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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 1,513 records · Page 84
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2019

A massively-parallel, unstructured overset method to simulate moving bodies in turbulent flows

An unstructured overset method capable of performing direct numerical simulation (DNS) and large eddy simulation (LES) of many (O(10 5 )) moving bodies, utilizing many computational cores (O(10 5 )), in turbulent, incompressible fluid flow is presented. Unstructured meshes are attached to bodies and placed within a fixed background domain. Body meshes are allowed to arbitrarily overlap and move throughout the domain. Within each mesh a high resolution, unstructured, non-dissipative finite volume method is used to solve for the flow field. Boundary conditions for each mesh are provided by interpolation from flow solutions on overlapping meshes. When many unstructured meshes of different resolution overlap, care is required in the connection between the different flow solutions. An interpolant is created which seeks to preserve volume conservation of flow quantities between meshes regardless of overlapping mesh differences. An implicit fractional step method is used for time advancement, requiring the calculation of a predicted fluid velocity and corrector pressure field. For the predictor step, the resulting interpolation is directly introduced into the implicit equations for the predicted flow field. For the corrected pressure field, the continuity between meshes is weakly enforced using a penalty formulation. The pressure formulation is symmetric, positive-definite and non-singular resulting in a formulation which is readily solvable using traditional iterative matrix inversion techniques. An Arbitrary Euler-Lagrangian (ALE) method coupled to a 6 degrees of freedom rigid body equation system (6-DOF) is used for body motion. For rotation, a quaternion representation is used to solve Euler's equations of rigid body motion. A linear spring damper model, which uses geometry information readily available from the overset assembly process, is used for collisions. Validation of the method for canonical flow fields is presented including assessment of order of accuracy and kinetic energy conservation properties. Particle-resolved direct numerical simulation (PR-DNS) of single particles in various flow fields are presented for validation. PR-DNS results of 50,000 spherical particles freely moving within turbulent channel flow are shown as a demonstration of the method at full scale. LES results of a marine propeller under crashback conditions are shown to demonstrate the ability to simulate highly unsteady turbulent flows over complex, moving geometries.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Status of Shift for NCS Applications in SCALE 6.3 [Slides]

Shift can run most KENO V.a and KENO-VI inputs, but beware of small geometry fudge factors. Shift is faster than KENO for fast spectrum systems, but has a higher uncertainty per particle. KENO FoM is higher for thermal systems. KENO V.a in MG is significantly faster than KENO V.a in CE, so this may exacerbate Shift difference. Shift generally has greater speedup for parallel calculations. Shift has only IFP available for TSUNAMI-3D, but parallel calculations are enabled.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

LiNbO{sub 3}: A photovoltaic substrate for massive parallel manipulation and patterning of nano-objects

The application of evanescent photovoltaic (PV) fields, generated by visible illumination of Fe:LiNbO{sub 3} substrates, for parallel massive trapping and manipulation of micro- and nano-objects is critically reviewed. The technique has been often referred to as photovoltaic or photorefractive tweezers. The main advantage of the new method is that the involved electrophoretic and/or dielectrophoretic forces do not require any electrodes and large scale manipulation of nano-objects can be easily achieved using the patterning capabilities of light. The paper describes the experimental techniques for particle trapping and the main reported experimental results obtained with a variety of micro- and nano-particles (dielectric and conductive) and different illumination configurations (single beam, holographic geometry, and spatial light modulator projection). The report also pays attention to the physical basis of the method, namely, the coupling of the evanescent photorefractive fields to the dielectric response of the nano-particles. The role of a number of physical parameters such as the contrast and spatial periodicities of the illumination pattern or the particle deposition method is discussed. Moreover, the main properties of the obtained particle patterns in relation to potential applications are summarized, and first demonstrations reviewed. Finally, the PV method is discussed in comparison to other patterning strategies, such as those based on the pyroelectric response and the electric fields associated to domain poling of ferroelectric materials.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2023

Critical role of isopotential surfaces for magnetostatic ponderomotive forces

By producing localized wave regions at the ends of an open-field-line magnetic confinement system, ponderomotive walls can be used to differentially confine different species in the plasma. Furthermore, if the plasma is rotating, this wall can be magnetostatic in the laboratory frame, resulting in simpler engineering and better power flow. However, recent work on such magnetostatic walls has shown qualitatively different potentials than those found in the earlier, nonrotating theory. Here, using a simple slab model of a ponderomotive wall, we resolve this discrepancy. We show that the form of the ponderomotive potential in the comoving plasma frame depends on the assumption made about the electrostatic potential in the laboratory frame. If the laboratory-frame potential is unperturbed by the magnetic oscillation, one finds a parallel-polarized wave in the comoving frame, while if each field line remains equipotential throughout the perturbation region, one finds a perpendicularly polarized wave. As a result, this in turn dramatically changes the averaged ponderomotive force experienced by a charged particle along the field line, not only its scaling, but also its direction.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

