Reliable, long-life power systems are required for ambitious space exploration missions. Nuclear power and propulsion options can enable a bold, new set of missions and introduce propulsion capabilities to achieve access to science destinations that are not possible with more conventional systems. Space nuclear power options can be divided into three main categories: radioisotope power for heating or low power applications; fission power systems for non-terrestrial surface application or for spacecraft power; and fission power systems for electric propulsion or direct thermal propulsion. Each of these areas has been investigated in the United States since the 1950s, achieving various stages of development. While some nuclear systems have achieved flight deployment, others continue to be researched today. This paper will provide a brief overview of historical space nuclear programs in the U.S. and will provide a summary of the ongoing space nuclear systems research, development, and deployment in the United States.

Wind turbine gearboxes are not always meeting 20-year design life. Premature failure of gearboxes increases cost of energy, turbine downtime, unplanned maintenance, gearbox replacement and rebuild, and increased warranty reserves. The problem is widespread, affects most Original Equipment Manufacturers, and is not caused by manufacturing practices. There is a need to improve gearbox reliability and reduce turbine downtime. The topics of this presentation are: GRC (Gearbox Reliability Collaborative) technical approach; Gearbox failure database; Recorded incidents summary; Top failure modes for bearings; Top failure modes for gears; GRC test gearbox; Bearing nomenclature; Test history; Real damage; Gear sets; Bearings; Observations; and Summary. 5 refs.

An increasing number of energy efficient appliances operate on direct current (DC) internally, offering the potential to use DC from renewable energy systems directly and avoiding the losses inherent in converting power to alternating current (AC) and back. This paper investigates that potential for net-metered residences with on-site photovoltaics (PV) by modeling the net power draw of the ‘direct-DC house’ with respect to today’s typical configuration, assuming identical DC-internal loads. Power draws were modeled for houses in 14 U.S. cities, using hourly, simulated PV-system output and residential loads. The latter were adjusted to reflect a 33% load reduction, representative of the most efficient DC-internal technology, based on an analysis of 32 electricity end-uses. The model tested the effect of climate, electric vehicle (EV) loads, electricity storage, and load shifting on electricity savings; a sensitivity analysis was conducted to determine how future changes in the efficiencies of power system components might affect savings potential. Based on this work, we estimate that net-metered PV residences could save 5% of their total electricity load for houses without storage and 14% for houses with storage. Based on residential PV penetration projections for year 2035 obtained from the National Energy Modeling System (2.7% for the …

Air-cooled binary plants are designed to provide a specified level of power production at a particular air temperature. Nominally this air temperature is the annual mean or average air temperature for the plant location. This study investigates the effect that changing the design air temperature has on power generation for an air-cooled binary plant producing power from a resource with a declining production fluid temperature and fluctuating ambient temperatures. This analysis was performed for plants operating both with and without a geothermal fluid outlet temperature limit. Aspen Plus process simulation software was used to develop optimal air-cooled binary plant designs for specific ambient temperatures as well as to rate the performance of the plant designs at off-design operating conditions. Results include calculation of annual and plant lifetime power generation as well as evaluation of plant operating characteristics, such as improved power generation capabilities during summer months when electric power prices are at peak levels.

This paper provides an overview of wind turbine drivetrain condition monitoring based on presentations from a condition monitoring workshop organized by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2009 and on additional references.

DOE works with national labs, academia, and industry to support the domestic photovoltaics (PV) industry and research enterprise. SunShot aims to achieve widespread, unsubsidized cost-competitiveness through an applied research and development (R&D) portfolio spanning PV materials, devices, and manufacturing technologies.

Battery testing procedures are important for understanding battery performance, including degradation over the life of the battery. Standards are important to provide clear rules and uniformity to an industry. The work described in this report addresses the need for standard battery testing procedures that reflect real-world applications of energy storage systems to provide regulation services to grid operators. This work was motivated by the need to develop Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) testing procedures, or V2G drive cycles. Likewise, the stationary energy storage community is equally interested in standardized testing protocols that reflect real-world grid applications for providing regulation services. As the first of several steps toward standardizing battery testing cycles, this work focused on a statistical analysis of frequency regulation signals from the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnect with the goal to identify patterns in the regulation signal that would be representative of the entire signal as a typical regulation data set. Results from an extensive time-series analysis are discussed, and the results are explained from both the statistical and the battery-testing perspectives. The results then are interpreted in the context of defining a small set of V2G drive cycles for standardization, offering some recommendations for the next steps toward standardizing testing protocols.

