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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

Fundamental Needs for Dynamic and Interactive Thermal Storage Solutions for Buildings (2019 Workshop)

The 2019 Workshop on Fundamental Needs for Dynamic and Interactive Thermal Storage Solutions for Buildings was held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California, on November 19–20, 2019. The workshop convened 47 individuals involved in thermal, building, and materials science to present and discuss the use of thermal energy storage (TES) associated with buildings. The goals of the event were to revisit recent breakthroughs and identify future research opportunities in scientific areas.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Simulations of the fault current limiting operation of a long-length REBCO CORC ® superconducting cable cooled by helium gas

Conductor-on-round-core (CORC®) cables composed of rare-earth-barium-copper-oxide high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tapes are of great interest for power transmission applications due to their many advantages such as high power density, light weight, and low loss. Closed circulation loops of cryogenic helium gas can be used to cool HTS cables down to low temperatures to significantly improve their current-carrying capacity. Coupled circuit-electromagnetic-thermal finite element simulations implemented in the COMSOL Multiphysics package were developed, validated, and then used for simulating the fault current limiting (FCL) performance and the cooling processes of an 8-layer CORC® cable cooled with a flow of cryogenic helium gas. In the simulations, the temperature dependence of the electrical and thermal properties of all component materials is implemented for improved accuracy. To overcome computational challenges caused by the considerable difference in geometrical scales (i.e. few-µm-thick HTS layers versus 10 m-long HTS cable), the model is divided into two separate simulations. The first simulation is performed on the transverse cross-section of the cable to calculate the electric field, heating power and temperature rise in each component of a CORC® cable during FCL operation. The heating power calculated in the first simulation is transferred to the second model to simulate the cooling of a 10 m-long cable after the fault is cleared. The effect of the helium gas flow rate on the cooling process is also investigated to develop strategic approaches for optimizing cooling systems for HTS cables with FCL capability. The simulations indicated that a 40 ms fault with a voltage drop of 20 V m −1 along the cable can result in a temperature increase from 60 K to about 165 K inside the cable, and it takes about 500 s to cool the cable back to nearly 60 K with a flow of cold helium gas at a rate of 5 g s −1 .

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Characterizing and Modeling the Influence of Geometry on the Performance of Superconducting Nanowire Cryotrons

The scaling of superconducting nanowire detectors to larger arrays is often limited by room-temperature-readout cabling. Cryogenic integrated circuits constructed from nanowire cryotrons, or nanocryotrons, can address this limitation by performing signal processing on chip. In this study, we characterize key performance metrics of the nanocryotron to elucidate its potential as a logical element in cryogenic integrated circuits and develop an electro-thermal model to connect material parameters with device performance. We find that the performance of the nanocryotron depends on the device geometry, and trade-offs are associated with optimizing the gain, jitter, and energy dissipation. Here, we demonstrate that nanocryotrons fabricated on niobium nitride can achieve a grey zone less than 210 nA wide for a 5 ns long input pulse corresponding to a maximum achievable gain of 48 dB, an energy dissipation of less than 20 aJ per operation, and a jitter of less than 60 ps.

Superconductor↗
DOE OSTI2023

Observation and Modeling of the Thermal Runaway of High-Capacity Pouch Cells Due to an Internal Short Induced by an Indenter

Owing to the complexity of coupling mechanical and electrical solvers for finite element analysis (FEA) of mechanical abuse of a battery, the simulation should be performed by incorporating a local short circuit model activated based on the status of battery elements. However, the approach should also consider various other conditions of the battery simulated, such as the initial state of charge (SOC), for precise simulations of the internal short. This study proposes an approach developed with a mechanical model and single-particle battery model, along with a reaction kinetics model for thermal abuse using LS-DYNA. Several key parameters were selected, such as the activation criteria, kinetic abuse and element integration points during the internal short circuit induced by the indenter. The impact of these key parameters in the FEA on thermal runaway response for various initial SOCs from 25 to 100 % were analyzed. The FEA results obtained were compared against experimental results with various parameters such as activation criterion of internal short, kinetic abuse based on accelerating rate calorimetry (ARC) data. Finally, the root causes of the discrepancy between the FEA and experimental results are discussed regarding integration point what solver can make difference during calculation.

ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Numerical and experimental analysis of mechanically induced failure in electric vehicle battery modules

Mitigating thermal runaway and cell-to-cell propagation is essential for improving the safety of electric and hybrid vehicles. Enhancing digital twin capabilities to predict battery mechanical abuse is particularly critical for automotive and aerospace applications, where crashworthiness is a key concern. Understanding failure conditions and propagation in battery modules during mechanical abuse is complex due to interactions between structural deformation, heat transfer, electrochemical processes, exothermic reactions and mechanical fracture. While prior studies have focused on modeling cell-level behavior, extending these models to module or pack level is necessary for a system level understating of electric vehicle safety. This study develops coupled large deformation finite element models that simultaneously solve for electrochemistry, material failure, internal short circuit and thermal runaway propagation. The models account for mechanical and thermal interactions between lithium-ion cells and other battery components while the contact interfaces are evolving with time. Model-predicted voltage, temperature and force responses are compared with experimental data for validation. The results demonstrate that the approach captures key failure mechanisms, including thermal propagation through heat transfer, electrical propagation from short circuits in parallel-connected cells, and mechanical propagation via penetration and crack formation. These findings show that computational models are valuable tools for understanding battery module failure and providing insight that can reduce the need for extensive experimental testing.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2022

Physics-based compact modeling of electro-thermal memristors: Negative differential resistance, local activity, and non-local dynamical bifurcations

Leon Chua's Local Activity theory quantitatively relates the compact model of an isolated nonlinear circuit element, such as a memristor, to its potential for desired dynamical behaviors when externally coupled to passive elements in a circuit. However, the theory's use has often been limited to potentially unphysical toy models and analyses of small-signal linear circuits containing pseudo-elements (resistors, capacitors, and inductors), which provide little insight into required physical, material, and device properties. Furthermore, the Local Activity concept relies on a local analysis and must be complemented by examining dynamical behavior far away from the steady-states of a circuit. In this work, we review and study a class of generic and extended one-dimensional electro-thermal memristors (i.e., temperature is the sole state variable), re-framing the analysis in terms of physically motivated definitions and visualizations to derive intuitive compact models and simulate their dynamical behavior in terms of experimentally measurable properties, such as electrical and thermal conductance and capacitance and their derivatives with respect to voltage and temperature. Within this unified framework, we connect steady-state phenomena, such as negative differential resistance, and dynamical behaviors, such as instability, oscillations, and bifurcations, through a set of dimensionless nonlinearity parameters. In particular, we reveal that the reactance associated with electro-thermal memristors is the result of a phase shift between oscillating current and voltage induced by the dynamical delay and coupling between the electrical and thermal variables. We thus, demonstrate both the utility and limitations of local analyses to understand non-local dynamical behavior. Critically for future experimentation, the analyses show that external coupling of a memristor to impedances within modern sourcing and measurement instruments can dominate the response of the total circuit, making it impossible to characterize the response of an uncoupled circuit element for which a compact model is desired. However, these effects can be minimized by proper understanding of the Local Activity theory to design and utilize purpose-built instruments.

Brown, Timothy D. (ORCID:0000000347068355)↗
DOE OSTI2024

Thermal Analysis of a Polypropylene Capacitor for Resonant Tuning Networks in WPT Applications

This study presents the thermal analysis of polypropylene capacitors operating at high frequencies and high currents used in the resonant tuning networks for electric vehicle (EV) wireless charging systems. The thermal analysis and performance results of the CELEM polypropylene capacitors are presented at different currents for a polyphase wireless power transfer (WPT) system while the study can be expanded to other capacitors by different manufacturers. Thermal equivalent circuit of the capacitor is derived and required cold plate size and design calculations are conducted by modeling the polypropene capacitor in MATLAB. The polypropene capacitor's finite element analysis (FEA) model is developed using COMSOL Multiphysics simulation software, and the thermal characteristics and analysis of the capacitor are presented in this paper.

