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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 145 records · Page 8
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1984

Plasma and magnetospheric research

Methods employed in the analysis of plasmas and the magnetosphere are examined. Computer programs which generate distribution functions are used in the analysis of charging phenomena and non maxwell plasmas in terms of density and average energy. An analytical model for spin curve analysis is presented. A program for the analysis of the differential ion flux probe on the space shuttle mission is complete. Satellite data analysis for ion heating, plasma flows in the polar cap, polar wind flow, and density and temperature profiles for several plasmasphere transits are included.

Comfort, R. H.↗
NASA NTRS1972

A summary of the OV1-19 satellite dose, depth dose, and linear energy transfer spectral measurements

Measurements of the biophysical and physical parameters in the near earth space environment, specifically, the Inner Van Allen Belt are discussed. This region of space is of great interest to planners of the Skylab and the Space Station programs because of the high energy proton environment, especially during periods of increased solar activity. Many physical measurements of charged particle flux, spectra, and pitch angle distribution have been conducted and are programmed in the space radiation environment. Such predictions are not sufficient to accurately predict the effects of space radiations on critical biological and electronic systems operating in these environments. Some of the difficulties encountered in transferring from physical data to a prediction of the effects of space radiation on operational systems are discussed.

Cervini, J. T.↗
NASA NTRS1976

Molecular effect on equilibrium charge-state distributions

The paper describes an experiment consisting of the acceleration of N(+) and N2(+) ions to energies between 0.25 and 1.75 MeV and their injection through a thin carbon foil, whereupon they were charge-state analyzed with an electrostatic analyzer. A foil-covered electrically suppressed Faraday cup, connected to a stepping motor, moved in the plane of the dispersed beams. The Faraday cup current, which was proportional to the number of incident ions, was sent to a current digitizer and computer programmed as a multiscaler. The energy-dependent charge-state fractions, the mean charge and the distribution width were calculated. It was shown that for incident atoms, the charge state distribution appeared to be spread over more charge states, while for the incident molecules, there was a greater fraction of charge states near the mean charge.

Wickholm, D.↗
DOE OSTI2020

Performance Assessments of Demand Flexibility from Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings: Issues and Considerations

This SEE Action Network report explains basic concepts and fundamental considerations for assessing the actual demand flexibility performance of buildings participating in demand flexibility programs and responding to time-varying retail rates. Demand flexibility is the capability of distributed energy resources (DERs) to adjust a building’s load profile across different timescales. Assessments determine the timing, location, quantity, and quality of grid services provided. The results can be used for financial settlements and to improve performance of demand flexibility, support its consideration in resource potential studies and electricity system planning, and contribute to cost-effectiveness evaluations. While practitioners and regulators regularly find opportunities to improve performance assessments of demand-related services, to a large degree current best practices are sufficient for basic service offerings as demand flexibility is implemented today. However, advances in assessment practices will be required in a future with grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs) that provide continuous demand flexibility by integrating multiple DERs and flexibility modes (load shed, load shift, modulate, and generate). Example practices include using new baseline constructs—including whether baselines are even required for certain building flexibility modes or configurations, deploying more advanced metering and analytics, further developing cybersecurity standards, improving communication standards for increased interoperability, and establishing performance metrics and assessment procedures for load modulation as it is more fully defined and implemented. This report provides information on prioritizing and designing performance assessment elements for demand flexibility programs and time-varying retail rates, assessment protocols, and research and development needs. Additional research sponsored by DOE’s Building Technologies Office offers more detailed technical information on assessing performance of demand flexibility, including definition of performance metrics.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

The Solar Influencer Next Door: Predicting Low-Income Solar Referrals and Leads

Increasing the adoption of solar among low-to-moderate income (LMI) households remains an important policy goal because of its promise to simultaneously reduce energy burden and support the just distribution of benefits of renewable energy. However, scaling LMI solar remains challenging due to affordability and access issues. Most existing LMI adoption has occurred under public-funded programs, highlighting the importance of increasing the cost-effectiveness of these programs at scale. We develop a new household-level data set on LMI solar lead acquisition, referrals, and adoption to understand the processes through which LMI solar uptake has occurred in California. Then, we develop models to predict two sub-mechanisms in the solar adoption process: whether an otherwise qualified lead becomes "lost" i.e. non-responsive to outreach and, for existing clients, whether they refer solar to others. For the program analyzed, participants received their solar system at no cost, which deemphasizes economic drivers of solar adoption and could differ from other program experiences. Both models substantially improved the accuracy of prediction relative to a baseline. Overall, we find that peer effects and solar economics are important to predicting referrals, and household demographic factors in lead loss prediction. Finally, we find that referrals are both the highest quality and largest source of LMI solar leads, providing a promising mechanism to expand LMI programs further.

