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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 163 records · Page 9

Revisiting a minimally destructive analytic approach for determining electrochemical kinetic parameters: Measuring aluminum corrosion across a wide pH range based on the Butler-Volmer equation

Here, this study revisits the three-point sampling of the simplified Butler-Volmer equation to address the limitations of strong potentiodynamic polarization, which can introduce irreversible damage and uncertainty in corrosion analysis. The method extracts electrochemical kinetic parameters while minimizing polarization effects, evaluates noise sensitivity relative to overpotential, and accounts for errors from signal noise, OCP drift, ohmic resistance, and mass-transfer constraints. Verified against the Tafel extrapolation method for aluminum corrosion across a wide pH range, this low-polarization approach enables accurate evaluations with specific error estimates, offering a robust alternative to linear polarization resistance methods that assume constant Tafel slopes.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

An open control sequence specification to scale building demand flexibility via analytics software

For over two decades, researchers and practitioners have showcased the ability of large commercial buildings to provide grid services by shedding or shifting load. Various utility demand response (DR) and virtual power plant (VPP) programs throughout the United States are presently utilizing these demand-side resources. However, growth of these programs have been limited, in part due to the high cost necessary to integrate the DR control strategies into the building automation system (BAS). Implementing these strategies involves adjusting control sequences, necessitating dozens of hours of customized programming per building, limiting their adoption to large organizations and progressive owners. Recent efforts by researchers and industry have demonstrated the capability of energy management and information systems (EMIS), originally designed for fault detection and diagnostics, to interface with existing BAS and perform supervisory control to optimize building operations. While these approaches are quickly being adopted by industry, demand flexibility (DF) control strategies remain limited in product offerings. One of the challenges is the lack of documented best-practice DF sequences, despite the rich literature on field implementations. This paper develops a new open-specification for a zone-based temperature adjustment shed strategy for commercial building HVAC systems, describing the specification’s implementation in two EMIS tools in both experimental and field settings. Both implementations successfully reduced electric load by at least 40% on average during the called event, while maintaining temperature limits. This study’s detailed process from specification to deployment shows the potential for scalability as well as highlights challenges related to integration with heterogeneous BAS products.

Granderson, Jessica↗

AI-Based Analytics and Energy Modeling Framework for Characterizing Urban Energy Systems

Developing location-specific district energy models is essential for understanding energy patterns and supporting efficient management and planning decisions. However, accurately characterizing these models remains challenging due to gaps in building characteristics and labor-intensive traditional modeling workflows. To address these challenges, we develop an AI-based framework that integrates top-down and bottom-up building energy data to automate urban energy model characterization. The framework trains multimodal deep learning models using heterogeneous ResStockTM datasets to infer missing building characteristics from varying levels of known information and generate simulation-ready inputs for district-scale energy modeling. It also employs a conditioning-based injection approach to generate ”what-if” scenarios, enabling users to explore retrofit, efficiency, and technology-upgrade pathways. Integrated within URBANoptTM, a bottom-up district energy modeling platform for simulating co-located buildings, the framework infers detailed building-level inputs required for bottom-up simulations. Both localized and generalized AI models are developed to learn relationships across categorical, numerical, and time-series data, enabling reconstruction of missing attributes and generation of targeted upgrade scenarios. We demonstrate this methodology on a residential neighborhood in Baltimore, MD, assessing internal consistency against ResStock reference data and URBANopt simulation, and comparing selected attributes against real-world building characteristics. Results show strong overall predictive accuracy in data completion and scenario generation, with localized and generalized models offering complementary trade-offs between precision and scalability. Overall, our automated framework streamlines energy modeling and provides a reliable framework for urban building energy characterization.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

A systematic analytical framework for multi-source municipal solid waste characterization for energy recovery

Advancing municipal solid waste (MSW) management from disposal-oriented practices toward circular, value-driven systems requires standardized methodologies capable of identifying material composition and resource recoverable potential at the point of generation. Despite extensive research, MSW characterization remains fragmented due to inconsistences in sampling methodologies, waste sorting categories, and temporal coverage across previous studies which limit cross-site comparability, reproducibility, and constrain the reliable evaluation of potential resource recovery pathways. This lack of consistency has hindered the development of a unified framework for MSW characterization and resource assessment. This study introduces a standardized, field-validated protocol for MSW sampling and composition analysis that ensures consistent, traceable data across diverse waste sources. The protocol integrates randomized spatial sampling, systematic material sorting, and controlled subsampling for multi-site and multi-season field campaigns. Validation included MSW collection from residential, grocery, restaurant, and school MSW streams across five U.S. states, including Maryland, Idaho, Virginia, Ohio, and Mississippi, to demonstrate the protocol’s ability to identify source-based composition patterns relevant to resource recovery applications. Grocery and restaurant streams were dominated by food waste and high-moisture organics, while school waste contained higher paper content and residential waste showed greater heterogeneity. Aggregation into energy-relevant fractions highlighted practical recovery pathways via anaerobic digestion or gasification, supporting data-driven planning, policy, and circular economy strategies for sustainable waste management across waste sources.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

An analytic theory for the degree of Arctic Amplification

Arctic Amplification (AA), the amplified surface warming in the Arctic relative to the global mean, is a robust and impactful feature of climate change. While the basic physical picture of AA has been depicted, a clear understanding of how the degree of AA is determined has not been established. Here, by deciphering the intricate role of atmospheric heat transport (AHT), we build a two-box energy-balance model of AA and derive that the degree of AA is a simple nonlinear function of the Arctic and global feedbacks, the meridional heterogeneity in radiative forcing, and the partial sensitivities of AHT to global mean warming and meridional warming gradient. The formula captures the varying degree of AA in individual climate models and attributes the variation to specific physical factors. It further conveys a concise picture of how essential physics mutually determine the degree of AA and limit the range within 1.5~3.5. Our results articulate AHT as both forcing and feedback to AA, highlighting its partial sensitivities instead of total change as the key parameters for understanding AA. We also find that the effect of lapse rate feedback, a widely-recognized major contributor to AA, is fully offset by the effect of water vapor feedback.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

An analytical model of “Electron-Only” magnetic reconnection rates

Abstract “Electron-only” reconnection, which is both uncoupled from the surrounding ions and much faster than standard reconnection, is arguably ubiquitous in turbulence. One critical step to understanding the rate in this novel regime is to model the outflow speed that limits the transport of the magnetic flux, which is super ion Alfvénic but significantly lower than the electron Alfvén speed based on the asymptotic reconnecting field. Here we develop a simple model to determine this limiting speed by taking into account the multiscale nature of reconnection, the Hall-mediated electron outflow speed, and the pressure buildup within the small system. The predicted scalings of rates and various key quantities compare well with fully kinetic simulations and can be useful for interpreting the observations of NASA’s Magnetospheric-Multiscale (MMS) mission and other ongoing missions.

Physics↗

Analytical models for the enhancement of fusion reactivity by turbulence

The reactivity of fusion plasma depends not only on its local density and temperature but also, through a recently identified kinetic effect, on the relative velocities of nearby fluid elements. Turbulence on fine spatial scales, therefore, enhances fusion reactivity. The enhancement is quantified here for general subsonic turbulent flows. Leveraging this effect in the design of inertial confinement fusion experiments could enable substantial energy savings.

Fluid dynamics↗