The LOCO algorithm has been used by many accelerators around the world. Although the uses for LOCO vary, the most common use has been to find calibration errors and correct the optics functions. The light source community in particular has made extensive use of the LOCO algorithms to tightly control the beta function and coupling. Maintaining high quality beam parameters requires constant attention so a relatively large effort was put into software development for the LOCO application. The LOCO code was originally written in FORTRAN. This code worked fine but it was somewhat awkward to use. For instance, the FORTRAN code itself did not calculate the model response matrix. It required a separate modeling code such as MAD to calculate the model matrix then one manually loads the data into the LOCO code. As the number of people interested in LOCO grew, it required making it easier to use. The decision to port LOCO to Matlab was relatively easy. It's best to use a matrix programming language with good graphics capability; Matlab was also being used for high level machine control; and the accelerator modeling code AT, [5], was already developed for Matlab. Since LOCO requires collecting and processing a …

Treatment of Coulomb collisions within the beam requires consideration of both large and small angle scattering. Such collisions lead to the Touschek effect and Intrabeam Scattering (IBS). The Touschek effect refers to particle loss as a result of a single collision, where only transfer from the transverse direction into longitudinal plays a role. It is important to consider this effect for ERL design to have an appropriate choice of collimation system. The IBS is a diffusion process which leads to changes of beam distribution but does not necessarily result in a beam loss. Evaluation of IBS in ERLs, where beam distribution is non-Gaussian, requires special treatment. Here we describe the IBS and Touschek effects with application to ERLs.

VCE is an ethylene/vinyl acetate/vinyl alcohol terpolymer binder for filled elastomers which is designed to accept high filler loadings. Filled elastomer parts consist of the binder (VCE), a curing agent (Hylene MP, diphenol-4-4{prime}-methylenebis(phenylcarbamate)), a processing aid (LS, lithium stearate), and filler particles (typically 70% fraction by weight). The curing of the filled elastomer parts occurs from the heat-activated reaction between the hydroxyl groups of VCE with the Hylene MP curing agent, resulting in a cross-linked network. The final vinyl acetate content is typically between 34.9 and 37.9%, while the vinyl alcohol content is typically between 1.27 and 1.78%. Surveillance data for this material is both scarce and scattered, complicating the assessment of any aging trends in systems. In addition, most of the initial surveillance efforts focused on mechanical properties such as hardness and tensile strength, and chemical information is therefore lacking. Material characterization and aging studies had been performed on previous formulations of the VCE material but the Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA) starting copolymer is no longer commercially available. New formulations with replacement EVA materials are currently being established and will require characterization as well as updated aging models.

Funding from this grant has allowed Morehouse School of Medicine to complete its first professionally developed, comprehensive campus master plan that is in alignment with the recently completed strategic plan. In addition to master planning activities, funds were used for programming and designing research renovations, and also to supplement other research facility upgrades by providing lighting and equipment. The activities funded by this grant will provide the catalyst for substantial improvement in the School’s overall facilities for biomedical education and research, and will also provide much of the information needed to conduct a successful campaign to raise funds for proposed buildings and renovations.

The goal is to develop technologies for pulverized coal boilers with >90% CO{sub 2} capture and sequestration and <35% increase in the cost of electricity. Air-fired power plant experience shows a corrosion loss max at 680-700 C. Low melting point alkali metal trisulfates, such as (K,Na){sub 3}Fe(SO{sub 4}){sub 3}, become thermally unstable above this temperature range. Some overall conclusions are: (1) CO{sub 2} + 30% H{sub 2}O more corrosive than Ar + 30% H{sub 2}O; (2) Excess O{sub 2} in H{sub 2}O can, in some cases, greatly increase oxidation; (3) Coal ash is generally innocuous without SO{sub 3}3 in gas phase; and (4) Long-term exposures are starting to establish differences between air-firing and oxy-firing conditions.

Under this program, Aspen Aerogels has developed an industrial insulation called Pyrogel HT, which is 4-5 times more thermally efficient than current non-aerogel technology. Derived from nanoporous silica aerogels, Pyrogel HT was specifically developed to address a high temperature capability gap not currently met with Aspen Aerogels{trademark} flagship product, Pyrogel XT. Pyrogel XT, which was originally developed on a separate DOE contract (DE-FG36-06GO16056), was primarily optimized for use in industrial steam processing systems, where application temperatures typically do not exceed 400 C. At the time, further improvements in thermal performance above 400 C could not be reasonably achieved for Pyrogel XT without significantly affecting other key material properties using the current technology. Cumulative sales of Pyrogel HT into domestic power plants should reach $125MM through 2030, eventually reaching about 10% of the total insulation market share in that space. Global energy savings would be expected to scale similarly. Over the same period, these sales would reduce domestic energy consumption by more than 65 TBtu. Upon branching out into all industrial processes in the 400 C-650 C regime, Pyrogel HT would reach annual sales levels of $150MM, with two-thirds of that being exported.

