Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems, or CASoS, are vastly complex ecological, sociological, economic and/or technical systems which we must understand to design a secure future for the nation and the world. Perturbations/disruptions in CASoS have the potential for far-reaching effects due to pervasive interdependencies and attendant vulnerabilities to cascades in associated systems. Phoenix was initiated to address this high-impact problem space as engineers. Our overarching goals are maximizing security, maximizing health, and minimizing risk. We design interventions, or problem solutions, that influence CASoS to achieve specific aspirations. Through application to real-world problems, Phoenix is evolving the principles and discipline of CASoS Engineering while growing a community of practice and the CASoS engineers to populate it. Both grounded in reality and working to extend our understanding and control of that reality, Phoenix is at the same time a solution within a CASoS and a CASoS itself.
The work reported here supports the efforts of the Market Transformation element of the DOE Fuel Cell Technology Program. The portfolio includes hydrogen technologies, as well as fuel cell technologies. The objective of this work is to model the use of bulk hydrogen storage, integrated with intermittent renewable energy production of hydrogen via electrolysis, used to generate grid-quality electricity. In addition the work determines cost-effective scale and design characteristics and explores potential attractive business models.
Aerodynamic noise from wind turbine rotors leads to constraints in both rotor design and turbine siting. The primary source of aerodynamic noise on wind turbine rotors is the interaction of turbulent boundary layers on the blades with the blade trailing edges. This report surveys concepts that have been proposed for trailing edge noise reduction, with emphasis on concepts that have been tested at either sub-scale or full-scale. These concepts include trailing edge serrations, low-noise airfoil designs, trailing edge brushes, and porous trailing edges. The demonstrated noise reductions of these concepts are cited, along with their impacts on aerodynamic performance. An assessment is made of future research opportunities in trailing edge noise reduction for wind turbine rotors.
In [3] we proposed a new Control Volume Finite Element Method with multi-dimensional, edge- based Scharfetter-Gummel upwinding (CVFEM-MDEU). This report follows up with a detailed computational study of the method. The study compares the CVFEM-MDEU method with other CVFEM and FEM formulations for a set of standard scalar advection-diffusion test problems in two dimensions. The first two CVFEM formulations are derived from the CVFEM-MDEU by simplifying the computation of the flux integrals on the sides of the control volumes, the third is the nodal CVFEM [2] without upwinding, and the fourth is the streamline upwind version of CVFEM [10]. The finite elements in our study are the standard Galerkin, SUPG and artificial diffusion methods. All studies employ logically Cartesian partitions of the unit square into quadrilateral elements. Both uniform and non-uniform grids are considered. Our results demonstrate that CVFEM-MDEU and its simplified versions perform equally well on rectangular or nearly rectangular grids. However, performance of the simplified versions significantly degrades on non-affine grids, whereas the CVFEM-MDEU remains stable and accurate over a wide range of mesh Peclet numbers and non-affine grids. Compared to FEM formulations the CVFEM-MDEU appears to be slightly more dissipative than the SUPG, but has much less local overshoots and undershoots.
In 1957, Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) initiated its first programs in fundamental science, in support of its primary nuclear weapons mission. In 1974, Sandia initiated programs in fundamental science supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Science (DOE-SC). These latter programs have grown to the point where, today in 2011, support of Sandia's programs in fundamental science is dominated by that Office. In comparison with Sandia's programs in technology and mission applications, however, Sandia's programs in fundamental science are small. Hence, Sandia's fundamental science has been strongly influenced by close interactions with technology and mission applications. In many instances, these interactions have been of great mutual benefit, with synergies akin to a positive 'Casimir's spiral' of progress. In this report, we review the history of Sandia's fundamental science programs supported by the Office of Science. We present: (a) a technical and budgetary snapshot of Sandia's current programs supported by the various suboffices within DOE-SC; (b) statistics of highly-cited articles supported by DOE-SC; (c) four case studies (ion-solid interactions, combustion science, compound semiconductors, advanced computing) with an emphasis on mutually beneficial interactions between science, technology, and mission; and (d) appendices with key memos and reminiscences related to fundamental science at Sandia.
We present an approach to simulate time-synchronized, one-minute power output from large photovoltaic (PV) generation plants in locations where only hourly irradiance estimates are available from satellite sources. The approach uses one-minute irradiance measurements from ground sensors in a climatically and geographically similar area. Irradiance is translated to power using the Sandia Array Performance Model. Power output is generated for 2007 in southern Nevada are being used for a Solar PV Grid Integration Study to estimate the integration costs associated with various utility-scale PV generation levels. Plant designs considered include both fixed-tilt thin-film, and single-axis-tracked polycrystalline Si systems ranging in size from 5 to 300 MW{sub AC}. Simulated power output profiles at one-minute intervals were generated for five scenarios defined by total PV capacity (149.5 MW, 222 WM, 292 MW, 492 MW, and 892 MW) each comprising as many as 10 geographically separated PV plants.
