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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 1,405 records · Page 78

ElectroCat: DOE's approach to PGM-free catalyst and electrode R&D

The successful development of high-performance, durable platinum group metal-free (PGM-free) electrocatalysts and electrodes for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) will ultimately improve the cost-competiveness of fuel cells in a wide range of applications. This is considered to be a critical development especially for automotive fuel cell applications in order to bring the system cost of an automotive fuel cell system down to the $30/kW cost target set by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The platinum group metal (PGM) electrocatalysts are a major contributor to the system cost. Addressing the technical challenges to PGM-free electrocatalyst and electrode development, therefore, represents one of DOE's most pressing research and development (R&D) priorities. ElectroCat was formed by the DOE as part of the Energy Materials Network (EMN) in early 2016, and shares with other EMN consortia the goal of decreasing the time to market for advanced materials related to clean energy technologies, in the context of increasing U.S. fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) manufacturing competitiveness. To accomplish this, the consortium performs core research and development and provides universities and companies streamlined access to the unique, world-class set of tools and expertise relevant to early-stage applied PGM-free catalyst R&D of the member national laboratories. Moreover, ElectroCat fosters a systematic methodology by which prospective catalysts and electrodes are prepared and analyzed rapidly and comprehensively using high-throughput, combinatorial methods. Catalyst discovery is augmented by theory as well as foundational electrocatalysis and materials knowledge at the participating national laboratories. Furthermore, ElectroCat has developed a data sharing framework, requisite of all EMN consortia, for disseminating its findings to the public via a searchable database, to further expedite incorporation of PGM-free electrocatalysts into next-generation fuel cells by advancing the general understanding of the PGM-free electrocatalyst field.

Thompson, Simon T.↗

Adaptive Interface-PINNs (AdaI-PINNs) for transient diffusion: Applications to forward and inverse problems in heterogeneous media

We model transient diffusion in heterogeneous materials using a novel physics-informed neural networks framework (PINNs) termed Adaptive interface physics-informed neural networks or AdaI-PINNs (Roy et al. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.04626, 2024). AdaI-PINNs utilize different activation functions with trainable slopes tailored to each material region within the computational domain, allowing for a fully automated and adaptive PINNs approach to model interface problems with strongly and weakly discontinuous solutions. To enhance its performance in highly heterogeneous transient diffusion systems, we prescribe a suite of robust practices, including appropriate non-dimensionalization of equations, a biased sampling method, Glorot initialization, and the hard enforcement of boundary and initial conditions. Here we evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method on several benchmark forward and inverse problems. Comparative studies on one-dimensional and two-dimensional benchmark problems reveal that the modified AdaI-PINNs outperform its unmodified counterpart, achieving root-mean-square errors that are at least two orders of magnitude better in forward problems. For inverse problems, the maximum errors in the approximated diffusion coefficients by modified AdaI-PINNs are four orders of magnitude better than those of the unmodified version. Additionally, modified AdaI-PINNs demonstrate improved stability in problems with large material mismatches.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Progress of 3D network binders in silicon anodes for lithium ion batteries

Prompted by its overwhelming benefits, silicon (Si) has evolved as one of the most promising anode materials for high-capacity lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, some of the intrinsic drawbacks such as low ionic conductivity and inevitable volume change during the alloying/dealloying process seriously hamper the commercialization of Si-based anodes in LIBs. Among the several strategies to overcome the challenges of the Si anode, the development of designed polymeric binders is imperative for enabling stable and satisfactory performance. The improved cell performance due to the designed binders is recognized as an economical and practical approach, especially from the industrial perspective. In addition to their conventional role in integrating electrode components, binders also play a significant role in alleviating the unfavorable phenomenon of volume expansion, and ultimately stabilizing the Si anode and Si-electrolyte interphase. The polymer architecture of the binders significantly influences the binder performance, and three-dimensional (3D) network binders are generally more effective at coping with the stress resulting from the huge volume change of the Si anode. To develop advanced 3D binders, substantial research efforts have been made including various crosslinking strategies in the past decade. In this review, we focus on diverse crosslinking methods including chemical-, physical-, and topological-crosslinking for rationally designing network binders for Si anodes and take a glance at dynamic interactions to construct healable binders for long-term stability.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Ternary Organic Solar Cells with Efficiency >16.5% Based on Two Compatible Nonfullerene Acceptors