In this report we have presented a brief review of the glass transition and one means of characterizing glassy materials: linear and nonlinear thermodynamic oscillatory experiments to extract the dynamic heat capacity. We have applied these methods to the east model (a variation of the Ising model for glass forming systems) and a simple polymeric system via molecular dynamics simulation, and our results match what is seen in experiment. For the east model, since the dynamics are so simple, a mathematical model is developed that matches the simulated dynamics. For the polymeric system, since the system is a simulation, we can instantaneously 'quench' the system - removing all vibrational energy - to separate the vibrational dynamics from dynamics associated with particle rearrangements. This shows that the long-time glassy dynamics are due entirely to the particle rearrangements, i.e. basin jumping on the potential energy landscape. Finally, we present an extension of linear dynamic heat capacity to the nonlinear regime.

This paper summarizes an evaluation of siting an HTGR plant in a remote area supplying steam, electricity and high temperature gas for recovery and upgrading of unconventional crude oil from oil sands. The area selected for this evaluation is the Alberta Canada oil sands. This is a very fertile and active area for bitumen recovery and upgrading with significant quantities piped to refineries in Canada and the U.S Additionally data on the energy consumption and other factors that are required to complete the evaluation of HTGR application is readily available in the public domain. There is also interest by the Alberta oil sands producers (OSP) in identifying alternative energy sources for their operations. It should be noted, however, that the results of this evaluation could be applied to any similar oil sands area.

A detailed simulation-based model of the June 2011 National Ignition Campaign (NIC) cryogenic DT experiments is presented. The model is based on integrated hohlraum-capsule simulations that utilize the best available models for the hohlraum wall, ablator, and DT equations of state and opacities. The calculated radiation drive was adjusted by changing the input laser power to match the experimentally measured shock speeds, shock merger times, peak implosion velocity, and bangtime. The crossbeam energy transfer model was tuned to match the measured time-dependent symmetry. Mid-mode mix was included by directly modeling the ablator and ice surface perturbations up to mode 60. Simulated experimental values were extracted from the simulation and compared against the experiment. The model adjustments brought much of the simulated data into closer agreement with the experiment, with the notable exception of the measured yields, which were 15-45% of the calculated yields.

The Collaborative Lubricating Oil Study on Emissions (CLOSE) project was a pilot investigation of how fuels and crankcase lubricants contribute to the formation of particulate matter (PM) and semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOC) in vehicle exhaust. As limited vehicles were tested, results are not representative of the whole on-road fleet. Long-term effects were not investigated. Pairs of vehicles (one normal PM emitting, one high-PM emitting) from four categories were selected: light-duty (LD) gasoline cars, medium-duty (MD) diesel trucks, heavy-duty (HD) natural-gas-fueled buses, and HD diesel buses. HD vehicles procured did not exhibit higher PM emissions, and thus were labeled high mileage (HM). Fuels evaluated were non-ethanol gasoline (E0), 10 percent ethanol (E10), conventional low-sulfur TxLED diesel, 20% biodiesel (B20), and natural gas. Temperature effects (20 degrees F, 72 degrees F) were evaluated on LD and MD vehicles. Lubricating oil vintage effects (fresh and aged) were evaluated on all vehicles. LD and MD vehicles were operated on a dynamometer over the California Unified Driving Cycle, while HD vehicles followed the Heavy Duty Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule. Regulated and unregulated emissions were measured. Chemical markers from the unregulated emissions measurements and a tracer were utilized to estimate the lubricant contribution to PM.

This presentation describes how you could conceivably allocate variability and reserve requirements, including how to allocate aggregation benefits. Conclusions of this presentation are: (1) Aggregation provides benefits because individual requirements are not 100% correlated; (2) Method needed to allocate reduced requirement among participants; (3) Differences between allocation results are subtle - (a) Not immediately obvious which method is 'better'; (b) Many are numerically 'correct', they sum to the physical requirement; (c) Many are not 'fair', Results depend on sub-aggregation and/or the order individuals are included; and (4) Vector allocation method is simple and fair.

