SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “ENFORCEMENT”

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.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,045 records · Page 58

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

DOE OSTI2013

Imaging-based optical caliper for objects in hot manufacturing processes

OG Technologies, Inc. (OGT), in conjunction with its industrial and academic partners, proposes to develop an Imaging-Based Optical Caliper (hereafter referred to as OC) for Objects in Hot Manufacturing Processes. The goal is to develop and demonstrate the OC with the synergy of OGT's current technological pool and other innovations to provide a light weight, robust, safe and accurate portable dimensional measurement device for hot objects with integrated wireless communication capacity to enable real time process control. The technical areas of interest in this project are the combination of advanced imaging, Sensor Fusion, and process control. OGT believes that the synergistic interactions between its current set of technologies and other innovations could deliver products that are viable and have high impact in the hot manufacture processes, such as steel making, steel rolling, open die forging, and glass industries, resulting in a new energy efficient control paradigm in the operations through improved yield, prolonged tool life and improved quality. In-line dimension measurement and control is of interest to the steel makers, yet current industry focus is on the final product dimension only instead of whole process due to the limit of man power, system cost and operator safety concerns. As sensor technologies advances, the industry started to see the need to enforce better dimensional control throughout the process, but lack the proper tools to do so. OGT along with its industrial partners represent the indigenous effort of technological development to serve the US steel industry. The immediate market that can use and get benefited from the proposed OC is the Steel Industry. The deployment of the OC has the potential to provide benefits in reduction of energy waste, CO2 emission, waste water amount, toxic waste, and so forth. The potential market after further expended function includes Hot Forging and Freight Industries. The OC prototypes were fabricated, and were progressively tested on-site in several steel mill and hot forging facilities for evaluation. Software refinements and new calibration procedures were also carried out to overcome the discovered glitches. Progress was presented to the hot manufacture facilities worldwide. Evidence showed a great interest and practical need for this product. OGT is in the pilot commercialization mode for this new development. The R&D team also successfully developed a 3D measurement function with no additional investment of hardware or equipment to measure low or room temperature object dimensions. Several tests were conducted in the reality environment to evaluate the measurement results. This new application will require additional development in product design.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

DOE OSTI2013

Objective analysis of toolmarks in forensics

Since the 1993 court case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. the subjective nature of toolmark comparison has been questioned by attorneys and law enforcement agencies alike. This has led to an increased drive to establish objective comparison techniques with known error rates, much like those that DNA analysis is able to provide. This push has created research in which the 3-D surface profile of two different marks are characterized and the marks’ cross-sections are run through a comparative statistical algorithm to acquire a value that is intended to indicate the likelihood of a match between the marks. The aforementioned algorithm has been developed and extensively tested through comparison of evenly striated marks made by screwdrivers. However, this algorithm has yet to be applied to quasi-striated marks such as those made by the shear edge of slip-joint pliers. The results of this algorithm’s application to the surface of copper wire will be presented. Objective mark comparison also extends to comparison of toolmarks made by firearms. In an effort to create objective comparisons, microstamping of firing pins and breech faces has been introduced. This process involves placing unique alphanumeric identifiers surrounded by a radial code on the surface of firing pins, which transfer to the cartridge’s primer upon firing. Three different guns equipped with microstamped firing pins were used to fire 3000 cartridges. These cartridges are evaluated based on the clarity of their alphanumeric transfers and the clarity of the radial code surrounding the alphanumerics.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2013

Cost-effectiveness of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010 Compared to ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) completed this project for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Building Energy Codes Program (BECP). DOE’s BECP supports upgrading building energy codes and standards, and the states’ adoption, implementation, and enforcement of upgraded codes and standards. Building energy codes and standards set minimum requirements for energy-efficient design and construction for new and renovated buildings, and impact energy use and greenhouse gas emissions for the life of buildings. Continuous improvement of building energy efficiency is achieved by periodically upgrading energy codes and standards. Ensuring that changes in the code that may alter costs (for building components, initial purchase and installation, replacement, maintenance and energy) are cost-effective encourages their acceptance and implementation. ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1 is the energy standard for commercial and multi-family residential buildings over three floors.

