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At least 1,495 records · Page 83

Risk Assessment of Rare Events in Probabilistic Power Flow via Hybrid Multi-Surrogate Method

The risks associated with rare events threatening the security of power system operation are of paramount importance to power system planners and operators. To analyze the risks caused by high-impact, low-frequency rare events, an immensely large number of samples are typically required for the Monte-Carlo (MC) method on the high-fidelity power system model to achieve a sufficient accuracy, thereby rendering this approach computationally prohibitive. To handle this problem efficiently, it is desirable to construct a surrogate model for the power system response. However, the straightforward MC sampling of the low-fidelity surrogate can lead to biased results in the low-probability tail regions that are vital to risk assessment. Moreover, a single surrogate is unable to handle the topology uncertainties caused by random branch outages. To overcome these issues, we propose a hybrid multi-surrogate (HMS) method based on the polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) with low-probability tail events reevaluated by the high-fidelity model through a probabilistic analysis. This method improves the computational efficiency of the MC method for rare-event risk assessment by leveraging multi-fidelity models while retaining the desired accuracy. Simulations conducted in three test systems verify the excellent performances of the HMS method.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Extended live-tracking and quantitative characterization of wound healing and cell migration with SiR-Hoechst

Highlights: • SiR-Hoechst is a nuclear dye that enables cell tracking without affecting migration. • Single cell analysis provides multiple migration metrics during wound healing. • Cell density-based report of wound healing is less susceptible to subjective bias. • Cell directionality is an important contributor of early wound recovery. Cell migration is essential to many life processes, including immune response, tissue repair, and cancer progression. A reliable quantitative characterization of the cell migration can therefore aid in the high throughput screening of drug efficacy in wound healing and cancer treatments. In this work, we report what we believe is the first use of SiR-Hoechst for extended live tracking and automated analysis of cell migration and wound healing. We showed through rigorous statistical comparisons that this far-red label does not affect migratory behavior. We observed excellent automated tracking of random cell migration, in which the motility parameters (speed, displacement, path length, directionality ratio, persistence time, and direction autocorrelation) obtained closely match those obtained from manual tracking. We also present an analysis framework to characterize the healing of a scratch wound from the perspective of single cells. The use of SiR-Hoechst is advantageous for the crowded environments in wound healing assays because as long as cell nuclei do not overlap, continuous tracking can be maintained even if there is cell-cell contact. In this paper, we report wound recovery based on the number of cells migrating into the wound over time, normalized by the initial cell count prior to the infliction of the wound. This normalized cell count approach is impervious to operator bias during the arbitration of wound edges and is also robust against variability that arises due to differences in the cell density of different samples. Additional wound healing characteristics were also defined based on the evolution of cell speed and directionality during healing. Not unexpected, the wound healing cells exhibited much higher tendency to maintain the same migratory direction in comparison to the randomly migrating cells. The use of SiR-Hoechst thus greatly simplified the automation of single cell and whole population analysis with high spatial and temporal resolution over extended periods of time.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Effect of hatch spacing and laser power on microstructure, texture, and thermomechanical properties of laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) additively manufactured NiTi

This study systematically evaluates the effects of laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing (L-PBF-AM) parameters (hatch spacing and laser power) on the thermomechanical behavior and microstructure of Ni 50.8 Ti 49.2 shape memory alloy. The samples were fabricated with hatch spacings from 40 to 240 µm and laser powers of 50 and 100 W at a constant scanning speed of 125 mm/s, resulting in parts with volumetric energy density levels from 55 to 666 J/mm 3 and two sets of linear energy densities of 0.4 and 0.8 J/mm. The results showed a reduced melt pool size and discontinuity of scan tracks with decreased laser power. Additionally, the porosity level was increased with larger hatch spacing and lower laser power. More notably, the transformation temperatures increased, and the critical stress, recoverable strain, and functional stability of samples improved with lower hatch spacing, where the recovery ratio of up to 90% was observed, regardless of the employed laser power. This study also discussed the relationship between the fabrication process and texture formation in the L-PBF-AM process. In conclusion, the advantage of L-PBF-AM was revealed in tailoring the microstructure from highly textured samples in [1 1 1] or [0 0 1] direction when hatch spacing lower than laser beam focused was employed, to the appearance of equiaxed solidification front with island grains and random orientations.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