The Persistent Challenge of Data Locality in the Post-Exascale Era

The era of exascale computing, exemplified by systems like Frontier achieving exaflop-level performance, marks a milestone. However, the quest for sheer compute power leads to strong imbalance in system design. Hence, scaling advancements in memory, network bandwidth, and storage are also necessary and pose challenges, with a crucial need to address data locality issues. This article underscores the fundamental importance of data locality as a key abstraction for optimizing application performance. Despite notable software solutions, the growing complexity of parallelism and memory hierarchy demands performance-portable data locality solutions across diverse computing platforms. Additionally, the article revisits data locality aspects, covering hardware considerations, application perspectives, software stack abstractions, and tool support. It concludes with insights into data locality challenges and opportunities, emphasizing the ongoing significance of collaborative research for progress in this critical issue.

Unat, Didem [Koc University, Istanbul (Turkey)] (O↗
DOE OSTI2017

On the Evolution From Micrometer-Scale Inhomogeneity to Global Overheated Structure During the Intense Joule Heating of a z-Pinch Rod

Ultrafast optical microscopy of metal z-pinch rods pulsed with megaampere current is contributing new data and critical insight into what provides the fundamental seed for the magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability. A two-frame near infrared/visible intensified-charge-coupled device gated imager with 2-ns temporal resolution and 3-μm spatial resolution captured emissions from the nonuniformly Joule heated surfaces of ultrasmooth aluminum (Al) rods. Nonuniform surface emissions are consistently first observed from discrete, 10-μm scale, subelectronvolt spots. Aluminum 6061 alloy, with micrometer-scale nonmetallic resistive inclusions, forms several times more spots than 99.999% pure Al 5N; 5-10 ns later, azimuthally stretched elliptical spots and distinct strata (40-100 μm wide by 10 μm tall) are observed on Al 6061, but not on Al 5N. In such overheat strata, aligned parallel to the magnetic field, we find that they are highly effective seeds for MRT instability growth. Our data give credence to the hypothesis that early nonuniform Joule heating, such as the electrothermal instability, may provide the dominant seed for MRT.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

PoliMOR

PoliMOR is a scalable, automated, and customizable policy engine framework for multi-tiered parallel file systems. It is composed of single-purpose agents that handle tasks such as gathering file metadata, making policy decisions, and then executing actions based on those policies. These agents are designed to communicate using distributed message queues, allowing the number of individual agents to be scaled up as needed. PoliMOR automates the data management tasks by precluding the need for admin intervention. The agents in PoliMOR can be customized to integrate any utilities/tools that perform tasks like metadata scanning and data placement management.

Brumgard, Christopher↗
DOE OSTI2017

A Polarimetric Approach for Constraining the Dynamic Foreground Spectrum for Cosmological Global 21 cm Measurements

The cosmological global (sky-averaged) 21 cm signal is a powerful tool to probe the evolution of the intergalactic medium in high-redshift universe (z⩽6). One of the biggest observational challenges is to remove the foreground spectrum which is at least four orders of magnitude brighter than the cosmological 21 cm emission. Conventional global 21 cm experiments rely on the spectral smoothness of the foreground synchrotron emission to separate it from the unique 21 cm spectral structures in a single total-power spectrum. However, frequency-dependent instrumental and observational effects are known to corrupt such smoothness and complicate the foreground subtraction. We introduce a polarimetric approach to measure the projection-induced polarization of the anisotropic foreground onto a stationary dual-polarized antenna. Due to Earth rotation, when pointing the antenna at a celestial pole, the revolving foreground will modulate this polarization with a unique frequency-dependent sinusoidal signature as a function of time. In our simulations, by harmonic decomposing this dynamic polarization, our technique produces two separate spectra in parallel from the same observation: (i) a total sky power consisting both the foreground and the 21 cm background and (ii) a model-independent measurement of the foreground spectrum at a harmonic consistent to twice the sky rotation rate. In the absence of any instrumental effects, by scaling and subtracting the latter from the former, we recover the injected global 21 cm model within the assumed uncertainty. We further discuss several limiting factors and potential remedies for future implementation.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Electron Heating at Kinetic Scales in Magnetosheath Turbulence

