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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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DOE OSTI2022

User-Focused Tools to Enhance IT/OT Cyber Resilience within the Power Grid

The power grid is undergoing several changes that are increasing its complexity as nexuses between electric-gas, transmission-distribution, and energy-communications continue to become increasingly critical. This system is heavily dependent on communication infrastructure and controls, and it relies on humans in operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) roles to manage the increasing breadth, depth, and speed of data. Many technical challenges have presented themselves and will need to be addressed to provide reliable grid operations. With increased reliance on distributed controls and communication infrastructure, cybersecurity becomes an inherent requirement. When considering current cyber-physical security solutions for the power grid, one can notice a clear divide between information technology and operation technology networks. However, in real-life applications, these networks are interdependent. This work presents results of interviews with key utility cybersecurity personnel, analyzes the results, and makes recommendations towards solution of existing technical and operational challenges realized. Existing workflows are presented, wireframe interviews are discussed, and tool requirements are described. The existence of easy-to-implement solutions, based on existing energy management systems, highlight the potential for real-life applications.

cybersecurity, resilience, user-centered design, p↗

DOE OSTI2022

Engineering A Low-Cost Kelp Aquaculture System for Community-Scale Seaweed Farming at Nearshore Exposed Sites via User-Focused Design Process

For over 50 years, government fishery agencies have recognized the need to transition excess fishing capacity in coastal waters to aquaculture. For the most part, investment strategies to move wild capture and harvest efforts into aquaculture have failed since the technology and capital expense for entry, such as large fish pens, was not conducive for acceptance. In contrast, low trophic level aquaculture of shellfish and seaweeds is suitable as an addition to the livelihoods of seasonal fishing communities and to those displaced by fishery closures, especially if vessels and gear can be designed around existing fishing infrastructures, thus allowing fishers to maintain engagement with their primary fishery, while augmenting income via aquaculture. In this study, an inexpensive, lightweight, and highly mobile gear for kelp seaweed farming was developed and tested over a 3-year period in southern Maine, USA. The system was different from existing kelp farming operations used in nearshore waters that use low-scope mooring lines, and heavy, deadweight anchors. Instead, a highly mobile, easy to deploy system using lightweight gear was designed for exposed conditions. The entire system fit into fish tote boxes and was loadable onto a standard pickup truck. The seaweed system had small but efficient horizontal drag embedment anchors connected to a chain catenary and pretensioned with simple subsurface flotation. The system was able to be deployed and removed in less than 4 h by a crew of three using a 10 m vessel and produced a harvest of 12.7 kg/m over an 8-month fall-winter growth period. The target group for this seaweed research and development effort were coastal fishing communities who move seasonally into non-fishing occupations in service industries, such as construction, retail, etc. An economic assessment suggests farmers would realize an 8% return on investment after3 years and $13.50/h greater income as compared to a non-farming off season job at minimum wage. This low-cost seaweed farming system for fall-winter operations fits well into a “livelihood” strategy for fishing families who must work multiple jobs in the offseason when their main fishery is unavailable.

St-Gelais, Adam T.↗

DOE OSTI2019

DiagSoftfailure: Automated Soft-Failure Diagnostic Tool Using Machine Learning for Network Users

Network performance problems resulting in slow data communication speed become a significant obstacle for a satisfactory user experience. Currently, there is a lack of an automated diagnostic tool that can help network users to find the complicated network problems that degrade network performance. To fill up this gap, InfoBeyond proposes DiagSoftfailure to provide an automated diagnosis tool. DiagSoftfailure is a machine learning-based approach to infer the location and root cause of network failures that result in performance degradation. As a user-focused tool, it allows a network user to request a diagnosis. DiagSoftfailure can automatically collect the raw packet traces in the network. Base on the network signature, automated classifiers trained by combining supervised and semi-supervised machine learning is used to identify both known and unknown soft-failures in the network. A report allows novice and expert users to understand network problems for troubleshooting. In this document, we describe the DiagSoftfailure diagnosis algorithms and our experiments in a live high-speed network. DiagSoftfailure achieves 96.39% accuracy for known soft-failure diagnosis and 99.82% for unknown soft-failure diagnosis, respectively. Such results demonstrate that DiagSoftfailure is a viable technology. InfoBeyond would develop it as a marketable product that can be used by universities, Labs, DOE, government agencies, organizations, enterprises, and scientific communities to improve their network diagnosis capabilities.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2019

Improvements to Bison Validation Base for LWR Fuel

The Bison fuel performance code is being developed by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to analyze a wide range of fuel forms and operating conditions with the flexibility to conduct simulations in 1D through 3D geometries. Bison plays an important role in the development of advanced fuel with improved accident tolerance for existing light water reactors (LWRs), the improved understanding of mechanisms in fuel designs in a wider range of operating conditions, and the facilitation of future development of fuel for advanced reactor designs. Additionally, industry interest in advanced fuels has also driven Bison development for advanced fuels in the last few years. All of these factors combine to create a potential increase of new Bison users. These new users will potentially be interested in the Bison LWR validation base for examples of Bison's capabilities and how to use Bison. Current users also rely on the Bison validation base as a demonstration of the best practices settings and material behavioral models. Bison, both through direct updates to the Bison source code and to the nearly daily changes and improvements in the underlying MOOSE framework source code, undergoes nearly continuous changes. It is necessary that these source code changes are reflected with updated input files in the Bison validation base. Periodic updates of the validation case input files should also be accompanied by a review and revision of the validation case documentation on which our users rely. Therefore our efforts under this milestone were guided by two objectives: (1) Update the Bison LWR validation input files to use current Bison simulation settings, and (2) Enhance the ease-of-use for Bison through improved documentation These objectives build on the goals identified FY18 CASL milestone reports. During FY18 we addressed issues with the robustness of Bison and identified a need to migrate the assessment suite to the more reliable tensor mechanics module system and set a goal of standardizing the Bison input files. The FY18 CASL milestone report on updates to the Bison documentation system listed continued development of user-focused guides and examples along with revisions to the validation case documentation as future development goals. During FY19 we have separated these two objectives into four different focus areas for our work on this milestone. Our first two focus areas target the existing Bison validation suite: update the existing LWR validation cases and the accompanying documentation. The second two focus areas center on adding new capabilities: a new Bison LWR validation case and expansion of user support documentation. In the following report each of these four focus areas are discussed as a separate section. We conclude the report with a summary of potential future work to build on the efforts of this year.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2023

STRATOS: A cyber-energy SAAS platform to manage real-time experiment configuration and deployment [SWR-23-16]

STRATOS is a novel management SAAS platform for achieving multi-environment, multi-tenant real-time cyber-energy experimentation. The platform empowers users to configure a wide variety of experiment environments by automating the initialization process and providing a framework for building system configurations. During run-time the platform ensures resources are allocated appropriately and the environment remains stable until the required cyber-energy events have occurred. This capability to manage this complex process in a single user-focused application significantly reduces difficulty and setup time for performing high-impact cyber-energy research.

Van Natta, Joshua↗