NMR study of Ni 50+x ⁢Ti 50-x strain glasses

Here, we studied Ni 50+x ⁢Ti 50-x with compositions up to x = 2, performing 47 Ti and 49 Ti nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements from 4 to 400 K. For large x in this system, a strain glass appears in which frozen ferroelastic nanodomains replace the displacive martensite structural transition. Here, we demonstrate that NMR can provide an extremely effective probe of the strain-glass freezing process, with large changes in NMR line shape due to the effects of random strains which become motionally narrowed at high temperatures. At the same time with high-resolution x-ray diffraction we confirm the lack of structural changes in x ≥ 1.2 samples, while we show that there is little change in the electronic behavior across the strain-glass freezing temperature. NMR spin-lattice relaxation time (T 1 ) measurements provide a further measure of the dynamics of the freezing process, and indicate a predominantly thermally activated behavior both above and below the strain-glass freezing temperature. We show that the strain-glass results are consistent with a very small density of critically divergent domains undergoing a Vogel-Fulcher-type freezing process, coexisting with domains exhibiting faster dynamics and stronger pinning.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

ORNL_AISD_NiNb

This dataset describes the nickel-niobium solid solution binary alloy, where the two constituent elements nickel (Ni) and niobium (Nb) are randomly placed on an underlying crystal lattice. This dataset for nickel-niobium (Ni-Nb) alloys available includes the formation energy and bulk modulus for each crystal structure. Each atomic sample has a disordered phase which is obtained starting from an initial regular crystal structure of type body-centered cubic (BCC), face-centered cubic (FCC), or hexagonal compact packed (HCP). The geometry optimization ensures that all the alloy samples reached the equilibrium with negative formation energy. We perform geometry optimizations using the LAMMPS simulation package [1], a flexible simulation tool for particle-based materials modeling at the atomic, meso, and continuum scales. We utilized the embedded atom model (EAM) potential for Ni and Nb developed in a previous study [2]. The potential could describe behaviors of the liquid and solid phases of Ni-Nb alloy. The structural factors and angular distributions of three atoms are well-matched with X-ray and ab initio-based molecular dynamics data. We prepared the three different crystals with different initial lattice parameters (3.52 Ã… for FCC, 3.32 Ã… for BCC, and 3.5 Ã… for HCP). We performed energy minimization in two steps. Firstly, we minimized the structures with an isotropic unit cell to minimize the side effects from our arbitrary lattice parameters for all other compositions. Then, we applied geometry optimization with a triclinic (non-orthogonal) unit cell to fully minimize the stress components to calculate the elastic constants. In this procedure, we chose 10,000 as the maximum number of allowable steps aimed at obtaining fully relaxed atomic geometries. The dataset consists of three sets of crystal structures. The first set contains 46,086 irregular crystal structures, each of them with 54 atoms, obtained through optimization starting from a regular BCC crystal structure. The second set contains 24,543 irregular crystal structures, each of them with 32 atoms, obtained through optimization starting from a regular FCC crystal structure. The third set contains 39,303 irregular crystal structures, each of them with 48 atoms, obtained through optimization starting from a regular HCP crystal structure. The atomic configurations within each set span the possible compositional range. The three sets have been unified in a global dataset, which is extremely heterogeneous in terms of crystal structures, lattice volumes, and atomic configurations. Organization of files inside the dataset: the dataset contains three subdirectories called • BCC_opt • FCC_opt • HCP_opt based on the type of initial regular structure used to start the geometry optimization. Inside each of these folders, every atomic structure is identified by a string “A_B_Câ€, where A denotes the number of Nb in the system, B denotes index of structure with a given Nb number, and C denotes the total number of structures generated with a given Nb number. For each optimized crystal structure identified by the unique string of characters “A_B_Câ€, three files are provided: • A_B_C_opt.xyz: The optimized geometries in xyz format • A_B_C_opt.cfg: The optimized geometries in cfg format. It includes cell information and atomic energy, and forces calculated from LAMMPS. • A_B_C.elastic: Raw data of 21 elastic constants from LAMMPS output. • A_B_C.bulk: Calculated upper and lower bounds of bulk modulus and averaged one based on Voigt-Reuss-Hill approach from *.elastic. References: [1] A. P. Thompson, H. M. Aktulga, R. Berger, D. S. Bolintineanu, W. M. Brown, P. S. Crozier, P. J. in 't Veld, A. Kohlmeyer, S. G. Moore, T. D. Nguyen, R. Shan, M. J. Stevens, J. Tranchida, C. Trott, and S. J. Plimpton. LAMMPS - a flexible simulation tool for particle-based materials modeling at the atomic, meso, and continuum scales. Comp. Phys. Comm., 271:108171, 2022. [2] Y Zhang, R Ashcraft, MI Mendelev, CZ Wang, and KF Kelton. Experimental and molecular dynamics simulation study of structure of liquid and amorphous ni62nb38 alloy. The Journal of chemical physics, 145(20):204505, 2016.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Integration of LIBS with Machine Learning for Real-Time Monitoring of Feedstock in H 2 Gasification Applications

