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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 109 records · Page 6
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

An Educational Program on Concentrated Solar Power and Heliostats for Power Generation and Industrial Processes

The objective of this project was to design and implement a comprehensive educational and applied research program in Concentrated Solar Thermal Power (CSTP) and heliostat technologies at Northeastern University. In alignment with the U.S. Department of Energy's Heliostat Consortium (HelioCon) goals, the project aimed to expand student and public understanding of CSTP systems while simultaneously contributing to workforce development and the broader decarbonization strategy. A particular emphasis was placed on integrating hands-on student design projects and publicly disseminating educational content relevant to CSTP systems. The project addressed a critical gap in renewable energy education: CSTP and heliostats, despite their importance in utility-scale solar energy, are rarely included in standard mechanical engineering programs. This project established new pathways for students to engage with the topic through the creation of a 4-credit graduate/senior elective course, development of five industry-facing short courses, and the inclusion of CSTP-based capstone design projects. Over two academic years, 36 students across six senior design teams developed and tested technologies such as deformable heliostats, beacon-based tracking systems, and solar-powered pyrolizers for biomass-to-biochar conversion. Concurrently, 30 undergraduate and graduate students were enrolled in the new academic course centered around CSTP principles. To ensure the relevance and accessibility of the short course content, the project team engaged with industry professionals, technical policy stakeholders, and potential course participants through structured surveys and informal consultations. Feedback from 28 respondents guided the structure, length, and delivery format of the courses - resulting in a modular design broken into five workshops. The feedback emphasized the need for flexible, asynchronous delivery and practical case studies, particularly in areas such as heliostat control, thermal storage, and solar fuel production. This engagement helped align the courses with the evolving knowledge demands of the renewable energy workforce and ensured that participants from both technical and policy backgrounds could meaningfully benefit from the material. The research and educational activities advanced the understanding of heliostat control systems, optical performance under misalignment, and thermal system integration in solar-driven pyrolysis applications. Methods and designs explored in this project proved to be both technically effective and economically feasible at the lab scale. Prototypes were constructed using commercially available components and custom-fabricated elements, demonstrating that meaningful performance improvements can be achieved with modest material and fabrication costs, supporting the feasibility of student-led research in this field. The public benefit of this project is twofold. First, it cultivates a pipeline of engineers trained to be familiar with CSTP principles, an essential workforce need identified by the Department of Energy for achieving its 2030 cost and deployment targets. Second, it contributes openly accessible educational materials, course content, and experimental frameworks to the broader community, enabling other institutions to adopt or adapt similar programming. Through outreach activities, curriculum integration, and technical exposure, this project contributes to a more informed and capable renewable energy workforce while supporting innovation in heliostat and CSTP system design. A new technical report is being prepared to document the development of the course and its outcomes, with plans to publish it in the ASME Open Access Journal of Engineering to ensure global accessibility, free of cost.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

The Active Asteroids Citizen Science Program: Overview and First Results

Abstract We present the Citizen Science program Active Asteroids and describe discoveries stemming from our ongoing project. Our NASA Partner program is hosted on the Zooniverse online platform and launched on 2021 August 31, with the goal of engaging the community in the search for active asteroids—asteroids with comet-like tails or comae. We also set out to identify other unusual active solar system objects, such as active Centaurs, active quasi-Hilda asteroids (QHAs), and Jupiter-family comets (JFCs). Active objects are rare in large part because they are difficult to identify, so we ask volunteers to assist us in searching for active bodies in our collection of millions of images of known minor planets. We produced these cutout images with our project pipeline that makes use of publicly available Dark Energy Camera data. Since the project launch, roughly 8300 volunteers have scrutinized some 430,000 images to great effect, which we describe in this work. In total, we have identified previously unknown activity on 15 asteroids, plus one Centaur, that were thought to be asteroidal (i.e., inactive). Of the asteroids, we classify four as active QHAs, seven as JFCs, and four as active asteroids, consisting of one main-belt comet (MBC) and three MBC candidates. We also include our findings concerning known active objects that our program facilitated, an unanticipated avenue of scientific discovery. These include discovering activity occurring during an orbital epoch for which objects were not known to be active, and the reclassification of objects based on our dynamical analyses.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2026

The Dark Energy Bedrock All-sky Supernova Program: Motivation, Design, Implementation, and Preliminary Data Release