Abstract A ternary structure has been demonstrated as being an effective strategy to realize high power conversion efficiency (PCE) in organic solar cells (OSCs); however, general materials selection rules still remain incompletely understood. In this work, two nonfullerene small‐molecule acceptors 3TP3T‐4F and 3TP3T‐IC are synthesized and incorporated as a third component in PM6:Y6 binary blends. The photovoltaic behaviors in the resultant ternary OSCs differ significantly, despite the comparable energy levels. It is found that incorporation of 15% 3TP3T‐4F into the PM6:Y6 blend results in facilitating exciton dissociation, increasing charge transport, and reducing trap‐assisted recombination. All these features are responsible for the enlarged PCE of 16.7% (certified as 16.2%) in the PM6:Y6:3TP3T‐4F ternary OSCs, higher than that (15.6%) in the 3TP3T‐IC containing ternary devices. The performance differences are mainly ascribed to the compatibility between the third component and the host materials. The 3TP3T‐4F guest acceptor exhibits an excellent compatibility with Y6, tending to form well‐mixed phases in the ternary blend without disrupting the favored bicontinuous transport networks, whereas 3TP3T‐IC displays a morphological incompatibility with Y6. This work highlights the importance of considering the compatibility for materials selection toward high‐efficiency ternary organic OSCs.

Song, Jiali↗

Surrogate-driven design optimization with uncertainty constraints in Monte Carlo simulations

In multi-objective design tasks, the computational cost increases rapidly when high-fidelity simulations are used to evaluate objective functions. Surrogate models help mitigate this cost by approximating the simulation output, simplifying the design process. However, under high uncertainty, surrogate models trained on noisy data can produce inaccurate predictions, as their performance depends heavily on the quality of training data. This study investigates the impact of data uncertainty on two multi-objective design problems modelled using Monte Carlo transport simulations: a neutron moderator and an ion-to-neutron converter. For each, a grid search was performed using five different tally uncertainty levels to generate training data for neural network surrogate models. These models were then optimized using NSGA-III. The recovered Pareto-fronts were analyzed across uncertainty levels: in the moderator problem, normalized hypervolume dropped from 0.886 at 1.0% uncertainty to 0.748 at 10% uncertainty, while in the converter problem it remained near 0.50 for all cases. Average simulation times were also compared to evaluate the trade-off between accuracy and computational cost. Results show that the influence of simulation uncertainty is strongly problem-dependent. In the neutron moderator case, higher uncertainties led to exaggerated objective sensitivities and distorted Pareto-fronts, reducing normalized hypervolume. In contrast, the ion-to-neutron converter task was less affected—low-fidelity simulations produced results similar to those from high-fidelity data. These findings suggest that a fixed-fidelity approach is not optimal. Surrogate models can recover the Pareto-front under noisy conditions, and multi-fidelity studies help identify suitable uncertainty levels for each problem to balance efficiency and accuracy.

07 ISOTOPE AND RADIATION SOURCES↗

mdtmFTP and its evaluation on ESNET SDN testbed

In this paper, to address the high-performance challenges of data transfer in the big data era, we are developing and implementing mdtmFTP: a high-performance data transfer tool for big data. mdtmFTP has four salient features. First, it adopts an I/O centric architecture to execute data transfer tasks. Second, it more efficiently utilizes the underlying multicore platform through optimized thread scheduling. Third, it implements a large virtual file mechanism to address the lots-of-small-files (LOSF) problem. In conclusion, mdtmFTP integrates multiple optimization mechanisms, including–zero copy, asynchronous I/O, pipelining, batch processing, and pre-allocated buffer pools–to enhance performance. mdtmFTP has been extensively tested and evaluated within the ESNET 100G testbed. Evaluations show that mdtmFTP can achieve higher performance than existing data transfer tools, such as GridFTP, FDT, and BBCP.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Toward quantum networking with frequency-bin qudits

Quantum networking holds tremendous promise in transforming computation and communication. Entangled-photon sources are critical for quantum repeaters and networking, while photonic integrated circuits are vital for miniaturization and scalability. In this talk, we focus on generating and manipulating frequency-bin entangled states within integrated platforms. We encode quantum information as a coherent superposition of multiple optical frequencies; this approach is favorable due to its amenability to high-dimensional entanglement and compatibility with fiber transmission. We successfully generate and measure the density matrix of biphoton frequency combs from integrated silicon nitride microrings, fully reconstructing the state in an 8 × 8 two-qudit Hilbert space, the highest so far for frequency bins. Moreover, we employ Vernier electro-optic phase modulation methods to perform time-resolved measurements of biphoton correlation functions. Currently, we are exploring bidirectional pumping of microrings to generate indistinguishable entangled pairs in both directions, aiming to demonstrate key networking operations such as entanglement swapping and Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state generation in the frequency domain.

