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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 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Energy storage emerging: A perspective from the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research

Energy storage is an integral part of modern society. A contemporary example is the lithium (Li)-ion battery, which enabled the launch of the personal electronics revolution in 1991 and the first commercial electric vehicles in 2010. Most recently, Li-ion batteries have expanded into the electricity grid to firm variable renewable generation, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of transmission and distribution. Important applications continue to emerge including decarbonization of heavy-duty vehicles, rail, maritime shipping, and aviation and the growth of renewable electricity and storage on the grid. This perspective compares energy storage needs and priorities in 2010 with those now and those emerging over the next few decades. The diversity of demands for energy storage requires a diversity of purpose-built batteries designed to meet disparate applications. Advances in the frontier of battery research to achieve transformative performance spanning energy and power density, capacity, charge/discharge times, cost, lifetime, and safety are highlighted, along with strategic research refinements made by the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) and the broader community to accommodate the changing storage needs and priorities. Innovative experimental tools with higher spatial and temporal resolution, in situ and operando characterization, first-principles simulation, high throughput computation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence work collectively to reveal the origins of the electrochemical phenomena that enable new means of energy storage. This knowledge allows a constructionist approach to materials, chemistries, and architectures, where each atom or molecule plays a prescribed role in realizing batteries with unique performance profiles suitable for emergent demands.

Trahey, Lynn↗
DOE OSTI2018

Nurturing transformative U.S. energy research: Two guiding principles [Nurturing U.S. energy research: Two guiding principles]

Energy research is critical to continuing advances in human productivity and welfare. In this Commentary, we raise for debate and discussion what in our view is a growing mis-control and mis-protection of U.S. energy research. This flawed approach originates in natural human tendencies exacerbated by an historical misunderstanding of research and development, science and technology, and the relationships between them. We outline the origin of the mis-control and mis-protection, and propose two guiding principles to mitigate them and instead nurture research: (i) focus on people, not projects; and (ii) culturally insulate research from development, but not science from technology. As a result, our hope is to introduce these principles into the discourse now, so they can help guide policy changes in U.S. energy research and development that are currently being driven by powerful geopolitical winds.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2016

US-China Clean Energy Research Center on Building Energy Efficiency: Materials that Improve the Cost-Effectiveness of Air Barrier Systems

The US–China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC) was launched in 2009 by US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Chinese Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang, and Chinese National Energy Agency Administrator Zhang Guobao. This 5-year collaboration emerged from the fact that the United States and China are the world’s largest energy producers, energy consumers, and greenhouse gas emitters, and that their joint effort could have significant positive repercussions worldwide. CERC’s main goal is to develop and deploy clean energy technologies that will help both countries meet energy and climate challenges. Three consortia were established to address the most pressing energy-related research areas: Advanced Coal Technology, Clean Vehicles, and Building Energy Efficiency (BEE). The project discussed in this report was part of the CERC-BEE consortia; its objective was to lower energy use in buildings by developing and evaluating technologies that improve the cost-effectiveness of air barrier systems for building envelopes.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2016

Building envelope advancement under the US-China Clean Energy Research Center for building energy efficiency

The US–China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC) was launched in 2009 by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Chinese Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang, and Chinese National Energy Agency Administrator Zhang Guobao. 1 This five-year collaboration emerged from the fact that the U nited States and China are the world’s largest energy producers, energy consumers , and greenhouse gas emitters 2 (Figure 1) , and that their joint effort could have positive repercussions worldwide. CERC’s main goal is to develop and deploy clean energy technologies that will help both countries meet energy and climate challenges. Three consortia were established to address the most pressing energy-related research areas: Advanced Coal Technology, Clean Vehicles, and Building Energy Efficiency (BEE).

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2021

U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center Building Energy Efficiency (CERC-BEE) Open-Source Retrofit Targeting Tool (CRADA FP00007338 Final Report)

