DOE Laboratories Research Articles

(Invited) Increasing Biogas to Liquid Fuel Yield By Solid Oxide Co-Electrolysis of Biogas CO2 Fraction

OxEon Energy, LLC (OxEon) plans to demonstrate production of liquid hydrocarbon fuels using both the methane and CO2 generated in a food waste digester operated by the Environmental Products & Technologies Corporation (EPT). The EPT food waste digester in Burley Idaho sells produced biogas into a natural gas pipeline after separating and venting the bio-CO2. This project will convert the bio-methane to synthesis gas (syngas, as CO & H2) using a non-thermal plasma catalyzed autothermal reformer. To achieve high bio-carbon utilization, an OxEon high temperature solid oxide co-electrolysis (HTCE) system will electrochemically generate additional syngas from the bio-CO2 combined with steam raised by cooling the Fischer Tropsch (FT) reactor. Syngas from the reformed methane and co-electrolyzed CO2, will be converted to liquid fuels using an OxEon developed FT reactor. Each of the technology components have been field tested independently and will be combined for the first time in this project. The project outcome will be an engineering scale demonstration of liquid hydrocarbon bio-fuel production achieving > 50% conversion to liquids of the biogenic carbon in both CH4 & CO2 produced by an anaerobic digester.Each of the three technology elements of the integrated engineering test incorporates numerous innovations. The plasma reactor is designed to be fuel flexible, sulfur tolerant, and economically scalable to small, distributed bio-gas resources. It is also very efficient using a low power non- thermal plasma. High temperature solid oxide electrolysis has demonstrated efficiency at the thermodynamic limit as shown by analysis and testing at DOE and NASA laboratories, and is unique in its ability to co-electrolyze steam and CO2 directly to syngas. The HTCE stacks use innovations proven for the NASA Mars 2020 project which required exceptional ruggedness and effective high temperature seals. The FT reactor enables economical fabrication of smaller size synthetic fuel plants designed to match the scale of distributed renewable biomass resources. This is achieved with large diameter standard piping combined with a novel internal thermal management structure.The status of the technology elements and the planned engineering demonstration will be presented.This work is supported by the Bioenergy Technologies Office of the US Department of Energy.

(Invited) Production of Liquid Hydrocarbons from Anaerobic Digester Gas

OxEon Energy, LLC (OxEon) plans to demonstrate production liquid hydrocarbon fuels using both the methane and CO2 generated in the food waste digester operated by the Environmental Products & Technologies Corporation (EPT). The EPT food waste digester in Burley Idaho sells produced biogas into a natural gas pipeline after separating and venting the bio-CO2. This project will convert the bio-methane to synthesis gas (syngas, as CO & H2) using a non-thermal plasma catalyzed autothermal reformer. To achieve high bio-carbon utilization, high temperature solid oxide co-electrolysis (HTCE) system will electrochemically generate additional syngas from the bio-CO2 combined with steam raised by cooling the Fischer Tropsch (FT) reactor. Syngas from the reformed methane and co-electrolyzed CO2, will be converted to liquid fuels using the FT reactor. Each of the technology components have been field tested independently and will be combined for the first time in this project. The project outcome will be an engineering scale demonstration of liquid hydrocarbon bio-fuel production achieving > 50% conversion to liquids of the biogenic carbon in both CH4 & CO2 produced by an anaerobic digester.Each of the three technology elements of the integrated engineering test incorporates numerous innovations. The plasma reactor is designed to be fuel flexible, sulfur tolerant, and economically scalable to small, distributed bio-gas resources. It is also very efficient using a low power non- thermal plasma. High temperature electrolysis has demonstrated efficiency at the thermodynamic limit as shown by analysis and testing at DOE and NASA laboratories, and is unique in its ability to co-electrolyze steam and CO2 directly to syngas. The HTCE stacks use innovations proven for the NASA Mars 2020 project which required exceptional ruggedness and effective high temperature seals. The FT reactor enables economical fabrication of smaller size synthetic fuel plants designed to match the scale of distributed renewable biomass resources. This is achieved with large diameter standard piping combined with a novel internal thermal management structure.The status of the technology elements and the planned engineering demonstration will be presented.This work is supported by the Bioenergy Technologies Office of the US Department of Energy.