Thornton, Brian A.↗

DOE OSTI2013

Compiling MPI for Many-Core Systems

Processors with multiple (or many) cores and shared memory are becoming ubiquitous across the com puting spectrum. MPI, the current de facto program ming model for scalable parallel applications, enforces copies between source and target processes and thus can not fully utilize shared memory and cache architectures of modern machines. To enable MPI-based programs to more fully exploit features of multi- and many-core architectures, we present a compiler-based transformation that transforms MPI processes into threads and fuses message serialization and deserialization loops such that send and receive calls can be replaced by direct memory accesses. Our compiler replaces most of the MPI communication functions with direct load/store accesses and our runtime provides a threaded MPI implementation to handle the remaining functions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2013

Systems Level Engineering of Plant Cell Wall Biosynthesis to Improve Biofuel Feedstock Quality

Our new regulatory model of cell wall biosynthesis proposes original network architecture with several newly incorporated components. The mapped set of protein-DNA interactions will serve as a foundation for 1) understanding the regulation of a complex and integral plant component and 2) the manipulation of crop species for biofuel and biotechnology purposes. This study revealed interesting and novel aspects of grass growth and development and further enforce the importance of a grass model system. By functionally characterizing a suite of genes, we have begun to improve the sparse model for transcription regulation of biomass accumulation in grasses. In the process, we have advanced methodology and brachy molecular genetic tools that will serve as valuable community resource.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

DOE OSTI2012

Second Line of Defense Spares Program Assessment

The Office of the Second Line of Defense (SLD) is part of the Department of Energy‘s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The SLD Program accomplishes its critical global security mission by forming cooperative relationships with partner countries to install passive radiation detection systems that augment traditional inspection and law enforcement measures by alerting border officials to the presence of special nuclear or other radiological materials in cross-border traffic. An important tenet of the program is to work collaboratively with these countries to establish the necessary processes, procedures, infrastructure and conditions that will enable them to fully assume the financial and technical responsibilities for operating the equipment. As the number of operational deployments grows, the SLD Program faces an increasingly complex logistics process to promote the timely and efficient supply of spare parts.

Henderson, Dale L.↗

DOE OSTI2013

National Cost-Effectiveness of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010 Compared to ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2011

Microkinetic Modeling of Lean NO x Trap Storage and Regeneration

A microkinetic chemical reaction mechanism capable of describing both the storage and regeneration processes in a fully formulated lean NOx trap (LNT) is presented. The mechanism includes steps occurring on the precious metal, barium oxide (NOx storage), and cerium oxide (oxygen storage) sites of the catalyst. The complete reaction set is used in conjunction with a transient plug flow reactor code (including boundary layer mass transfer) to simulate not only a set of long storage/regeneration cycles with a CO/H2 reductant, but also a series of steady flow temperature sweep experiments that were previously analyzed with just a precious metal mechanism and a steady state code neglecting mass transfer. The results show that, while mass transfer effects are generally minor, NOx storage is not negligible during some of the temperature ramps, necessitating a re-evaluation of the precious metal kinetic parameters. The parameters for the entire mechanism are inferred by finding the best overall fit to the complete set of experiments. Rigorous thermodynamic consistency is enforced for parallel reaction pathways and with respect to known data for all of the gas phase species involved. It is found that, with a few minor exceptions, all of the basic experimental observations can be reproduced with the transient simulations. In addition to accounting for normal cycling behavior, the final mechanism should provide a starting point for the description of further LNT phenomena such as desulfation and the role of alternative reductants.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

DOE OSTI2014

Universality of phase transition dynamics: topological defects from symmetry breaking