To increase the cost-saving energy and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions reductions in buildings and portfolios at the scale and speed necessary to limit climate change, researchers at LBNL and Johnson Controls (JCI) developed the Building Efficiency Targeting Tool for Energy Retrofits (BETTER). BETTER is a software tool that consists of three components: (1) the BETTER analytical engine source code (which was developed with intellectual property provided by JCI under CRADA FP00007338); (2) the BETTER web application, developed by LBNL and McQuillen Interactive Pty. Ltd; and (3) the BETTER application programming interface (API), also developed by LBNL and McQuillen Interactive Pty. Ltd. BETTER enables building and portfolio owners, managers, and service providers worldwide to quickly, easily identify cost-saving energy efficiency retrofits in existing buildings and portfolios without expensive site visits or complex modeling. With minimal data input, the tool benchmarks a building’s electric and fossil energy usage against peers; quantifies energy, cost and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction potentials at the building and portfolio levels; and recommends energy efficiency measures to decarbonize and electrify buildings and portfolios, targeting specific energy savings levels. No other tool so comprehensively analyzes buildings and portfolios with such ease. If fully implemented, it is estimated that BETTER could help reduce emissions equivalent to planting 1.3 billion trees globally by 2030. Moreover, an additional 50-75% of embodied GHG emissions could be avoided in each case where BETTER results in a building being retrofitted instead of demolished and replaced, providing substantial additional decarbonization benefits for the buildings sector. BETTER has garnered multiple awards and avid interest from investors. In 2020, it earned a R&D 100 Award for innovation and a LBNL Director’s Award for Technology Transfer. In 2021, BETTER was named an EarthX E-Capital Summit Climate Tech Prize semi-finalist

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2016

Final Report for "Non-Accelerator Physics – Research in High Energy Physics: Dark Energy Research on DES"

One of the greatest mysteries in modern cosmology is the fact that the expansion of the universe is observed to be accelerating. This acceleration may stem from dark energy, an additional energy component of the universe, or may indicate that the theory of general relativity is incomplete on cosmological scales. The growth rate of large-scale structure in the universe and particularly the largest collapsed structures, clusters of galaxies, is highly sensitive to the underlying cosmology. Clusters will provide one of the single most precise methods of constraining dark energy with the ongoing Dark Energy Survey (DES). The accuracy of the cosmological constraints derived from DES clusters necessarily depends on having an optimized and well-calibrated algorithm for selecting clusters as well as an optical richness estimator whose mean relation and scatter compared to cluster mass are precisely known. Calibrating the galaxy cluster richness-mass relation and its scatter was the focus of the funded work. Specifically, we employ X-ray observations and optical spectroscopy with the Keck telescopes of optically-selected clusters to calibrate the relationship between optical richness (the number of galaxies in a cluster) and underlying mass. This work also probes aspects of cluster selection like the accuracy of cluster centering which are critical to weak lensing cluster studies.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Insulating Nanofluids and Solids to Upgrade our Large Aging Transformer Equipment (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy Research Final Report)

This project developed a highly promising, minimally invasive pathway for transformers with up to double the thermal life that is achieved today. Thermal life is important because it is occasionally necessary to overload transformers in service and this overload raises the internal temperature, accelerating aging2. A seminal initial finding in the research was that a likely achievable increase in the thermal conductivity of the transformer paper could double the thermal life. Oil-impregnated paper is used to wrap the electrical conductors in a transformer to provide a good balance of electrical insulation and thermal conductivity. The novel approach to increase the thermal conductivity was to add micrometer boron nitride particles to the paper during manufacturing. This is encouraging because it provides benefits with minimal impact on the manufacturing processes of the paper or of a transformer.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2020

Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between National Energy Technology Laboratory and Korea Institute of Energy Research [Abstract]

The Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) intend to collaborate under a CRADA to advance the development of oxy-combustion technology, with an emphasis on process modeling, optimization, and techno-economic analysis. This collaboration will result in the development of a full-scale process model of a commercial oxy-fueled circulating fluid bed combustion (oxy-CFBC) plant, informed from pilot-scale data and built using the Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES) process systems engineering framework. It will also generate cost comparisons of the optimized oxyCFBC process with an air-CFBC process with and without carbon capture and sequestration.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Applications of explainable artificial intelligence in renewable energy research

Researchers in renewable energy are applying deep learning (DL) to a variety of problems from diverse renewable energy domains, such as biofuels, wind, solar, power systems, buildings, vehicles, and transportation systems. Improvements in accuracy may be demonstrated using DL in laboratory settings. However, the lack of interpretability of DL models poses a practical limitation to their utility in advancing scientific knowledge and in the deployment of DL models in safety-critical energy systems. In this article, we discuss explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) as one pathway toward more interpretable DL models. We explore a brief timeline of U.S. national laboratory interest in XAI, an overview and taxonomy of methods in the field of XAI, and a selection of applications across renewable energy research domains. We conclude by highlighting pivotal areas where XAI can accelerate innovation in artificial intelligence for renewable energy research and other essential future directions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2016

U.S.– India Joint Center for Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD) Caring for the Energy Health of Healthcare Facilities