customer acquisition costs↗
DOE OSTI2020

Minnesota’s Combined Heat and Power (CHP) Action Plan

With funding from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy State Energy Program’s Competitive Financial Assistance program, the Minnesota’s Department of Commerce (COM) created a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) Action Plan that has the potential to double the state’s CHP capacity, help the state achieve its target of 1.5% annual energy savings, and improve the resilience of the distribution grid.

implementation model, combined heat and power acti↗
DOE OSTI2025

Energy Justice Through Energy Storage: Supporting Energy Resilience in Disadvantaged Communities

This paper reviews energy storage technologies as a possible solution to address power outages and mitigate the impacts, enhancing vulnerable communities’ resilience to climate change. More frequent and severe extreme weather events are one of the main consequences of climate change. These events, coupled with the nation’s aging and frail energy infrastructure, are causing many communities throughout the United States to experience more frequent and longer power outages, resulting in economic, health, and social impacts. Impacts from power outages are not equally felt across communities, with disproportionate impacts across communities representing a matter of energy justice. From an energy justice standpoint, programs and policies that facilitate energy storage technologies should be intentionally designed to include distributive, procedural, recognition, and restorative justice.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2020

Detecting the undetected: Dealing with non-routine events using advanced M&V meter-based savings approaches

In a rapidly evolving energy industry, utilities are dealing with new challenges like integrating distributed energy resources and market saturation for advanced lighting retrofits. Demand-side management programs require new approaches to meet aggressive carbon reduction goals. Advanced measurement & verification (M&V) is an energy data analysis method using smart meter data in combination with analytics to quantify energy efficiency project savings. Advanced M&V shows great promise for supporting next generation commercial programs including retro commissioning, multi-measure retrofits, and behavior change programs. Advanced M&V captures real project impacts at the meter, but sometimes non-project events can also impact consumption (so-called “non-routine events” [NREs]). Accurately detecting and accounting for NREs is important for reducing uncertainty of savings estimates and helps manage investment risk for different stakeholders (e.g., utilities, building owners, ESCOs). Recent research has shown promise in establishing data-driven techniques to identify and adjust for NREs, but fundamental questions still remain, such as: how can you distinguish NREs from acceptable noise in energy consumption profiles? What is the frequency and magnitude of NREs? Can their detection and adjustment be automated and streamlined? This paper documents the state of the art in NRE quantification and analysis. The results of research to quantify the frequency, nature and direction of NREs, and methods and metrics for determining a trigger threshold for taking action on NREs are presented. The paper also documents the latest technical guidance on application of NRE detection and adjustment methods.

Fernandes, Samuel↗
DOE OSTI2019

Addressing Nuclear I&C Modernization Through Application of Techniques Employed in Other Industries

This research focuses on presenting advancements that have been made by non-nuclear I&C OT vendors and potential savings that could be realized by their optimized nuclear industry application. To promote understanding and to bound the initial scope for this effort, a pilot vendor and an associated pilot implementation were chosen as an integrated, presentation example for illustration. This integrated example is unique in that a utility in the United States (Duke Energy) engaged a traditional non-nuclear vendor (Honeywell Process Solutions) to install a non-safety, Distributed Control System (DCS) in four of its nuclear units. Duke Energy is currently exploring performing a “technology refresh” of these installed systems as part of a program to address digital obsolescence. This research presents techniques developed by distributed control system vendors to enable such upgrades and potential methods to employ them in a nuclear industry context. The objectives of such an effort are to minimize the utility cost both to refresh the systems and to put the systems into a repeatable refresh cycle for future obsolescence management. This will enable the utility to maximize the benefits of expanded use of their DCS as part of a larger plant strategy to eliminate obsolete I&C systems, reduce Operating and Maintenance (O&M) costs, and improve operational performance through digitalization.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
NASA NTRS1990