Myilswamy, Karthik V.↗

Resilient Control of Networked Microgrids Using Vertical Federated Reinforcement Learning: Designs and Real-Time Test-Bed Validations

Improving system-level resiliency of networked microgrids against adversarial cyber-attacks is an important aspect in the current regime of increased inverter-based resources (IBRs). To achieve that, this paper contributes in designing a hierarchical control layer, in conjunction with the existing control layers, resilient to adversarial attack signals. Considering model complexities, unknown dynamical behaviors of IBRs, and privacy issues regarding data sharing in multi-party-owned microgrids, designing such a control layer is non-trivial. Here, to tackle these issues, a novel federated reinforcement learning (Fed-RL) method is proposed. To grasp the interconnected dynamics of networked microgrids, the paper develops Federated Soft Actor-Critic (FedSAC) algorithm following the vertical structure of implementing Fed-RL. Next, utilizing the OpenAI Gym interface, we built a custom set-up in GridLAB-D/HELICS co-simulation platform, named Resilient RL Co-simulation (ResRLCoSIM), to train the RL agents with IEEE 123-bus benchmark comprising 3 interconnected microgrids. Finally, the learned policies in the simulation are transferred to the real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test-bed developed using the high-fidelity Hypersim platform. Finally, experiments show that the simulator-trained RL controllers achieve desirable performance with the test-bed platform, validating the minimization of the sim-to-real gap.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Approaching the ultimate superconducting properties of (Ba,K)Fe 2 As 2 by naturally formed low-angle grain boundary networks

The most effective way to enhance the dissipation-free supercurrent in the presence of a magnetic field for type II superconductors is to introduce defects that act as artificial pinning centers (APCs) for vortices. For instance, the in-field critical current density of doped BaFe 2 As 2 (Ba122), one of the most technologically important Fe-based superconductors, has been improved over the last decade by APCs created by ion irradiation. The technique of ion irradiation has been commonly implemented to determine the ultimate superconducting properties. However, this method is rather complicated and expensive. Here, we report a surprisingly high critical current density and strong pinning efficiency close to the crystallographic c-axis for a K-doped Ba122 epitaxial thin film without APCs, achieving performance comparable to ion-irradiated K-doped Ba122 single crystals. Microstructural analysis reveals that the film is composed of columnar grains with widths of approximately 30–60 nm. The grains are rotated around the b- (or a-) axis by 1.5° and around the c-axis by –1°, resulting in the formation of low-angle grain boundary networks. This study demonstrates that the upper limit of in-field properties reached in ion-irradiated K-doped Ba122 is achievable by grain boundary engineering, which is a simple and industrially scalable manner.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Low-Dimensional Network Formation in Molten Sodium Carbonate

Molten carbonates are highly inviscid liquids characterized by low melting points and high solubility of rare earth elements and volatile molecules. An understanding of the structure and related properties of these intriguing liquids has been limited to date. We report the results of a study of molten sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) which combines high energy X-ray diffraction, containerless techniques and computer simulation to provide insight into the liquid structure. Total structure factors (F-x(Q)) are collected on the laser-heated carbonate spheres suspended in flowing gases of varying composition in an aerodynamic levitation furnace. The respective partial structure factor contributions to Fx(Q) are obtained by performing molecular dynamics simulations treating the carbonate anions as flexible entities. The carbonate liquid structure is found to be heavily temperature-dependent. At low temperatures a low-dimensional carbonate chain network forms, at T = 1100 K for example similar to 55% of the C atoms form part of a chain. The mean chain lengths decrease as temperature is increased and as the chains become shorter the rotation of the carbonate anions becomes more rapid enhancing the diffusion of Na+ ions.