We present a statistical study of coherent structures at kinetic scales, using data from the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission in the Earth’s magnetosheath. We implemented the multi-spacecraft partial variance of increments (PVI) technique to detect these structures, which are associated with intermittency at kinetic scales. We examine the properties of the electron heating occurring within such structures. We find that, statistically, structures with a high PVI index are regions of significant electron heating. We also focus on one such structure, a current sheet, which shows some signatures consistent with magnetic reconnection. Strong parallel electron heating coincides with whistler emissions at the edges of the current sheet.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Developing Uintah's Runtime System for Forthcoming Architectures

The need to solve ever-more complex science and engineering problems on computer architectures that are rapidly evolving poses considerable challenges for modern simulation frameworks and packages. While the decomposition of software into a programming model that generates a task-graph for execution by a runtime system make portability and performance possible, it also imposes considerable demands on that runtime system. Here, the challenge of meeting those demands for near-term and longer term systems in the context of the Uintah framework is considered in key areas such as support for data structures, tasks on heterogeneous architectures, performance portability, power management and designing for resilience by the use of replication based upon adaptive mesh refinement processes is addressed. Examples of techniques in these areas are used to illustrate performance improvements obtained for present large-scale systems and the needs of proposed systems considered.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Impact of collisionality on turbulence in the edge of tokamak plasma using 3D global simulations

Collisionality is one of the key parameters in determining turbulent transport in the plasma edge, regulating phenomena such as 'shoulder formation', separation of scale lengths in the scrape-off layer (SOL), turbulence damping and zonal flow dynamics. Understanding its role is therefore of primary importance for future reactors like ITER. Getting reliable predictions and a better characterization of plasma flow properties when varying collisionality remains, however, a critical challenge for the simulations. This paper focuses on the impact of varying collisionality in a non-isothermal three-dimensional fluid model of the plasma edge. A high field side limited configuration encompassing open and closed magnetic field lines with parameters typical of a medium-sized tokamak is considered. The present model can consistently account for the variations of collisionality and its impact on both the parallel resistivity η ∥ and the ion and electron parallel thermal conductivities χ ∥e,i . Details on mean flow and turbulence properties are given. Changing collisionality leads to significant changes in the flow properties both on the mean and fluctuating quantities. In particular, lowering collisionality decreases the size of coherent structures, the fluctuation levels of turbulence, and steepens the density and temperature equilibrium profiles around the separatrix leading to a global reduction of the turbulent transport. The SOL width is observed to increase with collisionality, eventually resulting in the disappearance of the scale lengths separation between near and far SOL, consistently with previous experimental observations. At low collisionality, where the presence of narrow feature is well-established, a contribution of heat conduction increases up to compete with heat convection.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

3-D Semantic Information Inference from Airborne Video. Final Report

We developed a full 3D modeling pipeline focusing on an important application scenario: city-scale 3D reconstruction from aerial imagery. We propose an approach to solve camera pose estimation and dense reconstruction from Wide Area Aerial Surveillance (WAAS) videos captured by an airborne platform. Our approach solves them in an online fashion: it incrementally updates a sparse 3D map and estimates the camera pose as each new frame arrives; depth maps of selected key frames are computed using a variational method and integrated to produce a full 3D model via volumetric reconstruction. In practice, aerial imagery is usually captured using a multicamera system. We propose an approach for camera pose estimation of multi-camera aerial imagery which is parallelized on multiple GPUs for efficiency. The approach is also extended for progressive 3D model acquisition with a hand-held camera. We also developed an offline approach since online approach is not a necessity and accuracy has higher priority over efficiency in many scenarios. We presented MeshRecon, a mesh-based offline system composed of three modules: a dense point cloud is generated using multi-resolution plane sweep method; an initial mesh model is extracted from the point cloud via global optimization considering visibility information of all images; the mesh model is then iteratively refined to capture structural details by optimizing the photometric consistency and spatial regularization. The major processes are parallelized on GPU for efficiency. For the aerial imagery case, we evaluate our system on several real-world multicamera aerial imagery datasets, each covering an urban scenario of several square kilometers. Quantitative result shows that the reconstructed geometric 3D model is highly accurate with error smaller than 1 meter over the entire city. Besides aerial imagery, we also evaluate its performance on general geometric 3D model acquisition of real-world objects. Result shows that the system is robust and flexible for various types of objects at different scales in both indoor and outdoor environments. Based on city 3D models reconstructed at different times, we present a system for city-scale geometry change detection by performing comparisons at the 3D geometry level. Our system is able to detect geometry changes at different scales, ranging from a building cluster to small-scale vegetation changes, with high accuracy.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