The Voyager program at APL

An overview is presented of the structure and function of the Applied Physics Laboratory's low-energy charged particle (LECP) instrument used in NASA's Voyager program. The LECP experiment was designed to measure the intensity, energy spectra, composition, angular distributions, and spatial and temporal characteristics of ions and electrons that are encountered by the spacecraft. Scientific findings of previous planetary encounters are noted, and color energy-time spectrograms that summarize the LECP results at each planet are presented and analyzed. Some details of the encounter by Voyager 2 of Neptune are provided, noting that the characteristics of the trajectory that was used provided for close observation of Triton, observations of particle structures, and exploration of Neptune's polar cap. A schematic of Neptune's magnetosphere is provided and analyzed.

Mauk, Barry H.↗
DOE OSTI2023

RADWIND Project Final Technical Report

The Rural Area Distributed Wind Integration Network Development (RADWIND) Project (January 2020-April 2023) was undertaken by NRECA Research, a not-for-profit subsidiary of NRECA focused on underwritten research, with the support of DOE. The project was part of the Wind Energy Technologies Office’s (WETO’s) Wind Integration for Rural Economic Development (WIRED) program, which was developed out of an October 2018 workshop in which NRECA participated in. RADWIND’s end of project goal was “to raise awareness of distributed wind as a solution for the energy, resiliency, and economic development needs of electric cooperatives, and to provide resources and information that reduce barriers and lower costs for co-ops seeking to deploy distributed wind. Through this project, NRECA Research seeks to establish a national distributed wind presence for and by NRECA’s members that delivers these benefits and plans to communicate NRECA’s members that properly deployed distributed wind can be a bankable technology option for rural America.”

17 WIND ENERGY↗
NASA NTRS1980

Transient solution for megajoule energy release in a lumped-parameter series RLC circuit

A method is developed for optimizing the energy release from a megajoule capacitive discharge in a series RLC circuit with an RL load. Both the resistance and inductance of the load are represented by effective values that characterize their behavior during the discharge. Using Kirchhoff's laws, equations utilizing the load impedance and the external circuit impedance are derived for determining the instantaneous load voltage and energy characteristics. A program (ERES) computes and displays the load characteristics and the circuit current. Use of the ERES program allows a designer to perturbate values of the circuit elements in order to produce the desired time distribution for the load energy input.

Barnes, G.↗
DOE OSTI2018

Battery and backup generator sizing for a resilient microgrid under stochastic extreme events

Owing to the recent power outages caused by extreme events, installing battery energy storage and backup generators is important to improve resiliency for a grid-tied microgrid. In the design stage, the event occurrence time and duration, which are highly uncertain and cannot be effectively predicted, may affect the needed battery and backup generator capacity but are usually assumed to be pre-determined in utility planning tools. This study investigates the optimal battery and backup generator sizing problem considering the stochastic event occurrence time and duration for the grid-tied microgrid under islanded operation. The reliability requirement is quantified by the mean value of the critical customer interruption time in each stochastic islanding time window (ITW), whose length is the duration and the centre is the occurrence time. The stochastic ITW constraint is then transformed to a probability-weighted expression to derive an equivalent Mixed Integer Linear Programming model. Numerical simulations on a realistic grid-tied PV-based microgrid demonstrate that the total cost is reduced by 11.5% considering the stochastic ITW, compared with the deterministic ITW under the same reliability requirement.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2019

Addendum to the REBUS Users Guide: REBUS-PC (V.1.5)

The Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Material Management and Minimization (M3) Reactor Conversion Program uses the REBUS-PC computer code to provide reactor physics and core design information such as neutron flux distributions in space, energy, and time, and to track isotopic changes in fuel and neutron absorbers with burnup. REBUS-PC has evolved from the original REBUS code, which was created starting in the 1960’s to study large liquid metal cooled fast reactors. In particular, additional outputs were added to improve user convenience and some inputs were modified to improve the functionality of the software. REBUS and REBUS-PC both model the external cycle, and are very general codes with 1D, 2D, and 3D neutronics capabilities, and with complete fuel shuffling capabilities. REBUS remains an extremely efficient reactor analysis tool for use in fast reactor systems, and so development has continued at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to this day for non-thermal reactor applications. While retaining the efficient computational engine of REBUS, REBUS-PC has evolved to its present status with continuous development since 1999. REBUS-PC has numerous changes and enhancements directed toward the needs of the thermal reactor analyst using Windows or Linux-based computational platforms.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Secure Communications Concept and API Concept for Integrating XENDEE Positronix with TESLA PowerPack System at Site 300 (Final Deliverable)