Wilding, Martin C.↗

Bringing HPE Slingshot 11 support to Open MPI

The Cray HPE Slingshot 11 network is used on the new exascale systems arriving at the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) laboratories (e.g., Frontier, Aurora, Perlmutter). As such, the support of this network is an important capability to meet the needs of exascale applications. Here, this article highlights recent work to develop supporting infrastructure to enable Open MPI to efficiently support these new platforms. A key component of this effort involves development of a new Open Fabrics Interface (OFI) provider, LinkX. We discuss the design and development of enhancements that take advantage of the new Slingshot 11 network and AMD GPUs. We include performance data from tests on the Frontier supercomputer using synthetic communication benchmarks, and the vendor provided MPI as a baseline for comparison. The tests demonstrate full functionality of Open MPI on the system and initial results show favorable performance when compared to the highly tuned vendor implementation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

dCache: The Storage System of Choice for Data-Intensive Applications

The ever-increasing volumes of data produced by modern scientific facilities like EuXFEL and LHC put significant stress on data management infrastructure operated by laboratories and research centers. The challenges to be addressed span the entire data life cycle, from ingest and efficient data analysis to long-term preservation, typically involving large tape libraries. dCache, a storage system developed in collaboration between the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC), is designed to manage a large number of disk servers and to facilitate transparent data migration to and from archival storage. Its multifaceted approach offers a unified method to support a variety of scientific use cases with the same storage infrastructure, including high-throughput data ingest, data sharing over wide area networks, efficient access from HPC clusters, and long-term data preservation on tertiary storage. Initially developed for high energy physics (HEP) experiments, dCache is now used by various scientific communities, including astrophysics, biomedical research, and life sciences, each having specific requirements. This paper presents architecture, deployment strategies, performance and scalability enhancements, and recent advancements in dCache addressing the needs of scientific communities. Finally, we touch on the development and release process, ensuring the software’s high quality.

DCache↗

Cyclist exposure to black carbon, ultrafine particles and heavy metals: An experimental study along two commuting routes near Antwerp, Belgium

Highlights: • Wearable UFP and BC instrumentation was carried along whilst cycling 2 different commuting routes. • HR-ICP-MS provided elemental information on railway- and roadside-exposed routes. • Heart rate was tracked simultaneously to estimate the personal inhaled pollutant dose. • The bicycle highway route exhibited 300% lower BC and 20% lower UFP concentrations. • Elemental differences are observed between the considered commuting routes. Urban environments typically exhibit large atmospheric pollution variation, in both space and time. In contrast to traditional monitoring networks suffering from a limited spatial coverage, mobile platforms enable personalized high-resolution monitoring, providing valuable insights into personal atmospheric pollution exposure, and the identification of potential pollution hotspots. This study evaluated personal cyclist exposure to UFPs, BC and heavy metals whilst commuting near Antwerp, Belgium, by performing mobile measurements with wearable black carbon (BC) and ultrafine particle (UFP) instruments. Loaded micro-aethalometer filterstrips were chemically analysed and the inhaled pollutant dose determined from the exhibited heart rate. Considerable spatial pollutant variation was observed along the travelled routes, with distinct contributions from spatial factors (e.g. traffic intersections, urban park and market) and temporary events. On average 300% higher BC, 20% higher UFP and changing elemental concentrations are observed along the road traffic route (RT), when compared to the bicycle highway route (BH). Although the overall background pollution determines a large portion of the experienced personal exposure (in this case 53% for BC and 40% for UFP), cyclists can influence their personal atmospheric pollution exposure, by selecting less exposed commuting routes. Our results, hereby, strengthen the body of evidence in favour of further policy investments in isolated bicycle infrastructure.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Systematic and stochastic influences on the performance of the MinION nanopore sequencer across a range of nucleotide bias

Emerging sequencing technologies are allowing us to characterize environmental, clinical and laboratory samples with increasing speed and detail, including real-time analysis and interpretation of data. One example of this is being able to rapidly and accurately detect a wide range of pathogenic organisms, both in the clinic and the field. Genomes can have radically different GC content however, such that accurate sequence analysis can be challenging depending upon the technology used. Here, we have characterized the performance of the Oxford MinION nanopore sequencer for detection and evaluation of organisms with a range of genomic nucleotide bias. We have diagnosed the quality of base-calling across individual reads and discovered that the position within the read affects base-calling and quality scores. Finally, we have evaluated the performance of the current state-of-the-art neural network-based MinION basecaller, characterizing its behavior with respect to systemic errors as well as context- and sequence-specific errors. Overall, we present a detailed characterization the capabilities of the MinION in terms of generating high-accuracy sequence data from genomes with a wide range of nucleotide content. This study provides a framework for designing the appropriate experiments that are the likely to lead to accurate and rapid field-forward diagnostics.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Guidelines for creating artificial neural network empirical interatomic potential from first-principles molecular dynamics data under specific conditions and its application to $α$-Ag 2 Se