The U.S.-India Joint Center for Building Energy Research & Development (CBERD), created through the Partnership to Accelerate Clean Energy (PACE) agreement between the United States and India, is a research and development (R&D) center with over 30 institutional and industry partners from both nations. This five-year presidential initiative is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Government of India. CBERD aims to build upon a foundation of collaborative knowledge, tools, and technologies, and human capabilities that will increase development of high-performance buildings. To reach this goal, the R&D focuses on energy use reduction throughout the entire life cycle of buildings—i.e., design, construction, and operations. During the operations phase of buildings, even with best-practice energy-efficient design, actual energy use can be much higher than the design intent. Every day, much of the energy consumed by buildings serves no purpose (Roth et al. 2005). Building energy information systems (EIS) are commercially available systems that building owners and facility managers use to assess their building operations, measure, visualize, analyze, and report energy cost and consumption. Energy information systems can enable significant energy savings by tracking energy use, identifying consumption patterns, and benchmarking performance against similar buildings, thereby identifying improvement opportunities. The CBERD team has identified potential energy savings of approximately 2 quads of primary energy in the United States, while industry building energy audits in India have indicated potential energy savings of up to 30 percent in commercial buildings such as offices. Additionally, the CBERD team has identified healthcare facilities (e.g., hospitals, clinics), hotels, and offices as the three of the highest-growth sectors in India that have significant energy consumption, and that would benefit the most from implementation of EIS.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2014

Mississippi State University Sustainable Energy Research Center

The Sustainable Energy Research Center (SERC) project at Mississippi State University included all phases of biofuel production from feedstock development, to conversion to liquid transportation fuels, to engine testing of the fuels. The feedstocks work focused on non-food based crops and yielded an increased understanding of many significant Southeastern feedstocks. an emphasis was placed on energy grasses that could supplement the primary feedstock, wood. Two energy grasses, giant miscanthus and switchgrass, were developed that had increased yields per acre. Each of these grasses was patented and licensed to companies for commercialization. The fuels work focused on three different technologies that each led to a gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel product. The three technologies were microbial oil, pyrolysis oil, and syngas-to liquid-hydrocarbons

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
DOE OSTI2023

ERF: Energy Research and Forecasting

The Energy Research and Forecasting (ERF) code is a new model that simulates the mesoscale and microscale dynamics of the atmosphere using the latest high-performance computing architectures. It employs hierarchical parallelism using an MPI+X model, where X may be OpenMP on multicore CPU-only systems, or CUDA, HIP, or SYCL on GPU-accelerated systems. ERF is built on AMReX (Zhang et al., 2019, 2021), a block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) software framework that provides the underlying performance-portable software infrastructure for block-structured mesh operations. The "energy" aspect of ERF indicates that the software has been developed with renewable energy applications in mind. In addition to being a numerical weather prediction model, ERF is designed to provide a flexible computational framework for the exploration and investigation of different physics parameterizations and numerical strategies, and to characterize the flow field that impacts the ability of wind turbines to extract wind energy. The ERF development is part of a broader effort led by the US Department of Energy's Wind Energy Technologies Office.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Grand Challenges: wind energy research needs for a global energy transition

Wind energy is anticipated to play a central role in enabling a rapid transition from fossil fuels to a system based largely on renewable power. For wind power to fulfill its expected role as the backbone – providing nearly half of the electrical energy – of a renewable-based, carbon-neutral energy system, critical challenges around design, manufacture, and deployment of land and offshore technologies must be addressed. During the past 3 years, the wind research community has invested significant effort toward understanding the nature and implications of these challenges and identifying associated gaps. The outcomes of these efforts are summarized in a series of 10 articles, some under review by Wind Energy Science (WES) and others planned for submission during the coming months. This letter explains the genesis, significance, and impacts of these efforts.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2026

Coupling Noah-Multiparameterization land-surface Model with Energy Research and Forecasting Model

The Energy Research and Forecasting (ERF) model is a high-performance atmospheric model built on the AMReX adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) framework, enabling efficient simulations on heterogeneous computing platforms that combine multicore processors with hardware accelerators. To support land–atmosphere interactions within ERF’s AMR-based environment, a land-surface model must be capable of operating directly on hierarchically refined meshes. In this work, we present a methodology for coupling the Fortran-based Noah-Multiparameterization (Noah-MP) land-surface model with ERF’s C++ codebase. Rather than rewriting Noah-MP, we construct a Fortran–C interoperability layer using CodeScribe, a tool that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate the generation of interface code. CodeScribe applies structured prompting techniques to generate bindings that support efficient data exchange and function calls between ERF and Noah-MP. The coupling framework also incorporates AMR-aware data handling strategies, allowing NoahMP to operate seamlessly within ERF’s hierarchical mesh structure. This work provides a structured approach for integrating legacy Fortran models into modern C++-based modeling systems using LLM-assisted code generation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2014