Aktas, Ahmet↗
DOE OSTI2025

Circuit complexity and functionality: A statistical thermodynamics perspective

Circuit complexity, defined as the minimum circuit size required for implementing a particular Boolean computation, is a foundational concept in computer science. Determining circuit complexity is believed to be a hard computational problem. Recently, in the context of black holes, circuit complexity has been promoted to a physical property, wherein the growth of complexity is reflected in the time evolution of the Einstein-Rosen bridge (“wormhole”) connecting the two sides of an anti-de Sitter “eternal” black hole. Here, we are motivated by an independent set of considerations and explore links between complexity and thermodynamics for functionally equivalent circuits, making the physics-inspired approach relevant to real computational problems, for which functionality is the key element of interest. In particular, our thermodynamic framework provides an alternative perspective on the obfuscation of programs of arbitrary length—an important problem in cryptography—as thermalization through recursive mixing of neighboring sections of a circuit, which can be viewed as the mixing of two containers with “gases of gates.” This recursive process equilibrates the average complexity and leads to the saturation of the circuit entropy, while preserving functionality of the overall circuit. The thermodynamic arguments hinge on ergodicity in the space of circuits which we conjecture is limited to disconnected ergodic sectors due to fragmentation. The notion of fragmentation has important implications for the problem of circuit obfuscation as it implies that there are circuits of same size and functionality that cannot be connected via a polynomial number of local moves. Furthermore, we argue that fragmentation is unavoidable unless the complexity classes NP and coNP coincide, a statement that implies the collapse of the polynomial hierarchy of computational complexity theory to its first level.

Science & Technology - Other Topics↗
DOE OSTI2022

Electro-Thermal Characterization of Dynamical VO 2 Memristors via Local Activity Modeling

We report translating the surging interest in neuromorphic electronic components, such as those based on nonlinearities near Mott transitions, into large-scale commercial deployment faces steep challenges in the current lack of means to identify and design key material parameters. These issues are exemplified by the difficulties in connecting measurable material properties to device behavior via circuit element models. Here, the principle of local activity is used to build a model of VO 2 /SiN Mott threshold switches by sequentially accounting for constraints from a minimal set of quasistatic and dynamic electrical and high-spatial-resolution thermal data obtained via in situ thermoreflectance mapping. By combining independent data sets for devices with varying dimensions, the model is distilled to measurable material properties, and device scaling laws are established. The model can accurately predict electrical and thermal conductivities and capacitances and locally active dynamics (especially persistent spiking self-oscillations). The systematic procedure by which this model is developed has been a missing link in predictively connecting neuromorphic device behavior with their underlying material properties, and should enable rapid screening of material candidates before employing expensive manufacturing processes and testing procedures.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Thermal Management of Wide-Bandgap Semiconductor Amplifiers Used for Plasma Heating and Control

Princeton Fusion Systems (PFS) has designed, built, and tested a Load Switch printed circuit board (PCB) to demonstrate the capabilities of 2 kV silicon carbide (SiC) cascodes in development by Qorvo towards plasma heating and control applications. Initial tests have been conducted at low power (~100 W) for validation with thermal finite element analysis (FEA) modeling performed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Comparisons of experimental data with the thermal modeling results, along with considerations for operating in plasma systems, will be discussed.

CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SU↗
DOE OSTI2022

All-Ceramic Passive Wireless Temperature Sensor Realized by Tin-Doped Indium Oxide (ITO) Electrodes for Harsh Environment Applications

In this work, an all-ceramic passive wireless inductor–capacitor (LC) resonator was presented for stable temperature sensing up to 1200 °C in air. Instead of using conventional metallic electrodes, the LC resonators are modeled and fabricated with thermally stable and highly electroconductive ceramic oxide. The LC resonator was modeled in ANSYS HFSS to operate in a low-frequency region (50 MHz) within 50 × 50 mm geometry using the actual material properties of the circuit elements. The LC resonator was composed of a parallel plate capacitor coupled with a planar inductor deposited on an Al2O3 substrate using screen-printing, and the ceramic pattern was sintered at 1250 °C for 4 h in an ambient atmosphere. The sensitivity (average change in resonant frequency with respect to temperature) from 200–1200 °C was ~170 kHz/°C. The temperature-dependent electrical conductivity of the tin-doped indium oxide (ITO, 10% SnO2 doping) on the quality factor showed an increase of Qf from 36 to 43 between 200 °C and 1200 °C. The proposed ITO electrodes displayed improved sensitivity and quality factor at elevated temperatures, proving them to be an excellent candidate for temperature sensing in harsh environments. The microstructural analysis of the co-sintered LC resonator was performed using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) which showed that there are no cross-sectional and topographical defects after several thermal treatments.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2024