A microkinetic chemical reaction mechanism capable of describing both the storage and regeneration processes in a fully formulated lean NO{sub x} trap (LNT) is presented. The mechanism includes steps occurring on the precious metal, barium oxide (NO{sub x} storage), and cerium oxide (oxygen storage) sites of the catalyst. The complete reaction set is used in conjunction with a transient plug flow reactor code to simulate not only conventional storage/regeneration cycles with a CO/H{sub 2} reductant, but also steady flow temperature sweep experiments that were previously analyzed with just a precious metal mechanism and a steady state code. The results show that NO{sub x} storage is not negligible during some of the temperature ramps, necessitating a re-evaluation of the precious metal kinetic parameters. The parameters for the entire mechanism are inferred by finding the best overall fit to the complete set of experiments. Rigorous thermodynamic consistency is enforced for parallel reaction pathways and with respect to known data for all of the gas phase species involved. It is found that, with a few minor exceptions, all of the basic experimental observations can be reproduced with these purely kinetic simulations, i.e., without including mass-transfer limitations. In addition to accounting for normal cycling behavior, the final mechanism should provide a starting point for the description of further LNT phenomena such as desulfation and the role of alternative reductants.
This report is a summary of and commentary on (a) the seven lectures that C. S. Peirce presented in 1903 on pragmatism and (b) a commentary by P. A. Turrisi, both of which are included in Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, edited by Turrisi [13]. Peirce is known as the founder of the philosophy of pragmatism and these lectures, given near the end of his life, represent his mature thoughts on the philosophy. Peirce's decomposition of thinking into abduction, deduction, and induction is among the important points in the lectures.
Recognition of the importance of power in the field of High Performance Computing, whether it be as an obstacle, expense or design consideration, has never been greater and more pervasive. While research has been conducted on many related aspects, there is a stark absence of work focused on large scale High Performance Computing. Part of the reason is the lack of measurement capability currently available on small or large platforms. Typically, research is conducted using coarse methods of measurement such as inserting a power meter between the power source and the platform, or fine grained measurements using custom instrumented boards (with obvious limitations in scale). To collect the measurements necessary to analyze real scientific computing applications at large scale, an in-situ measurement capability must exist on a large scale capability class platform. In response to this challenge, we exploit the unique power measurement capabilities of the Cray XT architecture to gain an understanding of power use and the effects of tuning. We apply these capabilities at the operating system level by deterministically halting cores when idle. At the application level, we gain an understanding of the power requirements of a range of important DOE/NNSA production scientific computing applications running at large scale (thousands of nodes), while simultaneously collecting current and voltage measurements on the hosting nodes. We examine the effects of both CPU and network bandwidth tuning and demonstrate energy savings opportunities of up to 39% with little or no impact on run-time performance. Capturing scale effects in our experimental results was key. Our results provide strong evidence that next generation large-scale platforms should not only approach CPU frequency scaling differently, but could also benefit from the capability to tune other platform components, such as the network, to achieve energy efficient performance.
A microkinetic reaction sub-mechanism designed to account for the sulfation and desulfation of a commercial lean NOx trap (LNT) is presented. This set of reactions is appended to a previously developed mechanism for the normal storage and regeneration processes in an LNT in order to provide a comprehensive modeling tool. The reactions describing the storage, release, and reduction of sulfur oxides are patterned after those involving NOx, but the number of reactions is kept to the minimum necessary to give an adequate simulation of the experimental observations. Values for the kinetic constants are estimated by fitting semi-quantitatively the somewhat limited experimental data, using a transient plug flow reactor code to model the processes occurring in a single monolith channel. Rigorous thermodynamic constraints are imposed in order to ensure that the overall mechanism is consistent both internally and with the known properties of all gas-phase species. The final mechanism is shown to be capable of reproducing the principal aspects of sulfation/desulfation behavior, most notably (a) the essentially complete trapping of SO2 during normal cycling; (b) the preferential sulfation of NOx storage sites over oxygen storage sites and the consequent plug-like and diffuse sulfation profiles; (c) the degradation of NOx storage and reduction (NSR) capability with increasing sulfation level; and (d) the mix of H2S and SO2 evolved during desulfation by temperature-programmed reduction.