USU Alternative and Unconventional Energy Research and Development

The purpose and rationale of this project has been to develop enduring research capabilities at Utah State University (USU) and the Utah State University Research Foundation (USURF) in a number of energy efficient and renewable energy areas including primarily a) algae energy systems, b) solar lighting, c) intuitive buildings, d) electric transportation, 3) unconventional energy environmental monitoring and beneficial reuse technologies (water and CO 2 ), f) wind energy profiling, and g) land use impacts. The long-term goal of this initiative has been to create high-wage jobs in Utah and a platform for sustained faculty and student engagement in energy research. The program’s objective has been to provide a balanced portfolio of R&D conducted by faculty, students, and permanent staff. This objective has been met. While some of the project’s tasks met with more success than others, as with any research project of this scope, overall the research has contributed valuable technical insight and broader understanding in key energy related areas. The algae energy systems research resulted in a highly productive workforce development enterprise as it graduated a large number of well prepared students entering alternative energy development fields and scholarship. Moreover, research in this area has demonstrated both the technological and economic limitations and tremendous potential of algae feedstock-based energy and co-products. Research conducted in electric transportation, specifically in both stationary and dynamic wireless inductive coupling charging technologies, has resulted in impactful advances. The project initiated the annual Conference on Electric Roads and Vehicles (http://www.cervconference.org/), which is growing and attracts more than 100 industry experts and scholars. As a direct result of the research, the USU/USURF spin-out startup, WAVE (Wireless Advanced Vehicle Electrification), continues work in wirelessly charged bus transit systems and is poised to quickly become a multi-million dollar company with clients around the globe. Moreover, USU students and researchers alike are now on the leading edge of the electrified transportation workforce. Finally, the legacy of this DOE investment in electric transportation is continuing at USU with the formation in progress of an industry sponsored research center built around the Electric Roadway and Vehicle (EVR) research facility and test track (http://evr.usu.edu). The research conducted in unconventional energy environmental monitoring and beneficial reuse technologies experienced broad success developing experimental and modeling tools and implementing those tools to better understand environmental impacts of industrial processes used in unconventional energy development in the Utah’s Uintah Basin. Before this project began the USU Uintah Basin branch campus had minimal capability to perform this regionally critical environmental research. This research investment enabled monitoring and modeling equipment and expertise to assess impacts of energy development to all aspects of environmental quality. Laboratory capability for environmental analysis has been developed and engaged along with field testing at multiple locations. Successful campaigns to measure greenhouse gas and hydrocarbon emissions from produced water surface impoundments and leakage from subsurface oil and gas infrastructure were executed. A computer model of meteorological conditions during winter inversion episodes was created, and commercialization efforts are underway for those models. Finally, in the past 24 months, nearly $2 million in non- DOE external funding from state, local, federal and private entities has been awarded to USU Uintah Basin to continue and add to work and capability established by this task. The preceding examples represent a few highlights resulting from the USU Alternative and Unconventional Energy Research and Development project. The following report provides further detail.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

Visioning Energy: Science Fiction Author-Energy Researcher Collaboration Workshop Recap

The Visioning Energy: Science Fiction Author-Energy Researcher Collaboration Workshop brought together speculative fiction authors and NREL researchers to examine possible scenarios of the future. The goals of the workshop were to support out-of-the-box thinking and creative future visioning for the researchers and to provide authors with insights into the latest clean energy technologies and their potential. This report outlines the proceedings of the workshop and insights from the collaborative brainstorming activity, highlighting themes and opportunities for further exploration.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
NASA NTRS1974

The National Geothermal Energy Research Program

The continuous demand for energy and the concern for shortages of conventional energy resources have spurred the nation to consider alternate energy resources, such as geothermal. Although significant growth in the one natural steam field located in the United States has occurred, a major effort is now needed if geothermal energy, in its several forms, is to contribute to the nation's energy supplies. From the early informal efforts of an Interagency Panel for Geothermal Energy Research, a 5-year Federal program has evolved whose objective is the rapid development of a commercial industry for the utilization of geothermal resources for electric power production and other products. The Federal program seeks to evaluate the realistic potential of geothermal energy, to support the necessary research and technology needed to demonstrate the economic and environmental feasibility of the several types of geothermal resources, and to address the legal and institutional problems concerned in the stimulation and regulation of this new industry.

Green, R. J.↗
NASA NTRS1982

Second program on energy research and technologies

The second major energy research and development program is described. Renewable and nonrenewable energy resources are presented which include nuclear technology and future energy sources, like fusion. The current status and outlook for future progress are given.

Source record↗