The authors present recent results on exclusive {bar B} {yields} X{sub c}{ell}{sup -}{bar {nu}}{sub {ell}} decays and measurements of the CKM matrix element |V{sub cb}| based on data collected at the {Upsilon}(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II e{sup +}e{sup -} storage rings.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) conducted a final quantitative analysis to assess whether buildings constructed according to the requirements of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)/Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) Standard 90.1-2010 (ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010, Standard 90.1-2010, or 2010 edition) would result in energy savings compared with buildings constructed to ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007(ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007, Standard 90.1-2007, or 2007 edition). The final analysis considered each of the 109 addenda to ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007 that were included in ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010. All 109 addenda processed by ASHRAE in the creation of Standard 90.1-2010 from Standard 90.1-2007 were reviewed by DOE, and their combined impact on a suite of 16 building prototype models in 15 ASHRAE climate zones was considered. Most addenda were deemed to have little quantifiable impact on building efficiency for the purpose of DOE's final determination. However, out of the 109 addenda, 34 were preliminarily determined to have a measureable and quantifiable impact. A suite of 240 computer energy simulations for building prototypes complying with ASHRAE 90.1-2007 was developed. These prototypes were then modified in accordance with these 34 addenda to create a second suite of corresponding building …

Research reveals active role of cluster symmetries on the size-sensitive, diverse melting behaviors of metallic nanoclusters, providing insight to understanding phase changes of nanoparticles for thermal energy storage. Unlike macroscopic bulk materials, intermediate-sized nanoclusters with around 55 atoms inherently exhibit size-sensitive melting changes: adding just a single atom to a nanocluster can cause a dramatic change in melting behavior. Microscopic understanding of thermal behaviors of metal nanoclusters is important for nanoscale catalysis and thermal energy storage applications. However, it is a challenge to obtain a structural interpretation at the atomic level from measured thermodynamic quantities such as heat capacity. Using ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) revealed a clear correlation between the diverse melting behaviors of aluminum nanoclusters and cluster core symmetries. These simulations reproduced, for the first time, the size-sensitive heat capacities of aluminum nanoclusters, which exhibit several distinctive shapes associated with the diverse melting behaviors of the clusters. The size-dependent, diverse melting behaviors of the aluminum clusters are attributed to the reduced symmetry (from Td {yields} D2d {yields} Cs) with increasing the cluster sizes and can be used to help design thermal storage materials.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Office requested support from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) contract to delineate the extent of strontium titanate (SrTiO3) contamination in and around Solid Waste Storage Area (SWSA) 7 as part of the Oak Ridge National Priorities List Site boundary definition program. The study area is presented in Fig. 1.1 relative to the Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR). The investigation was executed according to Sampling and Analysis Plan/Quality Assurance Project Plan (SAP/QAPP) (DOE 2011) to supplement previous investigations noted below and to determine what areas, if any, have been adversely impacted by site operations.

A low-power time-to-digital convertor (TDC) for an application inside a vacuum has been implemented based on the Wave Union TDC scheme in a low-cost field programmable gate array (FPGA) device. Bench top tests have shown that a time measurement resolution better than 30 ps (standard deviation of time differences between two channels) is achieved. Special firmware design practices are taken to reduce power consumption. The measurements indicate that with 32 channels fitting in the FPGA device, the power consumption on the FPGA core voltage is approximately 9.3 mW/channel and the total power consumption including both core and I/O banks is less than 27 mW/channel.

This report summarizes the work performed to evaluate multiple, cesium loading, and elution cycles for small columns containing SRF resin using a simple, high-level waste (HLW) simulant. Cesium ion exchange loading and elution curves were generated for a nominal 5 M Na, 2.4E-05 M Cs, 0.115 M Al loading solution traced with 134Cs followed by elution with variable HNO3 (0.02, 0.07, 0.15, 0.23, and 0.28 M) containing variable CsNO3 (5.0E-09, 5.0E-08, and 5.0E-07 M) and traced with 137Cs. The ion exchange system consisted of a pump, tubing, process solutions, and a single, small ({approx}15.7 mL) bed of SRF resin with a water-jacketed column for temperature-control. The columns were loaded with approximately 250 bed volumes (BVs) of feed solution at 45 C and at 1.5 to 12 BV per hour (0.15 to 1.2 cm/min). The columns were then eluted with 29+ BVs of HNO3 processed at 25 C and at 1.4 BV/h. The two independent tracers allowed analysis of the on-column cesium interaction between the loading and elution solutions. The objective of these tests was to improve the correlation between the spent resin cesium content and cesium leached out of the resin in subsequent loading cycles (cesium leakage) to help establish …