Precise measurements of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) at low redshifts (z) serve as one of the most viable keys to unlocking our understanding of cosmic expansion, isotropy, and growth of structure. The Dark Energy Bedrock All-Sky Supernovae (DEBASS) program will deliver a uniformly calibrated low-z dataset of more than 400 spectroscopically confirmed SNe Ia in the Southern Hemisphere. DEBASS utilizes the Dark Energy Camera to image supernovae in conjunction with the Wide-Field Spectrograph to gather comprehensive host-galaxy information. By using the same photometric instrument as both the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the DECam Local Volume Exploration Survey, DEBASS not only benefits from a robust photometric pipeline and well-calibrated images across the Southern sky, but can replace the historic and external low-z samples that were used in the final DES supernova analysis. In this paper, along with a companion paper, we present an early data release of 77 DEBASS SNe within the DES footprint. We introduce the DEBASS program, discuss its scientific goals and the advantages it offers for supernova cosmology, and present our initial results demonstrating data quality. With this early data release, we find a robust median absolute standard deviation of Hubble diagram residuals of ∼0.10 mag and an initial measurement of the host-galaxy mass step of 0.06 ± 0.04 mag, both before performing bias corrections. This low scatter shows the promise of a low-z SN Ia program with a well-calibrated telescope and high signal-to-noise ratio across multiple bands.

Sherman, Nora F. [Boston U.] (ORCID:00000001539901↗
DOE OSTI2024

Guidance on EPAct section 707 Emergency Repair and Restoration Vehicle Exclusions: EPAct State and Alternative Fuel Provider Fleet Program Guidance Document

Section 707 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct 2005) amended section 301(9)(E) of EPAct 1992 by adding to the list of vehicles excluded from the definition of "fleet" a new subcategory of emergency motor vehicles, i.e., "vehicles directly used in the emergency repair of transmission lines and in the restoration of electricity service following power outages, as determined by the Secretary." Like other excluded vehicles, these light-duty vehicles (LDVs) do not count (1) when determining whether a fleet is covered under the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) State and Alternative Fuel Provider Fleet Program (Program), and (2) for fleets that are covered under the Program, when calculating annual alternative fuel vehicle (AFV)-acquisition requirements. If AFV models of excluded vehicles are acquired, however, a fleet may count them toward their acquisition requirement by including them in the calculation of the number of AFVs acquired. Exclusion Process.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Navigating the Compliance Reporting Tool: EPAct State and Alternative Provider Fleet Program User Guide

State government and alternative fuel provider fleets covered under the State and Alternative Fuel Provider Fleet Program (Program) established pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct) may use the Compliance Reporting Tool to track and report on several compliance activities. These activities include, but are not limited to, completing Standard Compliance annual reports, Alternative Compliance notices of intent, and exemption requests. Covered fleets can access the Compliance Tool through the Program's website at https://epact.energy.gov/users/sign_in. Covered fleet point of contacts should bookmark the Compliance Reporting Tool for future access. This user guide addresses general tool navigation, including: 1) Logging in to the Tool, 2) Managing Your Point of Contact and Account Information, 3) Managing Fleet Contact Information, 4) Adding New Fleets to Your Account, 5) Reporting for Entities With Multiple Fleets, and 6) Viewing Credit Trades.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Submitting a Standard Compliance Annual Report: EPAct State and Alternative Fuel Provider Fleet Program User Guide

State government and alternative fuel provider fleets covered under the State and Alternative Fuel Provider Fleet Program (Program) established pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct) may use the Compliance Reporting Tool to track and report on several compliance activities. These activities include, but are not limited to, completing Standard Compliance annual reports, Alternative Compliance notices of intent, and exemption requests. Covered fleets can access the Compliance Tool through the Program's website at https://epact.energy.gov/users/sign_in. Covered fleet points of contact should bookmark the Compliance Reporting Tool for future access. This user guide addresses how to complete and submit Standard Compliance annual reports, including getting started with reporting, submitting annual reports, submitting exemption requests, and viewing annual reports.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Workforce Development Opportunities Through the US Department of Energy’s Better Plants Program 2025

The increasing global demand for energy underscores the importance of energy efficiency and sustainability. To address these challenges in the US manufacturing sector, the US Department of Energy has implemented the Better Plants and Better Climate Challenge programs. These initiatives aim to reduce energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and water usage in industrial facilities. This paper highlights a critical component of these programs, workforce development, which equips individuals with the skills and knowledge to implement energy-saving measures. Through the variety of training opportunities discussed, including bootcamps, in-plant trainings, virtual trainings, and annual events, the programs are able to cater to a wide range of industrial participants, from entry-level professionals to experienced engineers. By fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing and by leveraging certifications offered by organizations like the Association of Energy Engineers, these initiatives empower individuals to drive innovation and sustainable practices.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2025