In the course of a non-equilibrium continuous phase transition, the dynamics ceases to be adiabatic in the vicinity of the critical point as a result of the critical slowing down (the divergence of the relaxation time in the neighborhood of the critical point). This enforces a local choice of the broken symmetry and can lead to the formation of topological defects. The Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM) was developed to describe the associated nonequilibrium dynamics and to estimate the density of defects as a function of the quench rate through the transition. During recent years, several new experiments investigating formation of defects in phase transitions induced by a quench both in classical and quantum mechanical systems were carried out. At the same time, some established results were called into question. We review and analyze the Kibble-Zurek mechanism focusing in particular on this surge of activity, and suggest possible directions for further progress.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2014

TAS: 89 0227: TAS Recovery Act - Optimization and Control of Electric Power Systems: ARRA

The name SuperOPF is used to refer several projects, problem formulations and soft-ware tools intended to extend, improve and re-define some of the standard methods of optimizing electric power systems. Our work included applying primal-dual interior point methods to standard AC optimal power flow problems of large size, as well as extensions of this problem to include co-optimization of multiple scenarios. The original SuperOPF problem formulation was based on co-optimizing a base scenario along with multiple post-contingency scenarios, where all AC power flow models and constraints are enforced for each, to find optimal energy contracts, endogenously determined locational reserves and appropriate nodal energy prices for a single period optimal power flow problem with uncertainty. This led to example non-linear programming problems on the order of 1 million constraints and half a million variables. The second generation SuperOPF formulation extends this by adding multiple periods and multiple base scenarios per period. It also incorporates additional variables and constraints to model load following reserves, ramping costs, and storage resources. A third generation of the multi-period SuperOPF, adds both integer variables and a receding horizon framework in which the problem type is more challenging (mixed integer), the size is even larger, and it must be solved more frequently, pushing the limits of currently available algorithms and solvers. The consideration of transient stability constraints in optimal power flow (OPF) problems has become increasingly important in modern power systems. Transient stability constrained OPF (TSCOPF) is a nonlinear optimization problem subject to a set of algebraic and differential equations. Solving a TSCOPF problem can be challenging due to (i) the differential-equation constraints in an optimization problem, (ii) the lack of a true analytical expression for transient stability in OPF. To handle the dynamics in TSCOPF, the set of differential equations can be approximated or converted into equivalent algebraic equations before they are included in an OPF formulation. In Chapter 4, a rigorous evaluation of using a predefined and fixed threshold for rotor angles as a mean to determine transient stability of the system is developed. TSCOPF can be modeled as a large-scale nonlinear programming problem including the constraints of differential-algebraic equations (DAE). Solving a TSCOPF problem can be challenging due to (i) the differential-equation constraints in an optimization problem, (ii) the lack of a true analytical expression for transient stability constraint in OPF. Unfortunately, even the current best TSCOPF solvers still suffer from the curse of dimensionality and unacceptable computational time, especially for large-scale power systems with multiple contingencies. In chapter 5, thse issues will be addressed and a new method to incorporate the transient stability constraints will be presented.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2014

Addressing Kitchen Contaminants for Healthy, Low-Energy Homes

Cooking and cooking burners emit pollutants that can adversely affect indoor air quality in residences and significantly impact occupant health. Effective kitchen exhaust ventilation can reduce exposure to cooking-related air pollutants as an enabling step to healthier, low-energy homes. This report identifies barriers to the widespread adoption of kitchen exhaust ventilation technologies and practice and proposes a suite of strategies to overcome these barriers. The recommendations have been vetted by a group of industry, regulatory, health, and research experts and stakeholders who convened for two web-based meetings and provided input and feedback to early drafts of this document. The most fundamental barriers are (1) the common misconception, based on a sensory perception of risk, that kitchen exhaust when cooking is unnecessary and (2) the lack of a code requirement for kitchen ventilation in most US locations. Highest priority objectives include the following: (1) Raise awareness among the public and the building industry of the need to install and routinely use kitchen ventilation; (2) Incorporate kitchen exhaust ventilation as a requirement of building codes and improve the mechanisms for code enforcement; (3) Provide best practice product and use-behavior guidance to ventilation equipment purchasers and installers, and; (4) Develop test methods and performance targets to advance development of high performance products. A specific, urgent need is the development of an over-the-range microwave that meets the airflow and sound requirements of ASHRAE Standard 62.2.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2012

Recommendations on Implementing the Energy Conservation Building Code in Rajasthan, India

India launched the Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) in 2007 and Indian Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) recently indicated that it would move to mandatory implementation in the 12th Five-Year Plan. The State of Rajasthan adopted ECBC with minor modifications; the new regulation is known as the Energy Conservation Building Directives – Rajasthan 2011 (ECBD-R). It became mandatory in Rajasthan on September 28, 2011. This report provides recommendations on an ECBD-R enforcement roadmap for the State of Rajasthan.