First-principles molecular dynamics (FPMD) simulations are highly accurate, but due to their high calculation cost, the computational scale is often limited to hundreds of atoms and few picoseconds under specific temperature and pressure conditions. As such, we present here the guidelines for creating artificial neural network empirical interatomic potential (ANN potential) trained with such a limited FPMD data, which can perform long time scale MD simulations at least under the same conditions. The FPMD data for training are prepared on the basis of the convergence of radial distribution function [$g(r)$]. While training the ANN using total energy and atomic forces of the FPMD data, the error of pressure is also monitored and minimized. To create further robust potential, we add a small amount of FPMD data to reproduce the interaction between two atoms that are close to each other. ANN potentials for $α$-Ag 2 Se were created as an application example, and it has been confirmed that not only $g(r)$ and mean square displacements but also the specific heat requiring a long time scale simulation matched the FPMD and the experimental values. In addition, the MD simulation using the ANN potential achieved over 10 4 acceleration over the FPMD one. The guidelines proposed here mitigate the creation difficulty of the ANN potential, and a lot of FPMD data sleeping on the hard disk after the research may be put on the front stage again.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Understanding and Estimating Error Propagation in Neural Networks for Scientific Data Analysis

Neural networks are increasingly integrated into scientific discovery, where input data reduction and model quantization play a key role in accelerating inference. However, understanding and mitigating the impact of these techniques on output error is critical for ensuring reliable results, particularly in tasks demanding high numerical precision. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for optimizing neural network inference in scientific computing by combining data reduction and weight quantization while maintaining error-controlled outcomes. We develop theoretical analyses to bound error propagation under these reductions and propose a framework that balances computational performance with error constraints. Evaluation on real-world learning-based combustion simulations and satellite image classification demonstrates that our derived error bounds accurately predict observed errors while enabling significant computational speedup under our framework. This work highlights the potential for further leveraging advancements in modern lossy compression algorithms and hardware accelerators that support lower-precision formats.

He, Weiming [New Jersey Institute of Technology]↗

Search for Gamma-Ray and Neutrino Coincidences Using HAWC and ANTARES Data

In the quest for high-energy neutrino sources, the Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network has implemented a new search by combining data from the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory and the Astronomy with a Neutrino Telescope and Abyss environmental RESearch (ANTARES) neutrino telescope. Using the same analysis strategy as in a previous detector combination of HAWC and IceCube data, we perform a search for coincidences in HAWC and ANTARES events that are below the threshold for sending public alerts in each individual detector. Data were collected between 2015 July and 2020 February with a live time of 4.39 yr. Over this time period, three coincident events with an estimated false-alarm rate of <1 coincidence per year were found. This number is consistent with background expectations.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Networked-based Cyber Analysis using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for High-Speed Networks

Today’s networked systems utilize advanced security components such as Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), and methods for network traffic classification. A fundamental aspect of these security components and methods is network packet visibility and packet inspection. To achieve packet visibility, a compute mechanism used by these security components and methods is Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). DPI is used to obtain visibility into packet fields by looking deeper inside packets, beyond just IP address, port, and protocol. However, DPI is considered extremely expensive in terms of compute processing costs and very challenging to implement on high speed network systems. The fundamental scientific paradigm addressed in this research project is the application of greater network packet visibility and packet inspection at data rates greater than 40Gbps to secure computer network systems. The greater visibility and inspection will enable detection of advanced content-based threats that exploit application vulnerabilities and are designed to bypass traditional security approaches such as firewalls and antivirus scanners. Greater visibility and inspection are achieved through identification of the application protocol (e.g., HTTP, SMTP, Skype) and, in some cases, extraction and processing of the information contained in the packet payload. Analysis is then performed on the resulting DPI data to identify potentially malicious behavior. In order to obtain visibility and inspect the application protocol and contents at high speed data rates, advanced DPI technologies and implementations are developed.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