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Results for “Innovation diffusion”

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 OSTI2019

Exploring Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Urban Mobility Strategies: An Initial Framework to Curate Data/Models, Measure Performance, and Diffuse Innovation: Preprint

Many cities across the United States seek to understand the maturity of data and models that are available to help manage challenges, opportunities, and uncertainties associated with the shifts in technologies, human behaviors and sustainable urban mobility strategies. One key question identified for smart city action planning includes how to best shape continuous improvements for urban populations at the intersection of mobility, energy, and quality of life? With the emerging megatrends of urbanization (more than 70% of world population in cities by 2050), on-demand shared mobility, vehicle electrification, and automated vehicles, initial 'urban science' studies to date have demonstrated the potential and need for maturing the related data and model ecosystems and on-going performance measurement across multiple urban system goals: e.g., from more mobility, clean and efficient energy use, accessibility and safety to less air pollution, traffic, and resource-intensive urban sprawl. To build on emerging literature and understand city responses to disruptive change, this initial study engages researchers and practitioners across four smart city finalists (Columbus, Denver, Austin and Portland) that competed in the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Smart City Challenge. The initial results emphasize the need for a suite of datasets and diverse analytical approaches that support U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) relevant research with cities. Considering desirable energy and mobility outcomes as a first step to advancing smart city solutions strategies, we systematically review approaches of and shortcomings in four U.S. cities, and suggest improvements in three areas: measurement, modeling effectiveness of new mobility technologies, and data-driven governance.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2020

The role of geography in the complex diffusion of innovations

The urban–rural divide is increasing in modern societies calling for geographical extensions of social influence modelling. Improved understanding of innovation diffusion across locations and through social connections can provide us with new insights into the spread of information, technological progress and economic development. In this work, we analyze the spatial adoption dynamics of iWiW, an Online Social Network (OSN) in Hungary and uncover empirical features about the spatial adoption in social networks. During its entire life cycle from 2002 to 2012, iWiW reached up to 300 million friendship ties of 3 million users. We find that the number of adopters as a function of town population follows a scaling law that reveals a strongly concentrated early adoption in large towns and a less concentrated late adoption. We also discover a strengthening distance decay of spread over the life-cycle indicating high fraction of distant diffusion in early stages but the dominance of local diffusion in late stages. The spreading process is modelled within the Bass diffusion framework that enables us to compare the differential equation version with an agent-based version of the model run on the empirical network. Although both model versions can capture the macro trend of adoption, they have limited capacity to describe the observed trends of urban scaling and distance decay. We find, however that incorporating adoption thresholds, defined by the fraction of social connections that adopt a technology before the individual adopts, improves the network model fit to the urban scaling of early adopters. Controlling for the threshold distribution enables us to eliminate the bias induced by local network structure on predicting local adoption peaks. Finally, we show that geographical features such as distance from the innovation origin and town size influence prediction of adoption peak at local scales in all model specifications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

Diffusion of Innovations: Interplay of Social, Economic, Technological, and Policy Drivers in the Solar Industry. Summary of UT Austin Student Capstone Research Projects

The University of Texas at Austin’s Policy Research Project (PRP), a nine-month (two semesters) capstone, is a keystone of the core curriculum at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. In PRPs, small groups of students, under the mentorship of a faculty director, take on real-world problems that require special knowledge and skill sets. PRPs expose students to challenges in formulating and executing research, and in communicating academic research and related complex data to broader stakeholder communities and decision makers. The PRP structure is an innovative and effective approach for integrating research within the teaching and training of graduate students who are preparing themselves to address important real-world problems at the intersection of society, economics, technology, and policy. The project summaries below describe seven papers developed during September 2017 – May 2018 as part of a PRP on “Diffusion of Innovations: Interplay of Social, Economic, Technological, and Policy Drivers in the Solar Industry.” Twenty graduate students, drawn from the LBJ School’s Masters in Public Affairs and Masters in Global Policy Studies programs and the Jackson School Geoscience’s Energy and Earth Resources program, participated in this PRP. Dr. Varun Rai, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the LBJ School, directed the PRP, with support from his research team including: Dr. Ariane Beck, Dr. Ashok Sekar, D. Cale Reeves, and Erik Funkhouser. Clients for the project included the U.S. Department of Energy (Casey Canfield), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Ben Hoen, Galen Barbose Joachim Seel, Naïm Darghouth, Ryan Wiser), and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Benjamin Sigrin, Eric O’Shaughnessy). The seven projects separately addressed one of the following topics: (1) low- and middle-income PV adoption, (2) modeling economic and information intervention design, (3) evaluation of DOE’s Solar in Your Community Challenge, (4) property value impacts near large-scale solar facilities, (5) solar market maturity and evolution of business models, (6) social media data for predicting PV adoption, and (7) individual-level variation in adoption of innovations. Many of the papers relied on data collected and curated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including data embedded within the annual Tracking the Sun and Utility-Scale Solar reports. Each of the seven teams in the PRP prepared a research paper. The PRP culminated with a full-day conference at UT Austin in May 2018 to present findings from the seven projects in this PRP to a broad audience of about 75 experts from academia, national labs, industry, and government from across the country.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2019