Building Energy Codes↗

DOE OSTI2014

Design of Experiments, Model Calibration and Data Assimilation

This presentation provides an overview of emulation, calibration and experiment design for computer experiments. Emulation refers to building a statistical surrogate from a carefully selected and limited set of model runs to predict unsampled outputs. The standard kriging approach to emulation of complex computer models is presented. Calibration refers to the process of probabilistically constraining uncertain physics/engineering model inputs to be consistent with observed experimental data. An initial probability distribution for these parameters is updated using the experimental information. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used to sample the calibrated parameter distribution. Several MCMC algorithms commonly employed in practice are presented, along with a popular diagnostic for evaluating chain behavior. Space-filling approaches to experiment design for selecting model runs to build effective emulators are discussed, including Latin Hypercube Design and extensions based on orthogonal array skeleton designs and imposed symmetry requirements. Optimization criteria that further enforce space-filling, possibly in projections of the input space, are mentioned. Designs to screen for important input variations are summarized and used for variable selection in a nuclear fuels performance application. This is followed by illustration of sequential experiment design strategies for optimization, global prediction, and rare event inference.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DOE OSTI2014

Building Energy Benchmarking in India: an Action Plan for Advancing the State-of-the-Art

This document describes an action plan for advancing the state of the art of commercial building energy benchmarking in the Indian context. The document is primarily intended for two audiences: (a) Research and development (R&D) sponsors and researchers can use the action plan to frame, plan, prioritize and scope new energy benchmarking R&D in order to ensure that their research is market relevant; (b) Policy makers and program implementers engaged in the deployment of benchmarking and building efficiency rating programmes can use the action plan for policy formulation and enforcement .

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2014

Building Detection in SAR Imagery

Current techniques for building detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery can be computationally expensive and/or enforce stringent requirements for data acquisition. The desire is to present a technique that is effective and efficient at determining an approximate building location. This approximate location can be used to extract a portion of the SAR image to then perform a more robust detection. The proposed technique assumes that for the desired image, bright lines and shadows, SAR artifact effects, are approximately labeled. These labels are enhanced and utilized to locate buildings, only if the related bright lines and shadows can be grouped. In order to find which of the bright lines and shadows are related, all of the bright lines are connected to all of the shadows. This allows the problem to be solved from a connected graph viewpoint. Where the nodes are the bright lines and shadows and the arcs are the connections between bright lines and shadows. Constraints based on angle of depression and the relationship between connected bright lines and shadows are applied to remove unrelated arcs. Once the related bright lines and shadows are grouped, their locations are combined to provide an approximate building location. Experimental results are provided showing the outcome of the technique.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

DOE OSTI2014

Building Temperature Set Point

This white paper provides information and recommendations for an actionable and enforceable corporate policy statement on temperature set points for office and related spaces at Sandia and presents a strategy that balances the need to achieve the energy goals with optimizing employee comfort and productivity.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2013

Development and implementation of energy efficiency standards and labeling programs in China: Progress and challenges