Exploring utilization options of heterogeneous architectures for multi-physics simulations

Top supercomputers in the TOP500 list have transitioned from homogeneous node architectures toward heterogeneous manycore nodes with accelerators and CPUs. These new architectures present significant challenges to developers of large-scale multiphysics applications, especially at DOE laboratories that have invested heavily in scalable MPI codes over decades. Much of these scientific application porting efforts for the new heterogeneous architectures are focused on running the computation on the accelerators, which usually comprise > 90% of the FLOPS of the system, typically using one core per GPU to offload work. We describe an approach to utilizing the remaining FLOPS on a heterogeneous machine by running a portion of the computation on the CPUs cooperatively with the GPU computation. Orthogonally, we evaluate using the additional cores to also offload work to GPUs, effectively oversubscribing the GPUs. We present a proof-of-concept implementation in ARES, a multiphysics ALE-AMR code at LLNL. ARES uses a portability layer, RAJA, which enables us to utilize the same source code for both the CPU and the GPU. We develop an approach to utilize both types of processors cooperatively in a heterogeneous system. Our implementation divides the work between the computing resources via domain decomposition, and utilizes all cores of the CPU and all of the GPUs on the node for computation. Load balancing is necessary to use the heterogeneous resources effectively. We present preliminary results on early delivery pre-Sierra machines at LLNL, showing up to 40% performance benefit of oversubscribing the GPUs (with caveats), and up to an 18% performance benefit of using the CPUs on the heterogeneous nodes for computing in addition to using the GPUs.

Exascale Computing in the United States

The U.S. is a long-time international leader in HPC, rooted in a strong and innovative computing industry that is complemented by partnerships with and among federal agencies, academia, and industries whose success relies on HPC. The advent of exascale computing brings challenges in traditional simulation as well as in areas colloquially referred to as “Big Data.” Within this context, we describe the U.S. exascale computing strategy: 1) the National Strategic Computing Initiative, a multiple U.S. federal agency effort comprehensively addressing computing and computational science requirements in the U.S.; 2) the Exascale Computing Initiative, a DOE effort to acquire, develop, and deploy exascale computing platforms within DOE laboratories on a given timeline; and, 3) the Exascale Computing Project (a component of the Exascale Computing Initiative), dedicated to the creation and enhancement of applications, software, and hardware technologies for exascale computers, focused on vital U.S. national security and science needs.

US House passes NIST and DOE laboratory legislation

A new speedy process for passing noncontroversial legislation has worked in favor of NIST and DOE.

Collaboration across vertical boundaries: lessons learned from the US DOE's SPI programme

The US Department of Energy has launched three vertically–integrated alliances to promote the development of high–temperature superconductivity (HTS) energy products. These alliances, part of the Superconductivity Partnership Initiative (SPI) programme, are novel to the US in that they integrate R&D, manufacturing and marketing. Each SPI arrangement focuses on a specific HTS–related product (fault current limiter, generator and motor, respectively) with assistance from DOE laboratories. These arrangements present unique challenges to managers and offer insights into collaboration and commercialization of publicly–developed energy technology.

An Increasing Role for 68Ga PET Imaging: A Perspective on the Availability of Parent 68Ge Material for Generator Manufacturing in an Expanding Market

ABSTRACTThe use of gallium-68 for molecular imaging is gaining momentum world-wide. While our understanding of68Ga chemistry, generators, and associated synthesis modules appear to have advanced to a clinically-reliable stage, uncertainty in the supply of radiopharmaceutically-suitable parent is of significant concern. In this work, we examine the current supply of68Ge in an effort to better understand the potential for expansion of manufacturing to meet an increasing demand for68Ga. Although specific information on sales and demand of68Ge is highly business sensitive and thus guarded, our examination finds no shortage in the current supply of68Ge. On the other hand, increases in the use of68Ge generators for clinical applications in the United States point to the need for continued support for production at DOE laboratories in the United States to ensure a reliable supply and suggests that new commercial facilities may be needed to meet the increasing demand.How to cite this articleSchultz MK, Donahue P, Musgrave NI, Zhernosekov K, Naidoo C, Razbash A, Tworovska I, Dick DW, Watkins GL, Graham MM, Runde W, Clanton JA, Sunderland JJ. An Increasing Role for68Ga PET Imaging: A Perspective on the Availability of Parent68Ge Material for Generator Manufacturing in an Expanding Market. J Postgrad Med Edu Res 2013;47(1):26-30.