Development of Innovative Gas Diffusion Layers for Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cells: Final Technical Report

This phase 1 program accomplished its primary goal of reducing the mass transport resistance (MTR) within the gas diffusion layer (GDL). The improvement in MTR was achieved by (1) the reduction of carbonaceous binder content, (2) reduced penetration of the microporous layer (MPL) into the substrate, and (3) a controlled size and frequency of micro-cracks within the MPL. Of these factors, (1) the amount of carbonaceous binder within the GDL substrate showed the greatest potential for a reduction of MTR and should be the focus for future development, preferably in concert with a commercial partner to ensure the material can meet the market requirements.

microporous layer (MPL)↗
DOE OSTI2020

Leveraging inter-firm influence in the diffusion of energy efficiency technologies: An agent-based model

Energy efficiency technologies (EETs) are crucial for saving energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. However, the diffusion of EETs in small and medium-sized enterprises is rather slow. Literature shows the interactions between innovation adopters and potential adopters have significant impacts on innovation diffusion. Enterprises lack the motivation to share information, and EETs usually lack observability, which suppress the inter-firm influence. Thus, an information platform, together with proper policies encouraging or forcing enterprises to disclose EET-related information, should help harness inter-firm influence to accelerate EETs' diffusion. To explore whether and how such an information platform affects EETs' diffusion in small and medium-sized enterprises, this report builds an agent-based model to mimic EET diffusion processes. Based on a series of controlled numerical experiments, some counter-intuitive phenomena are discovered and explained. The results show that the information platform is a double-edged sword that notably accelerates EETs' diffusion by approximately 47% but may also boost negative information to diffuse even faster and delay massive adoption of EETs. Increasing network density and the intensity of inter-firm influence are effective to speed EET diffusion, but their impacts diminish drastically after reaching some critical values (0.05 and 0.15 respectively) and eventually harm the stability of the system. Ultimately, the findings implicate that EET suppliers should carefully launch their promising but immature products; policies that can reduce the perceived risk by enterprises and the effort to maintain an informative rather than judgmental information platform can prominently mitigate the negative side effects brought by high fluidity of information.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Multidisciplinary Design of an Innovative Natural Draft, Forced Diffusion Cookstove for Woody and Herbaceous Biomass Fuels in East Africa

The goal of the project was to develop a commercially viable, natural draft cookstove that exceeds ISO tier 4 criteria while meeting the needs of rural and urban cooks in East Africa. The cookstove should be market ready that meets the manufacturing cost and usability expectations of the final users, including durability, safety, comfort, aspirational value and compatibility with local fuels, foods, and customs. The cleaner burning cookstove product was designed to replace open fires and inefficient stoves so that it can enhance indoor air quality, personal health, livelihoods, and the environment. The stove was developed using integrated and multidisciplinary design approach that included field based user research and focus groups, empirically verified computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer modeling, lab and field based emission and efficiency measurements, design for manufacturability, as well as in-home user product evaluations.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2021

Incentivizing Adoption of Software Quality Practices

Although many software teams across the laboratories comply with yearly software quality engineering (SQE) assessments, the practice of introducing quality into each phase of the software lifecycle, or the team processes, may vary substantially. Even with the support of a quality engineer, many teams struggle to adapt and right-size software engineering best practices in quality to fit their context, and these activities aren’t framed in a way that motivates teams to take action. In short, software quality is often a “check the box for compliance” activity instead of a cultural practice that both values software quality and knows how to achieve it. In this report, we present the results of our 6600 VISTA Innovation Tournament project, "Incentivizing and Motivating High Confidence and Research Software Teams to Adopt the Practice of Quality." We present our findings and roadmap for future work based on 1) a rapid review of relevant literature, 2) lessons learned from an internal design thinking workshop, and 3) an external Collegeville 2021 workshop. These activities provided an opportunity for team ideation and community engagement/feedback. Based on our findings, we believe a coordinated effort (e.g. strategic communication campaign) aimed at diffusing the innovation of the practice of quality across Sandia National Laboratories could over time effect meaningful organizational change. As such, our roadmap addresses strategies for motivating and incentivizing individuals ranging from early career to seasoned software developers/scientists.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Passive and active peer effects in the spatial diffusion of residential solar panels: A case study of the Las Vegas Valley