Supply and Demand Constraints on Future PV Power in the USA: Preprint

An economic analysis with a defined uncertainty range is presented that considers whether the future deployment of utility-scale PV (UPV) systems in the USA will be limited by the supply of PV modules or by market demand for these systems. An analysis of global PV module manufacturing growth and the fraction of modules produced that will be available for installation in the USA gives a plausible range of cumulative capacity for the UPV segment of 50 - 170 GW in 2030 and 60 - 500 GW in 2040. A parallel analysis of the future demand for UPV systems in the USA indicates a plausible range for cumulative capacity of 80 - 230 GW in 2030 and 150 - 530 GW in 2040. The plausible ranges for supply and demand substantially overlap in both 2030 and 2040, suggesting that neither supply nor demand is more likely to limit PV deployment in the USA. Consequently, mechanisms for enabling growth in both supply and demand can benefit efforts intended to increase the deployment of PV in the USA.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Parallel expansion of a fuel pellet plasmoid

The problem of the assimilation of a cryogenic fuel pellet injected into a hot plasma is considered. Due to the transparency to ambient particles of the plasmoid, the localised region of high-density plasma created by ionisation of the ablated pellet material, electrons reach a ‘quasiequilibrium’ (QE) state which is characterised by a steady-state on the fastest collisional time scale. The simplified electron kinetic equation of the QE state is solved. Taking a velocity moment of the higher-order electron kinetic equation, which is valid on the expansion time scale, permits a fluid closure, yielding an evolution equation for the macroscopic parameters describing the QE distribution function. In contrast to the Braginskii equations, the closure does not require that electrons have a short mean free path compared with the size of density perturbations, and permits an anisotropic and highly non-Maxwellian distribution function. As the QE distribution function accounts for both trapped and passing electrons, the self-consistent electric potential that causes the expansion can be properly described, in contrast to earlier models of pellet plasmoid expansion with an unbounded potential. The plasmoid expansion is simulated using both a Vlasov model and a cold-fluid model for the ions. During the expansion plasmoid ions and electrons obtain nearly equal amounts of energy; as hot ambient electrons provide this energy in the form of collisional heating of plasmoid electrons, the expansion of a pellet plasmoid is expected to be a potent mechanism for the transfer of energy from electrons to ions on a time scale shorter than that of ion–electron thermalisation.

Physics↗
DOE OSTI2018

Supply and Demand Constraints on Future PV Power in the USA

An economic analysis with a defined uncertainty range is presented that considers whether the future deployment of utility-scale PV (UPV) systems in the USA will be limited by the supply of PV modules or by market demand for these systems. An analysis of global PV module manufacturing growth and the fraction of modules produced that will be available for installation in the USA gives a plausible range of cumulative capacity for the UPV segment of 50 - 170 GW in 2030 and 60 - 500 GW in 2040. A parallel analysis of the future demand for UPV systems in the USA indicates a plausible range for cumulative capacity of 80 - 230 GW in 2030 and 150 - 530 GW in 2040. The plausible ranges for supply and demand substantially overlap in both 2030 and 2040, suggesting that neither supply nor demand is more likely to limit PV deployment in the USA. Consequently, mechanisms for enabling growth in both supply and demand can benefit efforts intended to increase the deployment of PV in the USA.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

SPHERICAL HARMONIC ANALYSES OF INTENSITY MAPPING POWER SPECTRA

Intensity mapping is a promising technique for surveying the large-scale structure of our universe from z = 0 to z ∼ 150, using the brightness temperature field of spectral lines to directly observe previously unexplored portions of our cosmic timeline. Examples of targeted lines include the 21 cm hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen, rotational lines of carbon monoxide, and fine-structure lines of singly ionized carbon. Recent efforts have focused on detections of the power spectrum of spatial fluctuations, but have been hindered by systematics such as foreground contamination. This has motivated the decomposition of data into Fourier modes perpendicular and parallel to the line of sight, which has been shown to be a particularly powerful way to diagnose systematics. However, such a method is well-defined only in the limit of a narrow-field, flat-sky approximation. This limits the sensitivity of intensity mapping experiments, as it means that wide surveys must be separately analyzed as a patchwork of smaller fields. In this paper, we develop a framework for analyzing intensity mapping data in a spherical Fourier–Bessel basis, which incorporates curved sky effects without difficulty. We use our framework to generalize a number of techniques in intensity mapping data analysis from the flat sky to the curved sky. These include visibility-based estimators for the power spectrum, treatments of interloper lines, and the “foreground wedge” signature of spectrally smooth foregrounds.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