This project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) – Office of Fossil Energy under Award Number DE-FE0032177, aimed to assess the feasibility of an integrated Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) system with advanced machine learning (ML) models for real-time characterization and potential control of hydrogen gasifiers running on waste materials as feedstocks. This was a multidisciplinary effort that encompassed the acquisition and standardized analysis of individual and blended feedstocks—comprising biomass, coal waste, and plastic waste, followed by the development of a dynamic LIBS bench system for material sample analysis and development of predictive ML models. Comprehensive laboratory testing enabled the creation of a robust elemental dataset that served as the foundation for ML model training. Techniques such as Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Regression, and Neural Networks were employed to predict key feedstock properties, including higher heating value (HHV), moisture content, thermal conductivity, and ash composition with high accuracy. The results were validated against experimental data and demonstrated strong potential for real-time application in gasifier control systems. The project concluded with a study on the integration of the LIBS+ML approach for gasifier control and a techno-economic analysis of the implementation of the approach into hydrogen (H 2 ) gasification systems. Dissemination of results was carried out at a DOE meeting. This work establishes a scalable framework for automated, in-line feedstock quality assessment, offering significant implications for process optimization and emissions reduction in hydrogen production.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗

Terrestrial age of nineteen stony meteorites derived from their radiocarbon content.

Approximately 10 g of meteorite samples were analyzed. The results show that the average age of the investigated stony meteorites is 5200 yr. The set of finds used for the investigation was a more or less random selection of specimens from collections. The age value found may, therefore, well represent the average terrestrial age of finds of ordinary chondrites in the western U.S. Attention is drawn to the fact that the specimens examined were all from a part of the world with a fairly low rainfall.

Boeckl, R.↗

Improvement program for polycarbonate capacitors

Hermetically sealed, wound, AC, polycarbonate capacitors incorporating design improvements recommended in a previous study were designed and built. A 5000 hour, 400 Hz ac life test was conducted using 384 of these capacitors to verify the adequacy of the design improvements. The improvements incorporated in the capacitors designed for this program eliminated the major cause of failure found in the preceding work, termination failure. A failure cause not present in the previous test became significant in this test with capacitors built from one lot of polycarbonate film. The samples from this lot accounted for 25 percent of the total test complement. Analyses of failed samples showed that the film had an excessive solvent content. This solvent problem was found in 37 of the total 46 failures which occurred in this test. The other nine were random failures resulting from causes such as seal leaks, foreign particles, and possibly wrinkles.

Bailey, R. R.↗

A declaration of independence for Mg/Si

The weak covariation that exists between Al/Si and Mg/Si for large areas of the lunar surface is little, if any, stronger than that forced on a random set of numbers that are subject to closure. The Mg and Al variations implied by the Mg/Si and Al/Si intensity ratio data are qualitatively like those seen in lunar soil sample data. Two petrogenetic provinces are suggested for terra materials; one appears to have 50% higher Mg values than the other. Using the improved data, Mg/Si variations can be studied at a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 5/1.

Hubbard, N.↗

Measurement of the absorption coefficient using the sound-intensity technique

The possibility of using the sound intensity technique to measure the absorption coefficient of a material is investigated. This technique measures the absorption coefficient by measuring the intensity incident on the sample and the net intensity reflected by the sample. Results obtained by this technique are compared with the standard techniques of measuring the change in the reverberation time and the standing wave ratio in a tube, thereby, calculating the random incident and the normal incident adsorption coefficient.

Atwal, M.↗

Axial ratios and orientations for 100 Galactic globular star clusters

Axial ratios and major-axis orientations determined from image processing of Palomar and SRC Sky Survey material are tabulated for a sample of 100 Galactic globular clusters. From a subsample of 99 clusters, the mean axial ratio is found to be 0.93 + or - 0.01. Given that only 32 percent are flatter than b/a less than 0.9, and 5 percent flatter than 0.8, the clusters are found to be quite spherical. As predicted by King (1961 and 1966), tidal interactions by the Galaxy on the cluster are not the means by which the observed ellipticities are produced. Rather, Galactic absorption effects may have a moderate but not dominant effect on the clusters' observed ellipticities, as suggested by van den Bergh (1984). The alternate mechanisms of cluster rotation or anisotropic internal velocity distributions, or both, are considered to be more likely. The observed distribution of axial ratios is statistically indistinguishable from that of a similar-size sample of rotationally flattened clusters, which have axial-ratio values lying in the range of 0.75 less than b/a less than 0.83, and the major axes of which are oriented randomly in space.

