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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 1,261 records · Page 70

A Machine Learning Approach to Predict Aircraft Landing Times using Mediated Predictions from Existing Systems

We developed a novel approach for predicting the landing time of airborne flights in real-time operations. The first step predicts a landing time by using mediation rules to select from among physics-based predictions (relying on the expected flight trajectory) already available in real time in the Federal Aviation Administration System Wide Information Management system data feeds. The second step uses a machine learning model built upon the mediated predictions. The model is trained to predict the error in the mediated prediction, using features describing the current state of an airborne flight. These features are calculated in real time from a relatively small number of data elements that are readily available for airborne flights. Initial results based on five months of data at six large airports demonstrate that incorporating a machine learning model on top of the mediated physics-based prediction can lead to substantial additional improvements in prediction quality.

Machine learning↗

Presentation: Sensor Anomaly Detection for Nuclear Reactor Systems Utilizing Linear Regression and K-Means Unsupervised Machine Learning: An overview of methods and results

This presentation is a culmination of work which has occurred over the course of a 10-week internship. Anomaly detection methods must be both robust enough to detect subtle anomalies yet not so sensitive to report false positives, which would result significant loss of revenue. Methods currently being developed for autonomous systems are often pursuing a Digital Twin method, which will look at the entire system and model it as a whole. This presentation, however, focuses less on direct application to an NPP, rather acting as a proof of concept for the methods developed. For the project, we look to develop methods to analyze steady-state data and report anomalies.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Motor System Development Depends on Experience: A Microgravity Study of Rats

Animals move about their environment by sensing their surroundings and making adjustments according to need. All animals take the force of gravity into account when the brain and spinal cord undertake the planning and execution of movements. To what extent must animals learn to factor in the force of gravity when making neural calculations about movement? Are animals born knowing how to respond to gravity, or must the young nervous system learn to enter gravity into the equation? To study this issue, young rats were reared in two different gravitational environments (the one-G of Earth and the microgravity of low Earth orbit) that necessitated two different types of motor operations (movements) for optimal behavior. We inquired whether those portions of the young nervous system involved in movement, the motor system, can adapt to different gravitational levels and, if so, the cellular basis for this phenomenon. We studied two groups of rats that had been raised for 16 days in microgravity (eight or 14 days old at launch) and compared their walking and righting (ability to go from upside down to upright) and brain structure to those of control rats that developed on Earth. Flight rats were easily distinguished from the age-matched ground control rats in terms of both motor function and central nervous system structure. Mature surface righting predominated in control rats on the day of landing (R+O), while immature righting predominated in the flight rats on landing day and 30 days after landing. Some of these changes appear to be permanent. Several conclusions can be drawn from these studies: (1) Many aspects of motor behavior are preprogrammed into the young nervous system. In addition, several aspects of motor behavior are acquired as a function of the interaction of the developing organism and the rearing environment; (2) Widespread neuroanatomical differences between one-G- and microgravity-reared rats indicate that there is a structural basis for the adaptation to the rearing environment. These observations provide support for the idea that an animal's motor system adapts for optimal function within the environment experienced during a critical period in early postnatal life.

Walton, Kerry D.↗

SECURED: Simulator-Enhanced Control and Understanding of Reactor systems for cyber-Event Defense

The study discusses a learning approach for analyzing cyber-events in reactor systems using integrated hardware and personal computer simulator models. Key points include the rise in cyber-attacks and their sophistication in industrial control systems (ICS), the necessity for awareness, understanding, resource allocation, and preparation to combat these threats, and the digital transformation of old and new nuclear plants, increasing their exposure to cyber threats. It highlights the cyber vulnerabilities of advanced reactor systems, which rely on digital instrumentation and control for operations and safety functions, making them susceptible to cyber-attacks. The approach involves demonstrating reactor system plant ICS cyber-attacks under various operational conditions utilizing tools like simulator models and hardware-based kits. A strategic solution approach tailored to critical infrastructure is emphasized, along with community engagement for public and government support, adopting effective learning approaches, and the preparation for anticipated future challenges. The presentation concludes with a call to action to address challenges, leverage opportunities, and advance through lesson learning in cybersecurity for nuclear energy systems.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