Coupled Multiphysics Modeling of Lithium-Ion Batteries for Automotive Crashworthiness Applications

Considerable advances have been made in battery safety models, but achieving predictive accuracy across a wide range of conditions continues to be challenging. Interactions between dynamically evolving mechanical, electrical, and thermal state variables make model prediction difficult during mechanical abuse scenarios. In this study, we develop a physics-based modeling approach that allows for choosing between different mechanical and electrochemical models depending on the required level of analysis. We demonstrate the use of this approach to connect cell-level abuse response to electrode-level and particle-level transport phenomena. A pseudo-two-dimensional model and simplified single-particle models are calibrated to electrical-thermal cycling data and applied to mechanically induced short-circuit scenarios to understand how the choice of electrochemical model affects the model prediction under abuse scenarios. These models are implemented using user-defined subroutines on ls-dyna finite element software and can be coupled with existing automotive crash safety models.

analysis and design of components↗
DOE OSTI2020

15.9% organic tandem solar cell with extended near-infrared absorption

Stacking single-junction organic solar cells is effective in increasing the power conversion efficiency (PCE) by reducing the thermalization loss and increasing the open circuit voltage. Current developments of non-fullerene acceptors (NFAs) offer a range of materials whose energy gaps are suited for absorbing relatively narrow slices of the solar spectrum, thus easing requirements for current balance between sub-elements in the multijunction stacks. In this report, we demonstrate a solution-processed tandem organic solar cell comprising a binary, visible-absorbing sub-cell and a ternary near-infrared (NIR) absorbing sub-cell. The ternary NIR sub-cell utilizes a narrow energy gap NFA acceptor that enables a broadened and increased absorption compared to a binary NIR sub-cell. An isopropanol surface treatment is developed to connect the hydrophilichydrophobic surfaces in the charge recombination zone (CRZ) located between the sub-cells. The nearly optically and electrically lossless CRZ combined with an anti-reflection coating results in a tandem OPV with PCE = 15.9 ± 0.2 % under AM 1.5G simulated illumination.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

A Practical Analysis Framework for Assessment of Printed Circuit Heat Exchangers in High-Temperature Nuclear Service

Abstract Printed circuit heat exchangers (PCHEs) have high thermal efficiency because of the numerous minuscule channels. These minuscule channels result in a high thermal exchange area per unit volume, making PCHE a top contender for an intermediate heat exchanger (IHX) in high-temperature reactors. Thousands of minuscule channels make finite element analysis of the PCHE computationally infeasible. A two-dimensional analysis is usually performed for the PCHE core, which cannot simulate the local channel level responses reasonably because of the absence of global constraint influence. At present, there is no analysis technique available in the ASME Code or literature that is computationally efficient and suitable for engineers to estimate PCHE local responses. A novel but practical two-step analysis framework is proposed for performing PCHE analysis. In the first step, the channeled core is replaced by orthotropic solids with similar stiffness to simulate the global thermomechanical elastic responses of the PCHE. In the second step, local submodel analysis with detailed channel geometry and loading is performed using the elastic-perfectly plastic (EPP) material model. The proposed two-step analysis technique provides a unique capability to estimate the channel corner responses to be used for PCHE performance assessment. This study first developed a methodology for calculating the elastic orthotropic properties of the PCHE core. Next, the two-step analysis is performed for a realistic size PCHE core, and different issues observed in the results are scrutinized and resolved. Finally, a practical finite element analysis framework for PCHEs in high-temperature nuclear service is recommended.