INCREASE-ing Access to DOE Laboratory User Facilities

The Interdisciplinary Consortium for Research and Educational Access in Science and Engineering (INCREASE) promotes competitive research and education in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs). Founded in 2007 and based at Hampton University in Virginia (USA), the consortium is increasing MSI faculty utilization of national user facilities and facilitating education and research training, especially for members of groups underrepresented in science and engineering research at national facilities, such as African-Americans, Hispanics, and women. INCREASE is a multi-campus and interdisciplinary consortium including more than 40 science and engineering faculty participants from over 30 MSIs and other strategic university partners to facilitate access to world-class facilities so that faculty members can conduct cutting-edge science.

Ethanol—the primary renewable liquid fuel

AbstractThis perspective paper establishes that ethanol has a long history of very good performance as a renewable liquid fuel blended with gasoline and can be used in over 80% of the automobile and other light duty transportation vehicles. It fits very well into the future of the combination of electricity and renewable liquid fuel for such transportation. It has also been established that renewable biomass feedstock is highly oxygenated and ethanol can be produced with high yields and efficiency with some conversion technologies—particularly the ‘Hybrid’ of gasification with bioconversion—that have been developed to the commercial implementation stage. Recent major studies conducted by the USDA, DOE and major National Laboratories have projected that large and sustainable biomass feedstock supplies are available and are going to be available to efficiently produce this ethanol in very large quantities of around 340 billion liters per year in the USA. The experience gained over the past 70 years in the south‐eastern USA has been summarized to further support the fact that efficient and sustainable biomass supply can be developed and maintained to support much increased usage. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry

Comprehensive thermal hydraulics research of the very high temperature gas cooled reactor

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL), under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy, is conducting research on the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) design concept for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) Project. The reactor design will be a graphite moderated, thermal neutron spectrum reactor that will produce electricity and hydrogen in a highly efficient manner. The NGNP reactor core will be either a prismatic graphite block type core or a pebble bed core. The NGNP will use very high-burnup, low-enriched uranium, TRISO-coated fuel, and have a projected plant design service life of 60 years. The VHTR concept is considered to be the nearest-term reactor design that has the capability to efficiently produce hydrogen. The plant size, reactor thermal power, and core configuration will ensure passive decay heat removal without fuel damage or radioactive material releases during reactor core-accidents. The objectives of the NGNP Project are to: Demonstrate a full-scale prototype VHTR that is commercially licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Demonstrate safe and economical nuclear-assisted production of hydrogen and electricity. The DOE laboratories, led by the INL, perform research and development (R&D) that will be critical to the success of the NGNP, primarily in the areas of: high temperature gas reactor fuels behaviour, high temperature materials qualification, design methods development and validation, hydrogen production technologies energy conversion. This paper presents current R&D work that addresses fundamental thermal hydraulics issues that are relevant to a variety of possible NGNP designs.

Remediation of Groundwater Contaminated by Nuclear Waste: A Workshop on Accelerating Development of Practical Field‐Scale Bioremediation Models; An Online Meeting, 23 January to 20 February 2008

A Web‐based workshop sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Remediation Sciences Program (DOE/ERSP) was organized in early 2008 to assess the state of the science and knowledge gaps associated with the use of computer models to facilitate remediation of groundwater contaminated by wastes from Cold War era nuclear weapons development and production. Microbially mediated biological reactions offer a potentially efficient means to treat these sites, but considerable uncertainty exists in the coupled biological, chemical, and physical processes and their mathematical representation.Individuals from academia and DOE laboratories with expertise in modeling or microbiology and experience involving groundwater bioremediation participated in the workshop, which involved 10 hours of online meetings over a 5‐week period in early 2008 via linked audio and video communication. The objective of the workshop was to narrow the communication gap between modelers and microbiologists, engineers, and scientists, who tend to look at problems from different and sometimes divergent perspectives.