The CleanStart DERMS project focuses on the management of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) for enhanced distribution grid resilience. The demonstration site has changed from Riverside Public Utility to the LLNS Site 300 DERS demonstration site. This project has so far focused only on device level controllers and local area controllers. These controllers potentially lack the ability to perform supervisory control and grid interactive control functions, essential for grid-level optimal DER management. This project seeks to close that gap in development of secure communication concept and appropriate Application Programming Interfaces (API) to enable integration with DERs, device level and local area controllers, such as Distributed Energy Resources Management System (DERMS).

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
NASA NTRS1998

Flow Simulation in Secondary Flow Passages of a Rocket Engine Turbopump

This paper presents application of a Generalized Fluid System Simulation Program (GFSSP) to model fluid flow in a very complex secondary flow circuit of a rocket engine turbopump, SIMPLEX. SIMPLEX was a low cost turbopump designed, manufactured and tested to demonstrate the ability to reduce the overall cost and design cycle time of turbomachinery. GFSSP is a general purpose computer program for analyzing flowrate, pressure, temperature and concentration distribution in a complex flow network. The program employs a finite volume formulation of mass, momentum and energy conservation equations in conjunction with thermodynamic equation of state of a real fluid. The secondary flow passages modeled include flow between the impeller shroud and housing, impeller back face and housing, flow through labyrinth seal and bearing, return line flow to inducer and flow adjacent to front and back face of the turbine. Axial load on the bearing are calculated from the predicted pressure on all axial faces of the rotor. The predicted pressure and temperature distributions compared well with the test data.

Schallhorn, Paul↗
DOE OSTI2021

Computational Math Problems for a Clean Energy Future

Cutting edge computational mathematics are ubiquitous in renewable energy research. Problems in resilient and reliable electric grid operations, infrastructure planning, wind farm yaw control, and more demand sophisticated and scalable computational tools that enable the transition of renewable energy technologies from proof of concept to deployment into our energy system. The mission of the Computational Science Center at NREL is to lead the lab's efforts to solve energy challenges using high-performance computing (HPC), computational science, applied mathematics, scientific data management, visualization, and informatics. In this poster, we provide a short overview of three areas of computational mathematics research at NREL: wind power scenario generation for stochastic grid operations and infrastructure planning, improved rational function approximations for electromagnetic transients codes, and wind farm yaw control using a combination of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and reinforcement learning (RL). Increasing penetrations of renewable energy into power grids motivate the investigation of new approaches to characterizing uncertainty for five-minute economic dispatch problems. Similarly, as the penetration of distributed energy resources on power grids increases, it becomes important to revisit our methods of modelling transient phenomena, i.e. electromagnetic transients programs. Finally, the combination of ADMM and RL for wind farm yaw control presented here can potentially increase the efficiency of the deployed distributed controllers by orders of magnitude.

ADMM↗
DOE OSTI2020

Applying Non-Energy Impacts from Other Jurisdictions in Cost-Benefit Analyses of Energy Efficiency Programs: Resources for States for Utility Customer-Funded Programs

Avoided energy and capacity costs are the primary yardstick utilities use to determine which energy efficiency programs are cost-effective for their customers. But sometimes "non-energy impacts" — not commonly recognized as directly associated with energy generation, transmission and distribution — represent substantial benefits, such as improving comfort, air quality and public health. Considering whether and how to include non-energy impacts is an important part of cost-benefit analyses for these programs. This report offers practical considerations for deciding which non-energy impacts to include and how to apply values or methods from other jurisdictions. Researchers reviewed studies quantifying non-energy impacts used in 30 states and applied a five-point system to indicate transferability of a value or method from each study for 16 categories of non-energy impacts: Water resource costs and benefits; Other fuels costs and benefits; Avoided environmental compliance costs; Environmental impacts; Productivity; Health and safety; Asset value; Energy and/or capacity price suppression effects; Avoided costs of compliance with Renewable Portfolio Standard requirements; Avoided credit and collection costs; Avoided ancillary services; Comfort; Economic development and job impacts; Public health impacts; Energy security impacts; Increased reliability. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office supported this work.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