PV Systems Reliability and Outreach

The project purpose was to collaborate with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to reach out to the photovoltaic (PV) industry to cooperate, collaborate and facilitate establishment and access to PV plant data for use in the Photovoltaic Reliability Operations and Maintenance (PVROM) database. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and EPRI conducted this outreach to expand and accelerate the implementation of PVROM by gathering more data for analyzing trends, with a goal of accelerating the adoption of PV systems as a primary power generation source in the United States. SNL and EPRI analyzed the data from the PVROM database to assess industry trends in operations and maintenance (O&M) and develop guidelines for the industry. More specifically, this project was intended to leverage SNL’s expertise in PV plant reliability data collection and analysis, with data sharing partners that own or operate PV systems who wanted to learn about rigorous reliabilitybased data collection to track issues over time and improve O&M activities. The partnership also worked to host multiple workshops as part of the SNL/EPRI PV Systems Symposium to gather industry feedback on O&M process improvement and data standards, and share insights learned from the collaboration between SNL and EPRI in the area of PV system reliability. Additional outreach included multiple ‘expert elicitation’ interviews led by EPRI to gather best practices and paths forward for improving/standardizing PV plant O&M and asset management practices. Technical accomplishments included further development of the PVROM database process, sharing best practices for reliability data collection and improving industry understanding of existing O&M practices, important knowledge, and new and novel techniques for benefitting EPRI utility partners and the broader PV industry. Improved reliability at a PV power plant leads to a lower levelized cost of energy (LCOE), which is reflected most directly in its operating expenses. Electric utilities that utilize PV as a larger share of plants they own and operate are interested in having a high degree of availability or ‘uptime’, similar to other power generation sources in their service area. Having low cost, reliable PV generation can lead to fewer costs that need to be recovered by the utility over the lifetime of the power plant, and less regulatory uncertainty when considering bulk transmission and distribution system reliability. The public and taxpayers benefit by the electric utility passing through lower electricity costs.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

A step towards the final frontier: Lessons learned from acceptance testing of the first HPE/Cray EX 3000 system at ORNL

Summary In this article, we summarize the deployment of the Air Force Weather (AFW) HPC11 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) including the process followed to successfully complete acceptance testing of the system. HPC11 is the first HPE/Cray EX 3000 system that has been successfully released to its user community in a federal facility. HPC11 consists of two identical 800‐node supercomputers, Fawbush and Miller, with access to two independent and identical lustre parallel file systems. HPC11 is equipped with Slingshot 10 interconnect technology and relies on the HPE Performance Cluster Manager software for system configuration. ORNL has a clearly defined acceptance testing process used to ensure that every new system deployed can provide the necessary capabilities to support user workloads. We worked closely with HPE and AFW to develop a set of tests that used the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office's Unified Model and 4‐dimensional variational data assimilation. We also included benchmarks and applications from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility portfolio to fully exercise the HPE/Cray programming environment and evaluate the functionality and performance of the system. Acceptance testing of HPC11 required parallel execution of each element on Fawbush and Miller. In addition, careful coordination was needed to ensure successful acceptance of the newly deployed lustre file systems alongside the compute resources. In this work, we present test results from specific system components and provide an overview of the issues identified, challenges encountered, and the lessons learned along the way.

Melesse Vergara, Verónica G.↗

Multi-Agent Safe Policy Learning for Power Management of Networked Microgrids

This paper presents a supervised multi-agent safe policy learning (SMAS-PL) method for optimal power management of networked microgrids (MGs) in distribution systems. While unconstrained reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are black-box decision models that could fail to satisfy grid operational constraints, our proposed method considers AC power flow equations and other operational limits. Accordingly, the training process employs the gradient information of operational constraints to ensure that the optimal control policy functions generate safe and feasible decisions. Furthermore, we have developed a distributed consensus-based optimization approach to train the agents’ policy functions while maintaining MGs’ privacy and data ownership boundaries. After training, the learned optimal policy functions can be safely used by the MGs to dispatch their local resources, without the need to solve a complex optimization problem from scratch. Lastly, numerical experiments have been devised to verify the performance of the proposed method.

, policy gradient↗

A Step Towards the Final Frontier: Lessons Learned from Acceptance Testing of the First HPE/Cray EX 3000 System at ORNL

In this paper, we summarize the deployment of the Air Force Weather (AFW) HPC11 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) including the process followed to successfully complete acceptance testing of the system. HPC11 is the first HPE/Cray EX 3000 system that has been successfully released to its user community in a federal facility. HPC11 consists of two identical 800-node supercomputers, Fawbush and Miller, with access to two independent and identical Lustre parallel file systems. HPC11 is equipped with Slingshot 10 interconnect technology and relies on the HPE Performance Cluster Manager (HPCM) software for system configuration. ORNL has a clearly defined acceptance testing process used to ensure that every new system deployed can provide the necessary capabilities to support user workloads. We worked closely with HPE and AFW to develop a set of tests that used the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office’s Unified Model (UM) and 4DVAR. We also included benchmarks and applications from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) portfolio to fully exercise the HPE/Cray programming environment and evaluate the functionality and performance of the system. Acceptance testing of HPC11 required parallel execution of each element on Fawbush and Miller. In addition, careful coordination was needed to ensure successful acceptance of the newly deployed Lustre file systems alongside the compute resources. In this work, we present test results from specific system components and provide an overview of the issues identified, challenges encountered, and the lessons learned along the way.