This research analyzes the role of peer influences on the adoption of residential rooftop solar photovoltaic panels (PV) within the context of the Diffusion of Innovation Theory. PV literature indicates that adopters are influenced by word of mouth (WOM) information exchange with peers, i.e., active peer effects, while other studies suggest that living near households with visible rooftop PV installations influences adoption, i.e., passive peer effects. We bridge the gap in this literature by conducting a mixed methods analysis. We develop and administer a survey to Las Vegas Valley (LVV) residents to identify current and potential PV adopters' perceptions of peer-effects and consumer intention variables. We conduct a spatial analysis of Google's Project Sunroof data to identify LVV neighborhoods in the later stages of the PV diffusion process, i.e., those with the highest PV adoption rates. Key results show that current PV adopters living in early diffusion areas report significantly higher active and passive peer effects compared to adopters in later diffusion areas. Potential adopters in later diffusion areas report higher passive peer effects than those in early diffusion areas. Overall, because LVV has a low PV adoption rate (<3%), short term strategies aimed at increasing PV adoption should emphasize WOM active peer effects. Here, we caution against long-term green marketing strategies focusing solely on peer-effects as the PV market matures.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Data-driven agent-based modeling, with application to rooftop solar adoption

Agent-based modeling is commonly used for studying complex system properties emergent from interactions among many agents. We present a novel data-driven agent-based modeling framework applied to forecasting individual and aggregate residential rooftop solar adoption in San Diego county. Our first step is to learn a model of individual agent behavior from combined data of individual adoption characteristics and property assessment. We then construct an agent-based simulation with the learned model embedded in artificial agents, and proceed to validate it using a holdout sequence of collective adoption decisions. We demonstrate that the resulting agent-based model successfully forecasts solar adoption trends and provides a meaningful quantification of uncertainty about its predictions. We utilize our model to optimize two classes of policies aimed at spurring solar adoption: one that subsidizes the cost of adoption, and another that gives away free systems to low-income house- holds. We find that the optimal policies derived for the latter class are significantly more efficacious, whereas the policies similar to the current California Solar Initiative incentive scheme appear to have a limited impact on overall adoption trends.

Agent-based modeling↗
DOE OSTI2020

A First Investigation of Agriculture Sector Perspectives on the Opportunities and Barriers for Agrivoltaics

Agrivoltaic systems are a strategic and innovative approach to combine solar photovoltaic (PV)-based renewable energy generation with agricultural production. Recognizing the fundamental importance of farmer adoption in the successful diffusion of the agrivoltaic innovation, this study investigates agriculture sector experts’ perceptions on the opportunities and barriers to dual land-use systems. Using in-depth, semistructured interviews, this study conducts a first study to identify challenges to farmer adoption of agrivoltaics and address them by responding to societal concerns. Results indicate that participants see potential benefits for themselves in combined solar and agriculture technology. The identified barriers to adoption of agrivoltaics, however, include: (i) desired certainty of long-term land productivity, (ii) market potential, (iii) just compensation and (iv) a need for predesigned system flexibility to accommodate different scales, types of operations, and changing farming practices. The identified concerns in this study can be used to refine the technology to increase adoption among farmers and to translate the potential of agrivoltaics to address the competition for land between solar PV and agriculture into changes in solar siting, farming practice, and land-use decision-making.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

High-Throughput Study of Diffusion and Phase Transformation Kinetics of Magnesium-Based Systems for Automotive Cast Magnesium Alloys

The objective of the proposed study is to establish a scientific foundation on kinetic modeling of diffusion, phase precipitation, and casting/solidification, in order to accelerate the design and optimization of cast magnesium (Mg) alloys for weight reduction of U.S. automotive fleet. The team has performed the following tasks: 1) study diffusion kinetics of various Mg-containing binary systems using high-throughput diffusion multiples to establish reliable diffusivity and mobility databases for the Mg-aluminum (Al)-zinc (Zn)-tin (Sn)-calcium (Ca)-strontium (Sr)-manganese (Mn) systems; 2) study the precipitation kinetics (nucleation, growth and coarsening) using both innovative dual-anneal diffusion multiples and cast model alloys to provide large amounts of kinetic data (including interfacial energy) and microstructure atlases to enable implementation of the Kampmann-Wagner numerical model to simulate phase transformation kinetics of non-spherical/non-cuboidal precipitates in Mg alloys; 3) implement a micromodel to take into account back diffusion in the solid phase in order to predict microstructure and microsegregation in multicomponent Mg alloys during dendritic solidification especially under high pressure die-casting (HPDC) conditions; and, 4) widely disseminate the data, knowledge and information using the Materials Genome Initiative infrastructure (http://www.mgidata.org) as well as publications and digital data sharing to enable researchers to identify new pathways/routes to better cast Mg alloys.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2023