White, Raymond E.↗

Correlating Sampling and Intensity Statistics in Nanoparticle Diffraction Experiments

In this article, [Öztürk, Yan, Hill & Noyan (2014). J. Appl. Cryst. 47, 1016-1025] it was shown that the sampling statistics of diffracting particle populations within a polycrystalline ensemble depended on the size of the constituent crystallites: broad X-ray peak breadths enabled some nano-sized particles to contribute more than one diffraction spot to Debye-Scherrer rings. Here it is shown that the equations proposed by Alexander, Klug & Kummer [J. Appl. Phys. (1948), 19, 742-753] (AKK) to link diffracting particle and diffracted intensity statistics are not applicable if the constituent crystallites of the powder are below 10 nm. In this size range, (i) the one-to-one correspondence between diffracting particles and Laue spots assumed in the AKK analysis is not satisfied, and (ii) the crystallographic correlation between Laue spots originating from the same grain invalidates the assumption that all diffracting plane normals are randomly oriented and uncorrelated. Such correlation produces unexpected results in the selection of diffracting grains. Three or more Laue spots from a given grain for a particular reflection can only be observed at certain wavelengths. In addition, correcting the diffracted intensity values by the traditional Lorentz term, 1/cos [theta], to compensate for the variation of particles sampled within a reflection band does not maintain fidelity to the number of poles contributing to the diffracted signal. A new term, cos [theta]B/cos [theta], corrects this problem.

77 NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY↗

Soluble TNF-alpha receptor 1 and IL-6 plasma levels in humans subjected to the sleep deprivation model of spaceflight

BACKGROUND: The extent to which sleep loss may predispose astronauts to a state of altered immunity during extended space travel prompts evaluation with ground-based models. OBJECTIVE: We sought to measure plasma levels of selected cytokines and their receptors, including the putative sleep-regulation proteins soluble TNF-alpha receptor (sTNF-alpha R) I and IL-6, in human subjects undergoing 2 types of sleep deprivation during environmental confinement with performance demands. METHODS: Healthy adult men (n = 42) were randomized to schedules that varied in severity of sleep loss: 4 days (88 hours) of partial sleep deprivation (PSD) involving two 2-hour naps per day or 4 days of total sleep deprivation (TSD). Plasma samples were obtained every 6 hours across 5 days and analyzed by using enzyme-linked immunoassays for sTNF-alpha RI, sTNF-alpha RII, IL-6, soluble IL-2 receptor, IL-10, and TNF-alpha. RESULTS: Interactions between the effects of time and sleep deprivation level were detected for sTNF-alpha RI and IL-6 but not for sTNF-alpha RII, soluble IL-2 receptor, IL-10, and TNF-alpha. Relative to the PSD condition, subjects in the TSD condition had elevated plasma levels of sTNF-alpha RI on day 2 (P =.04), day 3 (P =.01), and across days 2 to 4 of sleep loss (P =.01) and elevated levels of IL-6 on day 4 (P =.04). CONCLUSIONS: Total sleep loss produced significant increases in plasma levels of sTNF-alpha RI and IL-6, messengers that connect the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems. These changes appeared to reflect elevations of the homeostatic drive for sleep because they occurred in TSD but not PSD, suggesting that naps may serve as the basis for a countermeasures approach to prolonged spaceflight.

Non-NASA Center↗

Methods of Reverberation Mapping. I. Time-lag Determination by Measures of Randomness

A class of methods for measuring time delays between astronomical time series is introduced in the context of quasar reverberation mapping, which is based on measures of randomness or complexity of the data. Several distinct statistical estimators are considered that do not rely on polynomial interpolations of the light curves nor on their stochastic modeling, and do not require binning in correlation space. Methods based on von Neumann’s mean-square successive-difference estimator are found to be superior to those using other estimators. An optimized von Neumann scheme is formulated, which better handles sparsely sampled data and outperforms current implementations of discrete correlation function methods. This scheme is applied to existing reverberation data of varying quality, and consistency with previously reported time delays is found. In particular, the size–luminosity relation of the broad-line region in quasars is recovered with a scatter comparable to that obtained by other works, yet with fewer assumptions made concerning the process underlying the variability. The proposed method for time-lag determination is particularly relevant for irregularly sampled time series, and in cases where the process underlying the variability cannot be adequately modeled.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Representative elementary volume (REV) of cementitious materials from three-dimensional pore structure analysis