US QCD computational performance studies with PERI

We report on some of the interactions between two SciDAC projects: The National Computational Infrastructure for Lattice Gauge Theory (USQCD), and the Performance Engineering Research Institute (PERI). Many modern scientific programs consistently report the need for faster computational resources to maintain global competitiveness. However, as the size and complexity of emerging high end computing (HEC) systems continue to rise, achieving good performance on such systems is becoming ever more challenging. In order to take full advantage of the resources, it is crucial to understand the characteristics of relevant scientific applications and the systems these applications are running on. Using tools developed under PERI and by other performance measurement researchers, we studied the performance of two applications, MILC and Chroma, on several high performance computing systems at DOE laboratories. In the case of Chroma, we discuss how the use of C++ and modern software engineering and programming methods are driving the evolution of performance tools.

ESnet4: next generation network strategy, architecture, and implementation for DOE Science

The Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science is the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the US. It directly supports the research of 15,000 PhDs, PostDocs and Graduate Students, and operates major scientific facilities at DOE laboratories that serve the entire US research community: other Federal agencies, universities, and industry, as well as the international research and education (R and E) community. ESnet's mission is to provide the network infrastructure that supports the mission of the Office of Science (SC). ESnet must evolve substantially in order to continue meeting the Office of Science mission needs and this paper discusses the development of ESnet's strategy to meet these requirements through a new network architecture and implementation approach.

Update on ignition studies at CEA

This article sums up the theoretical and experimental studies about ignition. Three experiments are salient this year on the Omega laser in collaboration with DOE laboratories (1) 3 cones of beams allow to mimic the LMJ configuration and to get symmetry measurements. (2) We measured perturbations due to hydro-instability in CHGe planar samples with face-on and side-on radiographs. (3) We improved our nuclear diagnostics, particularly the neutron image system tested on direct drive implosions. As far as LMJ target design is concerned, we defined a preliminary domain corresponding to the possible operation at 2ω. At 3ω we studied the low mode instability effects on the DT deformation (due to the laser or to the target) and on the yield. The stability is clearly improved with graded doped CH for our nominal capsule L1215.

Grey literature in energy: Five years later

It is almost hard to imagine that less than ten years ago, users requesting U.S. government reports often had to wait many days and sometimes weeks to receive their paper copies or microfiche, usually via what we today call "snail mail." Five years ago, at GL'99, the Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (DOE/OSTI) presented a paper titled "Grey Literature in Energy: a Shifting Paradigm." The paper described the evolution of DOE reports delivery by OSTI from the paper and microfiche era into the electronic age of the Internet. The late 1990's saw the introduction of OSTI's DOE Information Bridge, an innovative web system that allowed users to find DOE reports and view or download the full text. In many ways, this easy access took the "hard to get" part of the grey literature definition out of the picture. Five years after presenting that paper, OSTI remains on the forefront of technology and techniques used in making grey literature even more easily accessible in a greater variety of ways. For instance, in just the past year, thanks to two OSTI initiatives, Internet searchers using the search engines Yahoo! or Google can now find individual DOE reports showing up on hit lists. This greatly expands the typical Web surfer's ability to find DOE grey literature into the depths of the Deep web. This paper will highlight more details on these and other initiatives plus give a current state of the collections, tools, access points, and partnerships that have allowed OSTI to truly bring science and energy information to the electronic desktop. First, perhaps a little background on DOE and OSTI is in order. As one of the largest sponsors of research and development for the United States, DOE supports thousands of research projects annually at the many DOE laboratories and universities across the country through contracts and grants. Researchers are required to document their research results in reports and can also submit articles to journals and present papers at conferences. OSTI partners with the DOE sites to serve as DOE's central repository for DOE research results. OSTI's mission is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making these R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the American people. Through OSTI's collections and services, the DOE research results are made available to scientists, researchers and engineers in the DOE community as well as to academia, the international science community, and science-attentive citizens. In addition to DOEfunded research, OSTI also provides research information of interest to DOE through partnerships with other federal agencies and international communities.