Knowledge Transfer Program for International Nuclear Safeguards

Nuclear safeguards were first announced in 1945 by the U.S., Canadian and British governments as a means to exchange scientific information about peaceful uses of atomic energy and prevent the use of nuclear material for weapons. International nuclear safeguards, now under the provision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), serves to hold accountable the 140 member countries (States) that have entered into treaties and agreements against the spread of nuclear weapons. Most notably, the IAEA acts as a nuclear materials inspectorate under the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, brought about in 1968, that specifies commitments member States make to the world?s non-proliferation regime. The Office of International Nuclear Safeguards (OINS) is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy. Within OINS, the Human Capital Development program recognizes the need to build workforce capacity and safeguards expertise. This includes supporting the education and training of younger generations working in international nuclear safeguards. One of the program?s main concerns is core competencies being lost to retirement or attrition and building knowledge retention pipelines from senior to new professionals. One identified core competency is knowledge gained by individuals who have completed IAEA assignments such as missions to member States to conduct safeguards inspections. Such individuals possess unique knowledge, and efforts are being put forth to effectively capture this knowledge within the national laboratories complex. To this end, we report findings from a one-year mentor-mentee knowledge retention program in which an international safeguards subject matter expert imparted knowledge and skills to a willing professional mentee. The knowledge and skills stem from the mentor?s multi-year assignment at the IAEA in Vienna, Austria.

98 - NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL↗
DOE OSTI2025

Cluster Dynamics Modeling Needs for the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Program

This milestone report aims to identify and assess the cluster dynamics (CD) modeling requirements within the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies (AMMT) program and to communicate these needs to the DOE-NE Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program. The goal is to ensure NEAMS is well-informed about the CD modeling requirements to support AMMT's mission of accelerating the development, qualification, demonstration, and deployment of advanced structural materials and manufacturing for nuclear energy applications. CD modeling is an essential tool for predicting the degradation of structural materials under irradiation, which is a key component of AMMT's accelerated qualification process. The AMMT program focuses on both additively manufactured and wrought structural alloys, such as laser powder-bed fusion 316H austenitic stainless steel, alloy 709, Haynes 244, and alloy 617. These materials require a generalized CD modeling framework to facilitate rapid model development and computational simulation. A flexible, generalized CD software, similar to the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) finite element framework, would enable modeling of various cluster types, including defect clusters, defect-solute clusters, and multicomponent clusters, incorporating thermodynamics and kinetics parameters. Radiation effects, microstructural feature evolution, and multi-dimensional modeling are critical considerations for the CD model. The usability of the CD code should allow for easy modification and coupling with MOOSE-based simulations. Additionally, the software should adhere to Nuclear Quality Assurance-1 standards, include a testing suite for verification and validation, and be version-controlled within a national laboratory-managed Git repository. Benchmark problems are needed to assess code predictions and performance.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2026

MeVPrtl: An Event Generator for Dark Sector Particles in the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program

MeVPrtl is a modular event generator of beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics particles developed for use in the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program. A large class of BSM physics models predict that new particles could be produced in the intense Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) and Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beams at Fermilab, travel to the SBN Program detectors, and decay into Standard Model (SM) particles. These new physics models are motivated by dark matter, the neutrino mass scale, and a solution to the strong CP problem. MeVPrtl provides an interface to implement the overlapping phenomenology of these models, and to connect them with meson flux inputs and object outputs used by the SBN Program's LArSoft-based detector simulation. Implementations for the Higgs portal, heavy neutral lepton, and heavy QCD axion models exist within MeVPrtl. In this paper these implementations and their validation, as well as details of the MeVPrtl interface, are specified.

Abratenko Ao, P.↗
DOE OSTI2026

Fermilab VALOR Program

The Veteran Applied Laboratory Occupational Retraining (VALOR) Program is an expansion of Fermilab’s established VetTech internship program originally initiated in 2016. The enhanced program seeks to recruit, hire, train, and retain veterans and transitioning service members by providing multiple entry points for full time STEM-based careers at Fermilab. VALOR is comprised of four paid internships/apprenticeships supplemented by professional development opportunities.