Melesse Vergara, Veronica↗

Lessons Learned From Developing Three Generations of Remote Sensing Science Data Processing Systems

The Biospheric Information Systems Branch at NASA s Goddard Space Flight Center has developed three generations of Science Investigator-led Processing Systems for use with various remote sensing instruments. The first system is used for data from the MODIS instruments flown on NASA s Earth Observing Systems @OS) Terra and Aqua Spacecraft launched in 1999 and 2002 respectively. The second generation is for the Ozone Measuring Instrument flying on the EOS Aura spacecraft launched in 2004. We are now developing a third generation of the system for evaluation science data processing for the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) to be flown by the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) in 2006. The initial system was based on large scale proprietary hardware, operating and database systems. The current OMI system and the OMPS system being developed are based on commodity hardware, the LINUX Operating System and on PostgreSQL, an Open Source RDBMS. The new system distributes its data archive across multiple server hosts and processes jobs on multiple processor boxes. We have created several instances of this system, including one for operational processing, one for testing and reprocessing and one for applications development and scientific analysis. Prior to receiving the first data from OMI we applied the system to reprocessing information from the Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet (SBUV) and Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) instruments flown from 1978 until now. The system was able to process 25 years (108,000 orbits) of data and produce 800,000 files (400 GiB) of level 2 and level 3 products in less than a week. We will describe the lessons we have learned and tradeoffs between system design, hardware, operating systems, operational staffing, user support and operational procedures. During each generational phase, the system has become more generic and reusable. While the system is not currently shrink wrapped we believe it is to the point where it could be readily adopted, with substantial cost savings, for other similar tasks.

Tilmes, Curt↗

Real-Time Fault Tracking and Ground Motion Prediction for Large Earthquakes With HR-GNSS and Deep Learning

Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems aim to forecast the shaking intensity rapidly after an earthquake occurs and send warnings to affected areas before the onset of strong shaking. The system relies on rapid and accurate estimation of earthquake source parameters. However, it is known that source estimation for large ruptures in real-time is challenging, and it often leads to magnitude underestimation. In a previous study, we showed that machine learning, HR-GNSS, and realistic rupture synthetics can be used to reliably predict earthquake magnitude. This model, called Machine-Learning Assessed Rapid Geodetic Earthquake model (M-LARGE), can rapidly forecast large earthquake magnitudes with an accuracy of 99%. Here, we expand M-LARGE to predict centroid location and fault size, enabling the construction of the fault rupture extent for forecasting shaking intensity using existing ground motion models. We test our model in the Chilean Subduction Zone with thousands of simulated and five real large earthquakes. The result achieves an average warning time of 40.5 s for shaking intensity MMI4+, surpassing the 34 s obtained by a similar GNSS EEW model. Our approach addresses a critical gap in existing EEW systems for large earthquakes by demonstrating real-time fault tracking feasibility without saturation issues. This capability leads to timely and accurate ground motion forecasts and can support other methods, enhancing the overall effectiveness of EEW systems. Additionally, the ability to predict source parameters for real Chilean earthquakes implies that synthetic data, governed by our understanding of earthquake scaling, is consistent with the actual rupture processes.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

GraphAlign: Graph-Enabled Machine Learning for Seismic Event Filtering

This report summarizes results from a 2 year effort to improve the current automated seismic event processing system by leveraging machine learning models that can operated over the inherent graph data structure of a seismic sensor network. Specifically, the GraphAlign project seeks to utilize prior information on which stations are more likely to detect signals originating from particular geographic regions to inform event filtering. To date, the GraphAlign team has developed a Graphical Neural Network (GNN) model to filter out false events generated by the Global Associator (GA) algorithm. The algorithm operates directly on waveform data that has been associated to an event by building a variable sized graph of station waveforms nodes with edge relations to an event location node. This builds off of previous work where random forest models were used to do the same task using hand crafted features. The GNN model performance was analyzed using an 8 week IMS/IDC dataset, and it was demonstrated that the GNN outperforms the random forest baseline. We provide additional error analysis of which events the GNN model performs well and poorly against concluded by future directions for improvements.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Hybrid Imitation Learning for Real-Time Service Restoration in Resilient Distribution Systems

Self-healing capability is a critical factor for a resilient distribution system, which requires intelligent agents to automatically perform service restoration online, including network reconfiguration and reactive power dispatch. Here, the article proposes the imitation learning framework for training such an agent, where the agent will interact with an expert built based on the mixed-integer program to learn its optimal policy, and therefore significantly improve the training efficiency compared with exploration-dominant reinforcement learning (RL) methods. This significantly improved training efficiency makes the training problem under N-k scenarios tractable. A hybrid policy network is proposed to handle tie-line operations and reactive power dispatch simultaneously to further improve the restoration performance. The 33-bus and 119-bus systems with N-k disturbances are employed to conduct the training. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms traditional RL algorithms such as the deep-Q network.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Using decision-tree classifier systems to extract knowledge from databases