The impact of SciDAC on US climate change research and the IPCC AR4

SciDAC has invested heavily in climate change research. We offer a candid opinion as to the impact of the DOE laboratories' SciDAC projects on the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Electric Utilities and Water: Emerging Issues and R&D Needs

Electricity production requires a reliable, abundant, and predictable source of water, a resource that is in limited supply in parts of the United States and much of the world. The process of thermoelectric generation from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as nuclear power, is water intensive. In fact, each kWh generated requires on average approximately 25 gallons of water to produce. This means that U.S. citizens may indirectly depend upon as much water turning on the lights and running appliances as they may directly use taking showers and watering lawns. The demand for water by the electric-utility sector will compete with demands from other sectors of the economy. As such, the availability of adequate supplies of water to produce electricity and the impact of power plant operations on water quality are receiving increased attention. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) sponsored a workshop on the interdependency of water and electric energy. The workshop, held on July 23-24, 2002 in Pittsburgh, PA, was cosponsored by two other DOE laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory. The purpose of this workshop was to provide a forum for discussion of current and emerging water issues that could impact electricity generation in the United States with the overall goal of identifying opportunities for public-private partnerships to address research and development (R&D) needs. The workshop covered a number of topics 1 United States Geological Survey, Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 1995, U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1200, 1998.

HPCVIEW: A Tool for Top-down Analysis of Node Performance

It is increasingly difficult for complex scientific programs to attain a significant fraction of peak performance on systems that are based on microprocessors with substantial instruction-level parallelism and deep memory hierarchies. Despite this trend, performance analysis and tuning tools are still not used regularly by algorithm and application designers. To a large extent, existing performance tools fail to meet many user needs and are cumbersome to use. To address these issues, we developed HPCVIEW—a toolkit for combining multiple sets of program profile data, correlating the data with source code, and generating a database that can be analyzed anywhere with a commodity Web browser. We argue that HPCVIEW addresses many of the issues that have limited the usability and the utility of most existing tools. We originally built HPCVIEW to facilitate our own work on data layout and optimizing compilers. Now, in addition to daily use within our group, HPCVIEW is being used by several code development teams in DoD and DoE laboratories as well as at NCSA.

COMMUNICATION ACROSS THE BLACK SEA VIA INTERNET TECHNOLOGY

ABSTRACT The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of International Affairs has been joined by an interagency task force to undertake a program in the Black Sea region called the “Black Sea Environmental Initiative.” The objectives of the task force are to support the countries of the region to address significant Black Sea environmental issues, including oil spill response and prevention. Working with delegates from Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine, DOE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) coordinated a workshop on a regional oil spill emergency response system for the Black Sea on September 14–17, 1999 in Odessa, Ukraine; DOE and the National Academy of Science, Ukraine cosponsored the workshop. The “Black Sea Environmental Information Center” Web site was unveiled at the Odessa workshop. Created by ORNL, the Web site ( http://pims.ed.ornl.gov/blacksea) facilitates information flow and dialog between the countries of the region. The Web site is intended to provide a comprehensive source for information on: Oil spill cleanup, monitoring, and related commercial technologies Scientists' requests for research partner Various countries' laws, regulations, and standards relating to the environmental condition of the Black Sea Publication of scientific papers and on-line discussions of these issue Individuals and companies working on Black Sea environmental issues The Web site also provides a real time chat capability where meetings are organized. Several meetings among regional officials have been conducted and planning is underway for the first real-time training session, which will be held in the next few months. The Web site also is host to a growing database of historical pollution testing data from research institutes around the Black Sea.

Law enforcement tools available at the Savannah River Site

A number of nuclear technologies developed and applied at the Savannah River Site in support of nuclear weapons material production and environmental remediation can be applied to problems in law enforcement. Techniques and equipment for high-sensitivity analyses of samples are available to identify and quantify trace elements and establish origins and histories of forensic evidence removed from crime scenes. While some of these capabilities are available at local crime laboratories, state-of-the-art equipment and breakthroughs in analytical techniques are continually being developed at DOE laboratories. Extensive experience with the handling of radioactive samples at the DOE labs minimizes the chances of cross-contamination of evidence received from law enforcement. In addition to high-sensitivity analyses, many of the field techniques developed for use in a nuclear facility can assist law enforcement personnel in detecting illicit materials and operations, in retrieving of pertinent evidence and in surveying crime scenes. Some of these tools include chemical sniffers, hand-held detectors, thermal imaging, etc. In addition, mobile laboratories can be deployed to a crime scene to provide field screening of potential evidence. A variety of portable sensors can be deployed on vehicle, aerial, surface or submersible platforms to assist in the location of pertinent evidence or illicit operations. Several specific nuclear technologies available to law enforcement and their potential uses are discussed.