Evaluation of Tungsten—Steel Solid-State Bonding: Options and the Role of CALPHAD to Screen Diffusion Bonding Interlayers

Critical aspects of innovative design in engineering disciplines like infrastructure, transportation, and medical applications require the joining of dissimilar materials. This study investigates the literature on solid-state bonding techniques, with a particular focus on diffusion bonding, as an effective method for establishing engineering bonds. Welding and brazing, while widely used, may pose challenges when joining materials with large differences in melting temperature and can lead to mechanical property degradation. In contrast, diffusion bonding offers a lower temperature process that relies on solid-state interactions to develop bond strength. The joining of tungsten and steel, especially for fusion reactors, presents a unique challenge due to the significant disparity in melting temperatures and the propensity to form brittle intermetallics. Here, diffusion characteristics of tungsten–steel interfaces are examined and the influence of bonding parameters on mechanical properties are investigated. Additionally, CALPHAD modeling is employed to explore joining parameters, thermal stability, and diffusion kinetics. The insights from this research can be extended to join numerous dissimilar materials for specific applications such as aerospace, automobile industry, power plants, etc., enabling advanced and robust design with high efficiency.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2020

An agent-based approach to study the diffusion rate and the effect of policies on joint placement of photovoltaic panels and green roof under climate change uncertainty

As two of the highest trending green technologies, photovoltaic panels and green roofs are proven to be effective practices for energy generation and energy saving. The achievable impact from the widespread installation of such technologies is, however, not clearly established. This is mainly because the degree of this impact highly depends on the inherently uncertain environmental and climate factors, as well as the unknown adoption rates of these technologies, which in turn depend on different characteristics of decision makers and interactions among them. To that end, this study aims to investigate the diffusion rate of these green technologies under uncertainties caused by climate change, characteristics of adopters, and their interactions. An integrated framework is developed to capture the interplay between financial and attitudinal aspects, as well as the uncertainties due to both the stochastic nature of system parameters and the interactions among agents involving human beings. Specifically, this framework consists of a integer programming model to optimize the green roof and/or photovoltaic panel installation settings for a given building under climate change uncertainty, and an agent-based model to factor in the role of human behavior and interactions. A case study for the city of Knoxville, TN, is presented to evaluate the effects of different policies on the diffusion rate of the green technologies of interest. The results show that the affordability of green technologies and public awareness are the key drivers of the adoption of these technologies, which highlight the important role of the decision makers in impacting the diffusion rate.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Final Report: Towards an Emergent Model of Technology Adoption for Accelerating the Diffusion of Residential Solar PV

This project sought to enable electric utilities in Texas to accelerate diffusion of residential solar photovoltaic (PV) by systematically identifying and targeting existing barriers to PV adoption. A core goal of the project was to develop an integrated research framework that combines survey research, econometric modeling, financial modeling, and implementation and evaluation of pilot projects to study the PV diffusion system. This project considered PV diffusion as an emergent system, with attention to the interactions between the constituent parts of the PV socio-technical system including: economics of individual decision-making; peer and social influences; behavioral responses; and information and transaction costs. We also conducted two pilot projects, which have yielded new insights into behavioral and informational aspects of PV adoption. Finally, this project has produced robust and generalizable results that will provide deeper insights into the technology-diffusion process that will be applicable for the design of utility programs for other technologies such as home-energy management systems and plug-in electric vehicles. When we started this project in 2013 there was little systematic research on characterizing the decision-making process of households interested in adopting PV. This project was designed to fill that research gap by analyzing the PV adoption process from the consumers' decision-making perspective and with the objective to systematically identifying and addressing the barriers that consumers face in the adoption of PV. The two key components of that decision-making process are consumers' evaluation of: (i) uncertainties and non-monetary costs associated with the technology and (ii) the direct monetary cost-benefit. This project used an integrated approach to study both the non-monetary and the monetary components of the consumer decision-making process.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