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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2010

Grid-tied PV battery systems.

Grid tied PV energy smoothing was implemented by using a valve regulated lead-acid (VRLA) battery as a temporary energy storage device to both charge and discharge as required to smooth the inverter energy output from the PV array. Inverter output was controlled by the average solar irradiance over the previous 1h time interval. On a clear day the solar irradiance power curve is offset by about 1h, while on a variable cloudy day the inverter output power curve will be smoothed based on the average solar irradiance. Test results demonstrate that this smoothing algorithm works very well. Battery state of charge was more difficult to manage because of the variable system inefficiencies. Testing continued for 30-days and established consistent operational performance for extended periods of time under a wide variety of resource conditions. Both battery technologies from Exide (Absolyte) and East Penn (ALABC Advanced) proved to cycle well at a Partial state of charge over the time interval tested.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2011

Closing plenary summary of working group 4 instrumentation and controls for ERL2011

Working group 4 was charged with presentations and discussions on instrumentation and controls with regards to Energy Recovery Linacs (ERL). There were 4 sessions spanning 3.5 hours in which 7 talks were delivered, the first being an invited plenary presentation. The time allotted for each talk was limited to 20-25 minutes in order to allow 5-10 minutes for discussion. Most of the talks were held in joint session with working group 5 (Unwanted Beam Loss). This format was effective for the purpose of this workshop. A final series of discussion sessions were also held with working group 5. Summary of the working group 4 activities, presented in the closing plenary session. We had a plenary presentation on operational performance, experience, and future plans at the existing ERL injector prototype at Cornell. This included instrumentation data, controls system configurations, as well as description of future needs. This was followed by four talks from KEK and RIKEN/SPring-8 that described electron beam instrumentation already in use or under development that can be applied to ERL facilities. The final talks described the ERLs under construction at KEK and BNL. The format of having joint sessions with working group 5 was beneficial as there were a significant number of common topics and concerns with regards to the causes of beam loss, instrumentation hardware, and techniques used to measure and analyze beam loss.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2012

The LCLS Undulator Beam Loss Monitor Readout System

The LCLS Undulator Beam Loss Monitor System is required to detect any loss radiation seen by the FEL undulators. The undulator segments consist of permanent magnets which are very sensitive to radiation damage. The operational goal is to keep demagnetization below 0.01% over the life of the LCLS. The BLM system is designed to help achieve this goal by detecting any loss radiation and indicating a fault condition if the radiation level exceeds a certain threshold. Upon reception of this fault signal, the LCLS Machine Protection System takes appropriate action by either halting or rate limiting the beam. The BLM detector consists of a PMT coupled to a Cherenkov radiator located near the upstream end of each undulator segment. There are 33 BLMs in the system, one per segment. The detectors are read out by a dedicated system that is integrated directly into the LCLS MPS. The BLM readout system provides monitoring of radiation levels, computation of integrated doses, detection of radiation excursions beyond set thresholds, fault reporting and control of BLM system functions. This paper describes the design, construction and operational performance of the BLM readout system.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2012

OVERVIEW OF A RECONFIGURABLE SIMULATOR FOR MAIN CONTROL ROOM UPGRADES IN NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS

This paper provides background on a reconfigurable control room simulator for nuclear power plants. The main control rooms in current nuclear power plants feature analog technology that is growing obsolete. The need to upgrade control rooms serves the practical need of maintainability as well as the opportunity to implement newer digital technologies with added functionality. There currently exists no dedicated research simulator for use in human factors design and evaluation activities for nuclear power plant modernization in the U.S. The new research simulator discussed in this paper provides a test bed in which operator performance on new control room concepts can be benchmarked against existing control rooms and in which new technologies can be validated for safety and usability prior to deployment.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2012

BEYOND INTEGRATED SYSTEM VALIDATION: USE OF A CONTROL ROOM TRAINING SIMULATOR FOR PROOF-OF-CONCEPT INTERFACE DEVELOPMENT

This paper provides background on a reconfigurable control room simulator for nuclear power plants. The main control rooms in current nuclear power plants feature analog technology that is growing obsolete. The need to upgrade control rooms serves the practical need of maintainability as well as the opportunity to implement newer digital technologies with added functionality. There currently exists no dedicated research simulator for use in human factors design and evaluation activities for nuclear power plants in the US. The new research simulator discussed in this paper provides a test bed in which operator performance on new control room concepts can be benchmarked against existing control rooms and in which new technologies can be validated for safety and usability prior to deployment.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2012