Fermilab, Fermilab↗
DOE OSTI2025

ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LLMS IN UNIT TEST GENERATION FOR STRUCTURED TEXT PROGRAMS

The reliability of industrial automation systems heavily depends on the correctness of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) programs, which are often written in Structured Text (ST). While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating test generation for mainstream programming languages, their effectiveness for the syntactically strict ST language remains underexplored. This thesis presents a systematic empirical evaluation of three state-of-the-art LLMs—GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude Sonnet 4.5—for generating ST unit tests. We examine three prompting strategies: Natural Language (NL), Code Language (CL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT), across a curated set of 11 ST function blocks. The quality of the generated tests is assessed using Compilation Success Rate (CSR), Statement Coverage (SC), and Branch Coverage (BC). In the zero-shot setting, Claude Sonnet 4.5 achieves the highest CSR, while Gemini 2.5 Pro consistently delivers the best statement and branch coverage, particularly under CL prompts. By incorporating a one-shot CL prompt, all models exhibit substantial improvements—most notably GPT-4o, whose CSR increases from 45.45% to 90.91%, with substantial gains in both SC and BC. To further contextualize these findings, we compare GPT-4o’s one-shot results with PLCAutoTester, a state-ofthe- art ST unit test generation tool, on an additional benchmark dataset. While LLMgenerated tests approach competitive coverage levels, PLCAutoTester maintains significantly higher and more stable coverage across programs. This study provides the first comprehensive benchmark of modern LLMs for ST unit testing, highlighting their strengths, limitations, and improvements through one-shot prompting, and positioning their performance relative to specialized automated testing tools in industrial automation.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Summary Report Of The FY25 Reactor Physics Verification And Validation Exercises In The Advanced Reactor Technologies - Gas-cooled Reactor Program

Valdiation and verification of numerical tools is critical for ensuring reasonable predictions for design scoping, licensing, and safety analsyis. In this report, two reactor physics verification and validation exercises are presented. The first of these exercises focuses on burnup analysis with data from the Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR) program. Simulations are performed with Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) and are compared with the experimental measurements for the AGR 1 and 2 experiments that utilize both UCO and UO2 fuel. The second exercises utilizes data from the HTR-Proteus experiments to perform reactor physics validation. Specifications of the experimental facility are provdied, along with a demonstration of initial modeling efforts in Serpent for one of the determistic packing experiments. Both cases are part of the Generation-IV international forum (GIF) Very High-Temperature Reactor (VHTR) Computational Methods, Validation, and Benchmarking (CMVB) program, an international collaborative organization dedicated to the verification and validation of High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR) analysis. Participation in the CMVB allows the US Department of Energy (DOE) to leverage these existing validation activities to provide extra value through benchmarking activities with other CMVB members.

and Benchmarking (CMVB) program↗
DOE OSTI2025

Unique & challenging aspects of plutonium metal standards exchange program for actinide measurements

The Los Alamos National Laboratory exchange program is the only program of its kind for the distribution of plutonium (Pu) standards materials with a range of impurity contents to multiple laboratories for destructive measurements of elemental concentration. This paper discusses statistical methods used to address challenges in Pu metal exchange data by way of two case studies. Challenges include how to evaluate a data set when a large fraction of the values are minimum detection limits (MDLs), and how to determine potential outliers with limited in-formation on the true spread of the data.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2025

Alternative mixed integer linear programming optimization for joint job scheduling and data allocation in grid computing

This paper presents a novel approach to the joint optimization of job scheduling and data allocation in grid computing environments. We formulate this joint optimization problem as a mixed integer quadratically constrained program. To tackle the nonlinearity in the constraint, we alternatively fix a subset of decision variables and optimize the remaining ones via Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). We solve the MILP problem at each iteration via an off-the-shelf MILP solver. Our experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms existing heuristic methods, employing either independent optimization or joint optimization strategies. We have also verified the generalization ability of our method over grid environments with various sizes and its high robustness to the algorithm setting.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Genetic programming for the nuclear many-body problem: a guide

Genetic Programming (GP) is an evolutionary algorithm that generates computer programs, or mathematical expressions, to solve complex problems. In this Guide, we demonstrate how to use GP to develop surrogate models to mitigate the computational costs of modeling atomic nuclei with ever increasing complexity. The computational burden escalates when uncertainty quantification is pursued, or when observables must be globally computed for thousands of nuclei. By studying three models in which the mean field depends on the total particle density self-consistently, we show that by constructing reduced order models supported by GP one can speed up many-body computations by several orders of magnitude with a negligible loss in accuracy.

dimensionality reduction↗
DOE OSTI2025

LLM Benchmarking with LLaMA2: Evaluating Code Development Performance Across Multiple Programming Languages

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for automating various tasks in software development. This paper evaluates the capabilities of the LLaMA 2-70B model in automating these tasks for scientific applications written in commonly used programming languages. Using representative test problems, we assess the model's capacity to generate code, documentation, and unit tests, as well as its ability to translate existing code between commonly used programming languages. Our comprehensive analysis evaluates the compilation, runtime behavior, and correctness of the generated and translated code. Additionally, we assess the quality of automatically generated code, documentation, and unit tests. Here, our results indicate that while LLaMA 2-70B frequently generates syntactically correct and functional code for simpler numerical tasks, it encounters substantial difficulties with more complex, parallelized, or distributed computations, requiring considerable manual corrections. We identify key limitations and suggest areas for future improvements to better leverage AI-driven automation in scientific computing workflows.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