One difficulty in applying artificial intelligence techniques to the solution of real world problems is that the development and maintenance of many AI systems, such as those used in diagnostics, require large amounts of human resources. At the same time, databases frequently exist which contain information about the process(es) of interest. Recently, efforts to reduce development and maintenance costs of AI systems have focused on using machine learning techniques to extract knowledge from existing databases. Research is described in the area of knowledge extraction using a class of machine learning techniques called decision-tree classifier systems. Results of this research suggest ways of performing knowledge extraction which may be applied in numerous situations. In addition, a measurement called the concept strength metric (CSM) is described which can be used to determine how well the resulting decision tree can differentiate between the concepts it has learned. The CSM can be used to determine whether or not additional knowledge needs to be extracted from the database. An experiment involving real world data is presented to illustrate the concepts described.

St.clair, D. C.↗

The Process of the Development of an Operator

On the job training is where new employees called operators can start gaining knowledge on what they will be working on during their time in JSC. In these lessons I learned different things that are important ranging from thermal systems to electrical systems. While doing OJT classes the student will learn how to use a portable computer system which has displays that I also helped edit and clean up. The way you can also learn is by reading system briefs which describes the different systems. Due to the fact of a possible change in the ISS I updated a systems brief so that it can be relevant to what is actually on the space station. I was given a task that will help develop my skills and make myself better prepared for my future in the work field. The project that I worked on had me pulling real time data from the International Space Station. The Data I obtained from the space station will be correlated to battery performance. The group I will be working which is called REBA and we will take the telemetry and evaluate the data. I will be working with my mentor Ben Chislom and co-op Tyler along with the Pro team. They then will put this data into a graph so that they can get the discrepancies and find a way to improve the battery performance. The first weeks I read familiarization books that informed me how the ISS works, how it was built, and the systems that are used to keep the station working. This project is going to benefit NASA by finding out how electricity is being used on the ISS and enabling us to see how it can be used more efficiently. This way we can operate the ISS without wasting power. While conducting research that goes on inside the space station knowing all electricity is being used efficiently.

Banks, Terrence↗

A flight expert system for on-board fault monitoring and diagnosis

An architecture for a flight expert system (FLES) to assist pilots in monitoring, diagnosing, and recovering from inflight faults is described. A prototype was implemented and an attempt was made to automate the knowledge acquisition process by employing a learning by being told methodology. The scope of acquired knowledge ranges from domain knowledge, including the information about objects and their relationships, to the procedural knowledge associated with the functionality of the mechanisms. AKAS (automatic knowledge acquisition system) is the constructed prototype for demonstration proof of concept, in which the expert directly interfaces with the knowledge acquisition system to ultimately construct the knowledge base for the particular application. The expert talks directly to the system using a natural language restricted only by the extent of the definitions in an analyzer dictionary, i.e., the interface understands a subset of concepts related to a given domain. In this case, the domain is the electrical system of the Boeing 737. Efforts were made to define and employ heuristics as well as algorithmic rules to conceptualize data produced by normal and faulty jet engine behavior examples. These rules were employed in developing the machine learning system (MLS). The input to MLS is examples which contain data of normal and faulty engine behavior and which are obtained from an engine simulation program. MLS first transforms the data into discrete selectors. Partial descriptions formed by those selectors are then generalized or specialized to generate concept descriptions about faults. The concepts are represented in the form of characteristic and discriminant descriptions, which are stored in the knowledge base and are employed to diagnose faults. MLS was successfully tested on jet engine examples.

Ali, Moonis↗

Differential Equation Approximation Using Gradient-Boosted Quantile Regression

The operation of cyber-physical-human (CPH) systems is subject to various epistemic and aleatory uncertainties. Overall trustworthiness of CPH systems relies on the trustworthiness of its components and their interactions. It is important that computational models comprising the cyber component of CPH provide predictions accompanied by a measure of confidence in model outcomes. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) and propagation are especially important in safety critical CPH systems. Gradient-boosted trees is a modeling approach capable both of learning the dynamics of a system and performing UQ. In this paper, we devise a method for using gradient boosting to learn the dynamics of a second order differential equation and estimate uncertainty at the same time. We do this by creating a custom loss function that trains the model to approximate the second derivative of a noisy time series, and to penalize based on a parameter that corresponds to the desired quantile. The resulting gradient boosting model can simulate stochastic trajectories of the system given a single starting point, that is, it can estimate both the expected trajectory and its uncertainty. We show that the uncertainty estimation is well calibrated and that the model can learn the dynamics even in the presence of noise. We demonstrate the approach on a simple cartpole system.

Autonomous systems↗