Spiral Development for Safeguards Instrumentation

Safeguards instrumentation is highly specialized, so a common approach in the US has been to develop initial prototypes for performance, operability and security within the US National Laboratories for the IAEA and then seek one or more commercial partners. Transfer of technology from US National Laboratories is a legal requirement for products that have the potential for mass production. Other important objectives include minimizing time to deployment and lifecycle cost, and optimizing product maintainability, sustainability and manufacturability. Unfortunately, the deployment of systems developed via this model has sometimes been seriously delayed or never adopted because of the difficulty of optimizing the significant parameters of the process between the public and private sectors. The authors suggest that forming an R&D partnership between a research laboratory and a commercial company much earlier in the process would provide significant advantages. The present US practice leads to unnecessary expenditures during the early R&D phase since many decisions are made based on research needs that are counterproductive for commercialization and manufacturability. If the ultimate goal of the project is to produce a reliable and cost effective commercial product, the commercial input is needed early and often. The new “model” of developing systems in a closer collaboration with the private sector, in a spiral “Commercialization by Design” approach, should also limit the long term financial mortgages that Member States frequently experience with respect to safeguards instrumentation development using the present process. As a concrete example, the potential for incorporating Wire Integrity Verification Technology into the iCobra Reader System is discussed.

Koskelo, M.↗
DOE OSTI2014

Shared address collectives using counter mechanisms

A shared address space on a compute node stores data received from a network and data to transmit to the network. The shared address space includes an application buffer that can be directly operated upon by a plurality of processes, for instance, running on different cores on the compute node. A shared counter is used for one or more of signaling arrival of the data across the plurality of processes running on the compute node, signaling completion of an operation performed by one or more of the plurality of processes, obtaining reservation slots by one or more of the plurality of processes, or combinations thereof.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2014

Effects of an Advanced Reactor’s Design, Use of Automation, and Mission on Human Operators

The roles, functions, and tasks of the human operator in existing light water nuclear power plants (NPPs) are based on sound nuclear and human factors engineering (HFE) principles, are well defined by the plant’s conduct of operations, and have been validated by years of operating experience. However, advanced NPPs whose engineering designs differ from existing light-water reactors (LWRs) will impose changes on the roles, functions, and tasks of the human operators. The plans to increase the use of automation, reduce staffing levels, and add to the mission of these advanced NPPs will also affect the operator’s roles, functions, and tasks. We assert that these factors, which do not appear to have received a lot of attention by the design engineers of advanced NPPs relative to the attention given to conceptual design of these reactors, can have significant risk implications for the operators and overall plant safety if not mitigated appropriately. This paper presents a high-level analysis of a specific advanced NPP and how its engineered design, its plan to use greater levels of automation, and its expanded mission have risk significant implications on operator performance and overall plant safety.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Petaflops router

Disclosed is a method and system for performing operations on at least one input data vector in order to produce at least one output vector to permit easy, scalable and fast programming of a petascale equivalent supercomputer. A PetaFlops Router may comprise one or more PetaFlops Nodes, which may be connected to each other and/or external data provider/consumers via a programmable crossbar switch external to the PetaFlops Node. Each PetaFlops Node has a FPGA and a programmable intra-FPGA crossbar switch that permits input and output variables to be configurably connected to various physical operators contained in the FPGA as desired by a user. This allows a user to specify the instruction set of the system on a per-application basis. Further, the intra-FPGA crossbar switch permits the output of one operation to be delivered as an input to a second operation. By configuring the external crossbar switch, the output of a first operation on a first PetaFlops Node may be used as the input for a second operation on a second PetaFlops Node. An embodiment may provide an ability for the system to recognize and generate pipelined functions. Streaming operators may be connected together at run-time and appropriately staged to allow data to flow through a series of functions. This allows the system to provide high throughput and parallelism when possible. The PetaFlops Router may implement the user desired instructions by appropriately configuring the intra-FPGA crossbar switch on each PetaFlops Node and the external crossbar switch.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2015

Method for adding nodes to a quantum key distribution system

An improved quantum key distribution (QKD) system and method are provided. The system and method introduce new clients at intermediate points along a quantum channel, where any two clients can establish a secret key without the need for a secret meeting between the clients. The new clients perform operations on photons as they pass through nodes in the quantum channel, and participate in a non-secret protocol that is amended to include the new clients. The system and method significantly increase the number of clients that can be supported by a conventional QKD system, with only a modest increase in cost. The system and method are compatible with a variety of QKD schemes, including polarization, time-bin, continuous variable and entanglement QKD.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2014

