test bed is developed. In addition, function of the test bed are developed. The papers were presented at the North America Power Systems Conference and the IEEE general meeting. 6. Outreach Program • From the outreach program, topics from the project have been included in the revision of courses at Howard University, new book called Energy Processing and Smartgrid has being developed. • Hosted masters students from University of Denver to complete their projects with us. • Hosted high school students for early exposure for careers in STEM • Representations made in IEEE conferences to share the lessons learned in the use of micro grid to expose students to STEM education and research.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2023

ERSAP: Toward Better NP Data-Stream Analytics With Flow-Based Programming

This paper presents an reactive, actor-model and FBP paradigm based framework that we develop to design data-stream processing applications for HEP and NP. This framework encourages a functional decomposition of the overall data processing application into small mono-functional artifacts. Artifacts that are easy to understand, develop, deploy and debug. The fact that these artifacts (actors) are programmatically independent they can be scaled and optimized independently, which is impossible to do for components of the monolithic application. One of the important advantages of this approach is fault tolerance where independent actors can come and go on the data-stream without forcing the entire application to crash. Furthermore, it also makes it is easy to locate the faulty actor in the data pipeline. Due the fact that the actors are loosely coupled, and that the data (inevitably) carries the context, they can run on heterogeneous environments, utilizing different accelerators. This paper describes the main design concepts of the framework and presents a ?proof of concept? application design and deployment results obtain processing on-beam calorimeter streaming data.

Gyurjyan, V.↗

DOE OSTI2019

Mechanism Design for Demand Response Programs

Demand response (DR) programs serve to reduce the consumption of electricity at times when the supply is scarce and expensive. Consumers or agents with flexible consumption profiles are recruited by an aggregator who manages the DR program. The aggregator calls on a subset of its pool of recruited agents to reduce their electricity use during DR events. Agents are paid for reducing their energy consumption from contractually established baselines. Baselines are counter-factual consumption estimates of the energy an agent would have consumed if they were not participating in the DR program. Baselines are used to determine payments to agents. This creates an incentive for agents to inflate their baselines in order to increase the payments they receive. There are several newsworthy cases of agents gaming their baseline for economic benefit. We propose a novel self-reported baseline mechanism (SRBM) where each agent reports its baseline and marginal utility. These reports are strategic and need not be truthful. Based on the reported information, the aggregator selects or calls on agents with a certain probability to meet the load reduction target. Called agents are paid for observed reductions from their self-reported baselines. Agents who are not called face penalties for consumption shortfalls below their baselines. Under SRBM, we show that truthful reporting of baseline consumption and marginal utility is a dominant strategy. Thus, SRBM eliminates the incentive for agents to inflate baselines. SRBM is assured to meet the load reduction target. To conclude, we show that SRBM is almost optimal in the metric of average cost of DR provision faced by the aggregator.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2020

Networked Microgrid Optimal Design and Operations Tool: Regulatory and Business Environment Study

Microgrids aim to increase the resilience of the electric supply to the loads within the microgrid through the ability to disconnect from the distribution utility in the event of a power outage and by supplying power to the microgrid loads from a combination of multiple power generation assets and storage systems. Microgrids can also improve reliability at the distribution level by reducing the load on the system under stress conditions. Networking two or more microgrids has the potential to increase reliability and resilience at a reduced cost by taking advantage of economies of scale and increasing the diversity of the generation assets and loads. This report is part of a collaborative effort among several U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories to develop a networked microgrid (NMG) Optimal Design and Operations (OD&O) tool. This tool addresses the goal defined in the Grid Modernization Multi-Year Program Plan to develop a suite of tools that addresses functional requirements for system optimal design and the operations of NMGs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2022

Hybrid Heat Pump Controls: Conventional Dual Fuel versus Seamlessly Fuel Flexible Heat Pump

This paper compares the performance of a novel seamlessly fuel flexible heat pump (SFFHP) and conventional dual fuel heat pump (DFHP) for space heating. The conventional dual fuel systems either run on the gas furnace or electric heat pump at any given moment, as a comparison, the proposed seamlessly fuel flexible heat pump simultaneously consumes gas and electricity by continuously optimizing the proportion of each. The process air flows across the heat pump condenser first and then flows across the furnace coil, therefore, the heat pump temperature lift is reduced. SFFHP delivers energy savings by allowing each subsystem, i.e., gas furnace and electric heat pump, to operate where it performs best.For DFHP, two operation control strategies, i.e., non-restricted control and restricted control, are available on market. For the non-restricted mode, the thermostat has a switching temperature-programmed according to the balancing point of heating load and capacity curve. Heat pump operates above the switching temperature, while the furnace takes over under the switching temperature. For the restricted control, the compressor of a heat pump is disabled below a predefined lockout outdoor temperature to let the furnace take over. For SFFHP, a model predictive control strategy is developed to continuously adjust the capacities of the electric heat pump and gas furnace based on the foreseen weather data, utility price signals, and marginal grid emission signals with the goal of minimizing the utility cost and CO2 emission while guaranteeing comfort requirements.In this paper, DFHP and SFFHP are simulated using high-fidelity heat pump performance curves generated from DOE/ORNL heat pump design model. Performance comparison of DFHP and SFFHP during 2019-2020 heating season in Los Angeles shows that SFFHP with model predictive control achieves 23% utility cost reduction and 17 % CO2 emission reduction. Case studies demonstrate that SFFHP can deliver significant reductions in peak demand, utility cost, and CO2 emission. As a result, SFFHP can deliver superior benefits for utility cost reduction and CO2 emission reduction over conventional dual fuel heat pump.

Li, Zhenning↗

DOE OSTI2023

Urban Combined Heat and Power with Integrated Renewables and Energy Storage

This project demonstrated how incorporating a diverse generation and storage portfolio allows an urban district energy system to improve its efficiency by at least 50% and increase its backup power by at least 40% with a return on investment of at least ten years. The improvement was evaluated against the baseline operations for two urban district energy systems (DESs): a synthetic DES and a George Washington University DES. The DES techno-economic framework we developed yields reliability, resilience, and vulnerability indices for urban DESs (including generation and storage) with designation of which technologies improve the security and resiliency metrics by at least 20% compared to the status quo. The indices are benchmarked against baseline scenarios, and cost projections (capital cost and return on investment) to achieve the 20% improvement are reported. The energy management system we developed to conduct these analyses was incorporated into a user-friendly interface that can be used for decision-making by a user with no technical or programming background.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2023

Comparison of Measured and Simulated Neutron Counting with 3He Detectors and the Subcritical Water-Moderated UO2 7uPCX Assembly

An experiment designed to compare neutron noise analysis techniques on subcritical assemblies using differing neutron detector designs was developed as a collaborative effort between the Institut de radioprotection et de surete nucleaire (IRSN), Los Alamos (LANL), Lawrence Livermore (LLNL), and Sandia National Laboratories. This experiment has the final goal of characterizing neutron noise analysis accuracy in determining multiplication in light water systems for various neutron detection systems. This experiment utilized the Seven Percent Critical Experiment (7uPCX) facility at Sandia National Laboratories. The 7uPCX is an assembly designed to investigate light water systems with fuel enrichment above 5% and is able to use square or hex grid plates with varying pitches.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