Engineering↗
DOE OSTI2020

Optimized Highly Efficient SSCB Using Organic Substrate Packaging for Electric Vehicle Applications

Solid State Circuit Breakers (SSCBs) are an attractive protection solution for their arcless current interruption and fast actuation speeds over mechanical breakers. This paper proposes a Bidirectional SSCB (BSSCB) with a thermally defined and digitally controlled current time profile for fault protection in EV and other low-voltage DC systems. The paper proposes an organic packaging approach utilizing flex circuitry to develop a reliable, cost-effective power module for BSSCBs. The paper studies transient heat transfer in the power modules using finite element analysis (FEA). An RC themal ladder network is extracted to define a fusing curve. To demonstrate and verify the design, a 1kV/50 A SiC MOSFET BSSCB prototype is fabricated and tested, having a power density of 60 W/cm3 and 4x reduction in form factor over presently researched breakers. Also, given are results for 750 V/150 A operation showing interruption in 2.4 μs.

organic power packaging↗
DOE OSTI2022

Effective Field Theory of Random Quantum Circuits

Quantum circuits have been widely used as a platform to simulate generic quantum many-body systems. In particular, random quantum circuits provide a means to probe universal features of many-body quantum chaos and ergodicity. Some such features have already been experimentally demonstrated in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. On the theory side, properties of random quantum circuits have been studied on a case-by-case basis and for certain specific systems, and a hallmark of quantum chaos—universal Wigner–Dyson level statistics—has been derived. This work develops an effective field theory for a large class of random quantum circuits. The theory has the form of a replica sigma model and is similar to the low-energy approach to diffusion in disordered systems. The method is used to explicitly derive the universal random matrix behavior of a large family of random circuits. In particular, we rederive the Wigner–Dyson spectral statistics of the brickwork circuit model by Chan, De Luca, and Chalker [Phys. Rev. X 8, 041019 (2018)] and show within the same calculation that its various permutations and higher-dimensional generalizations preserve the universal level statistics. Finally, we use the replica sigma model framework to rederive the Weingarten calculus, which is a method of evaluating integrals of polynomials of matrix elements with respect to the Haar measure over compact groups and has many applications in the study of quantum circuits. The effective field theory derived here provides both a method to quantitatively characterize the quantum dynamics of random Floquet systems (e.g., calculating operator and entanglement spreading) and a path to understanding the general fundamental mechanism behind quantum chaos and thermalization in these systems.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2025

Superconducting coherence peak in near-field radiative heat transfer

Enhancement and peaks in near-field radiative heat transfer (NFRHT) typically arise due to surface phonon-polaritons, plasmon-polaritons, and electromagnetic (EM) modes in structured materials. However, the role of material quantum coherence in enhancing near-field radiative heat transfer remains unexplored. Here, we unravel that NFRHT in superconductor-ferromagnetic systems displays a unique peak at the superconducting phase transition that originates from the quantum coherence of Bogoliubov quasiparticles in superconductors. Our theory takes into account evanescent EM radiation emanating from fluctuating currents related to Cooper pairs and Bogoliubov quasiparticles in stark contrast to the current-current correlations induced by free electrons in conventional materials. Our proposed NFRHT configuration exploits ferromagnetic resonance at frequencies deep inside the superconducting band gap to isolate this superconducting coherence peak. Furthermore, we reveal that Cooper pairs and Bogoliubov quasiparticles have opposite effects on near-field thermal radiation and isolate their effects on many-body radiative heat transfer near superconductors. As a result, our proposed phenomenon can have applications for developing thermal isolators and heat sinks in superconducting circuits.

Dipole approximation↗
DOE OSTI2025

Parameter extraction for a SPICE model of an hTron superconducting thermal switch

Efficiently simulating large circuits is crucial to the development of superconducting nanowire-based electronics. However, current simulation tools for this technology are not adapted to the scaling of circuit size and complexity. We focus on the multilayered heater-nanocryotron (hTron), a promising superconducting nanowire-based switch used in applications such as superconducting nanowire single-photon detector readout. Previously, the hTron was modeled using traditional finite-element methods, which fall short in simulating systems at a larger scale. An empirical-based method would be better adapted to this task, enhancing both simulation speed and agreement with experimental data. In this work, we perform switching current and activation delay measurements on 17 hTron devices. We then develop a method for extracting physical fitting parameters used to characterize the devices. We build a SPICE behavioral model that reproduces the static and transient device behavior using these parameters, and validate it by comparing its performance to a model developed in prior work, showing an improvement in simulation time by several orders of magnitude. Furthermore, our model provides circuit designers with a tool to help understand the hTron’s behavior during all design stages, thus enabling broader use of the hTron across various new areas of application.

Caloritronics↗