The representative elementary volume (REV) is a fundamental property of a material, but no direct measurements exist for cementitious materials. In this paper, the REV of cement pastes with supplementary cementitious materials (GGBS, PFA, SF) was determined by analysing the three-dimensional pore structure (> 0.2 μm) using laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM). The effect of axial distortion inherent to LSCM on 3D pore structure was also investigated. A range of 3D pore parameters was measured using skeletonisation, maximal ball and random walker algorithms. Results show that axial distortion has insignificant effects on most parameters except Euler connectivity, average pore and throat volumes and directional diffusion tortuosities. Most pore parameters become independent of sampling volume at ≈ 60{sup 3} μm{sup 3} except diffusion tortuosities and formation factor. The REV for porosity calculated based on a statistical approach at eight realisations and 5% relative error was found to be ≈ 100{sup 3} μm{sup 3}.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Ensemble variational Fokker-Planck methods for data assimilation

Particle flow filters solve Bayesian inference problems by smoothly transforming a set of particles into samples from the posterior distribution. Particles move in state space under the flow of an McKean-Vlasov-Itˆo process. This work introduces the Variational Fokker-Planck (VFP) framework for data assimilation, a general approach that includes previously known particle flow filters as special cases. The McKean-Vlasov-Itˆo process that transforms particles is defined via an optimal drift that depends on the selected diffusion term. It is established that the underlying probability density - sampled by the ensemble of particles - converges to the Bayesian posterior probability density. For a finite number of particles the optimal drift contains a regularization term that nudges particles toward becoming independent random variables. Based on this analysis, we derive computationally-feasible approximate regularization approaches that penalize the mutual information between pairs of particles, and avoid particle collapse. Moreover, the diffusion plays a role akin to a particle rejuvenation approach that aims to alleviate particle collapse. The VFP framework is very flexible. Different assumptions on prior and intermediate probability distributions can be used to implement the optimal drift, and localization and covariance shrinkage can be applied to alleviate the curse of dimensionality. A robust implicit-explicit method is discussed for the efficient integration of stiff McKean- Vlasov-Itˆo processes. Here, the effectiveness of the VFP framework is demonstrated on three progressively more challenging test problems, namely the Lorenz ’63, Lorenz ’96 and the quasi-geostrophic equations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Dynamics of Shape-Persistent Giant Molecules: Zimm-like Melt, Elastic Plateau, and Cooperative Glass-like

Giant molecules are a new class of soft matter having threedimensional (3D) shapes and composed of chemically linked rigid molecular nanoparticles. Structurally, a 3D cluster of molecular nanoparticles can be one giant molecule or a few giant molecules associated together via specific interactions. The dynamics of clusters that are smaller than a critical diameter (~5 nm) presents a power law relaxation exponent of 0.7 at the high frequency region corresponding to segmental dynamics. Such scaling is similar to the result of the Zimm model although those clusters are neither chain-like nor in solution. Clusters that are larger than this critical diameter and formed by the association of giant molecules exhibit an elastic plateau due to caging of individual giant molecules. Herein, we hypothesize that clusters of such a large size cannot move as a whole, even above the glass transition temperature of the sample. They thus are “cooperative glass-like”. A structural cluster of giant molecules could be abstracted as a dynamical cluster consisting of unlinked but cooperatively mobile beads. As derived in the random first-order transition theory, the cluster loses its mobility and reaches the glassy state when the diameter of the cluster is 6 times larger than the bead diameter. In our cases, we estimate that the critical diameter for these clusters is also approximately 6 times the bead diameter based on the glassy shear modulus of giant molecules. Thus, shape-persistent giant molecules may serve as a bridge between polymers and colloids and a platform to mimic cooperative rearrangements.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Optimal Energy Management for Microgrid with Stationary and Mobile Storage

This paper studies energy management in a Microgrid (MG) with solar generation, Battery Energy Management System (BESS) and gridable (V2G) EVs. A two-stage stochastic optimization method is proposed to capture the intermittent solar generation and random EV user behaviors. It is subsequently formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem. To evalutate the proposed method, real solar generation, loads, BESS and EV data is used in Sample Average Approximation (SAA). Computational results show the correctness of the proposed method as well as steady and tightly bounded optimality gap. Comparisons demonstrate that the proposed stochastic method outperforms its deterministic counterpart at the expense of higher computational cost. It is also observed that moderate number of EVs helps to reduce the overall operational cost of the MG, which sheds light on future EV integration to the smart grid.

Battery Energy Management System (BESS)↗