Over the last twenty years, with growing policy emphasis on improving energy efficiency and reducing environmental pollution and carbon emissions, China has implemented a series of new minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) and mandatory and voluntary energy labels to improve appliance energy efficiency. As China begins planning for the next phase of standards and labeling (S&L) program development under the 12th Five Year Plan, an evaluation of recent program developments and future directions is needed to identify gaps that still exist when compared with international best practices. The review of China’s S&L program development and implementation in comparison with major findings from international experiences reveal that there are still areas of improvement, particularly when compared to success factors observed across leading international S&L program. China currently lacks a formalized regulatory process for standard-setting and do not have any legal or regulatory guidance on elements of S&L development such as stakeholder participation or the issue of legal precedence between conflicting national, industrial and local standards. Consequently, China’s laws regarding standard-setting and management of the mandatory energy label program could be updated, as they have not been amended or revised recently and no longer reflects the current situation. While China uses similar principles for choosing target products as the U.S., Australia, EU and Japan, including high energy-consumption, mature industry and testing procedure and stakeholder support, recent MEPS revisions have generally aimed at only eliminating the bottom 20% efficiency of the market. Setting a firm principle based on maximizing energy savings that are technically feasible and economically justified may help improve the stringency of China’s MEPS program and reduce the need for frequent revisions. China also lacks robust survey data and relies primarily on market research data in relatively simple techno-economic analyses used to determine its efficiency standards levels rather than the specific sets of analyses and tools used internationally. Based on international experiences, inclusion of more detailed energy consumption surveys in the Chinese national census surveys and statistical reporting systems could help provide the necessary data for more comprehensive standard-setting analyses. In terms of stakeholder participation in the standards development process, stakeholder participation in China is limited to membership on technical committees responsible for developing or revising standards and generally do not include environmental groups, consumer associations, utilities and other NGOs. Increasing stakeholder involvement to broader interest groups could help garner more support and feedback in the S&L implementation process. China has emerged as a leader in a national verification testing scheme with complementary pilot checktesting projects, but it still faces challenges with insufficient funding, low local awareness amongst some regulatory agencies and resistance to check-testing by some manufacturers, limited product sampling scope, and testing inconsistency and incomparability of results. Thus, further financial and staff resources and capacity building will be needed to overcome these remaining challenges and to expand impacts evaluations to assess the actual effectiveness of implementation and enforcement.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2015

AGR-1 Irradiation Test Final As-Run Report, Rev. 3

This document presents the as-run analysis of the AGR-1 irradiation experiment. AGR-1 is the first of eight planned irradiations for the Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR) Fuel Development and Qualification Program. Funding for this program is provided by the US Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Next-Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) project. The objectives of the AGR-1 experiment are: 1. To gain experience with multi-capsule test train design, fabrication, and operation with the intent to reduce the probability of capsule or test train failure in subsequent irradiation tests. 2. To irradiate fuel produced in conjunction with the AGR fuel process development effort. 3. To provide data that will support the development of an understanding of the relationship between fuel fabrication processes, fuel product properties, and irradiation performance. In order to achieve the test objectives, the AGR-1 experiment was irradiated in the B-10 position of the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for a total duration of 620 effective full power days of irradiation. Irradiation began on December 24, 2006 and ended on November 6, 2009 spanning 13 ATR cycles and approximately three calendar years. The test contained six independently controlled and monitored capsules. Each capsule contained 12 compacts of a single type, or variant, of the AGR coated fuel. No fuel particles failed during the AGR-1 irradiation. Final burnup values on a per compact basis ranged from 11.5 to 19.6 %FIMA, while fast fluence values ranged from 2.21 to 4.39 x 10 25 n/m 2 (E >0.18 MeV). We’ll say something here about temperatures once thermal recalc is done. Thermocouples performed well, failing at a lower rate than expected. At the end of the irradiation, nine of the originally-planned 19 TCs were considered functional. Fission product release-to-birth (R/B) ratios were quite low. In most capsules, R/B values at the end of the irradiation were at or below 10 -7 with only one capsule significantly exceeding this value. A maximum R/B of around 2 x 10 -7 was reached at the end of the irradiation in Capsule 5. Several shakedown issues were encountered and resolved during the first three cycles. These include the repair of minor gas line leaks; repair of faulty gas line valves; the need to position moisture monitors in regions of low radiation fields for proper functioning; the enforcement of proper on-line data storage and backup, the need to monitor thermocouple performance, correcting for detector spectral gain shift, and a change in the mass flow rate range of the neon flow controllers.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