Advanced Metering Implementations - A Perspective from Federal Sector

Federal mandate (EPACT 2005) requires that federal buildings install advanced electrical meters-meters capable of providing data at least daily and measuring the consumption of electricity at least hourly. This work presents selected advanced metering implementations to understand some of the existing practices related to data capture and to understand how the data is being translated into information and knowledge that can be used to improve building energy and operational performance to meet federal energy reduction mandates. This study highlights case studies to represent some of the various actions that are being taken based on the data that are being collected to improve overall energy performance of these buildings. Some of these actions include- individualized tenant billing and energy forecasting, benchmarking, identifying energy conservation measures, measurement and verification.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2014

RF Input Power Couplers for High Current SRF Applications

High current SRF technology is being explored in present day accelerator science. The bERLinPro project is presently being built at HZB to address the challenges involved in high current SRF machines with the goal of generating and accelerating a 100 mA electron beam to 50 MeV in continuous wave (cw) mode at 1.3 GHz. One of the main challenges in this project is that of handling the high input RF power required for the photo-injector as well as booster cavities where there is no energy recovery process. A high power co-axial input power coupler is being developed to be used for the photo-injector and booster cavities at the nominal beam current. The coupler is based on the KEK–cERL design and has been modified to minimise the penetration of the coupler tip in the beam pipe without compromising on beam-power coupling (Qext ~105). Herein we report on the RF design of the high power (115 kW per coupler, dual couplers per cavity) bERLinPro (BP) coupler along with initial results on thermal calculations. We summarise the RF conditioning of the TTF-III couplers (modified for cw operation) performed in the past at BESSY/HZB. A similar conditioning is envisaged in the near future for the low current SRF photo-injector and the bERLinPro main linac cryomodule.

Khan, V. F.↗
DOE OSTI2015

Cyber-Informed Engineering: The Need for a New Risk Informed and Design Methodology

Current engineering and risk management methodologies do not contain the foundational assumptions required to address the intelligent adversary’s capabilities in malevolent cyber attacks. Current methodologies focus on equipment failures or human error as initiating events for a hazard, while cyber attacks use the functionality of a trusted system to perform operations outside of the intended design and without the operator’s knowledge. These threats can by-pass or manipulate traditionally engineered safety barriers and present false information, invalidating the fundamental basis of a safety analysis. Cyber threats must be fundamentally analyzed from a completely new perspective where neither equipment nor human operation can be fully trusted. A new risk analysis and design methodology needs to be developed to address this rapidly evolving threatscape.

CCE↗
DOE OSTI2014

Development and Demonstration of Smart grid inverters for High-Penetration PV Applications

The objective of this Smart Grid Inverter (SGI) project is to implement, on operating utility distribution feeders with “very high” penetration of rooftop PV, enhanced capability smart inverters to achieve improved operational performance, control and visibility. This is accomplished by creating, deploying, and evaluating new smart inverters using integrated inverter management control software (IMCS) and standards-based communications systems. Detailed distribution modeling is also employed to aid in development of inverter control algorithms/settings. The project will test various inverter control strategies in two project deployment locations – Maui, Hawai’i and Maryland/Washington D.C.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Life-Cycle Analysis of Energy Use, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, and Water Consumption in the 2016 MYPP Algal Biofuel Scenarios

The Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) Multi-year Program Plan (MYPP) describes the bioenergy objectives pursued by BETO, the strategies for achieving those objectives, the current state of technology (SOT), and a number of design cases that explore cost and operational performance required to advance the SOT towards middle and long term goals (MYPP, 2016). Two options for converting algae to biofuel intermediates were considered in the MYPP, namely algal biofuel production via lipid extraction and algal biofuel production by thermal processing. The first option, lipid extraction, is represented by the Combined Algae Processing (CAP) pathway in which algae are hydrolyzed in a weak acid pretreatment step. The treated slurry is fermented for ethanol production from sugars. The fermentation stillage contains most of the lipids from the original biomass, which are recovered through wet solvent extraction. The process residuals after lipid extraction, which contain much of the original mass of amino acids and proteins, are directed to anaerobic digestion (AD) for biogas production and recycle of N and P nutrients. The second option, thermal processing, comprises direct hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) of the wet biomass, separation of aqueous, gas, and oil phases, and treatment of the aqueous phase with catalytic hydrothermal gasification (CHG) to produce biogas and to recover N and P nutrients.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Performance of Existing Hydrogen Stations

In this presentation, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory presented aggregated analysis results on the performance of existing hydrogen stations, including performance, operation, utilization, maintenance, safety, hydrogen quality, and cost. The U.S. Department of Energy funds technology validation work at NREL through its National Fuel Cell Technology Evaluation Center (NFCTEC).

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