Physical Vulnerability of Electric Systems to Natural Disasters and Sabotage

This report offers an analysis of the vulnerability of electric power system specific equipment which is included in a separate appendix that is under classification review by the Department of Energy. This appendix will be made available only under appropriate safeguards by the Department of Energy

Power-to-heat for renewable energy integration: A review of technologies, modeling approaches, and flexibility potentials

A flexible coupling of power and heat sectors can contribute to both renewable energy integration and decarbonization. We present a literature review of model-based analyses in this field, focusing on residential heating. We compare geographical and temporal research scopes and identify state-of-the-art analytical model formulations, particularly considering heat pumps and thermal storage. While numerical findings are idiosyncratic to specific assumptions, a synthesis of results indicates that power-to-heat technologies can cost-effectively contribute to fossil fuel substitution, renewable integration, and decarbonization. Heat pumps and passive thermal storage emerge as particularly favorable options.EC/H2020/646116/EU/Realising Value from Electricity Markets with Local Smart Electric Thermal Storage Technology/RealValu

NASA Probe Study Report: Farside Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets (FARSIDE)

This is the final report submitted to NASA for a Probe-class concept study of the "Farside Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets" (FARSIDE), a low radio frequency interferometric array on the farside of the Moon. The design study focused on the instrument, a deployment rover, the lander and base station, and delivered an architecture broadly consistent with the requirements for a Probe mission. This notional architecture consists of 128 dipole antennas deployed across a 10 km area by a rover, and tethered to a base station for central processing, power and data transmission to the Lunar Gateway, or an alternative relay satellite. FARSIDE would provide the capability to image the entire sky each minute in 1400 channels spanning frequencies from 150 kHz to 40 MHz, extending down two orders of magnitude below bands accessible to ground-based radio astronomy. The lunar farside can simultaneously provide isolation from terrestrial radio frequency interference, auroral kilometric radiation, and plasma noise from the solar wind. This would enable near-continuous monitoring of the nearest stellar systems in the search for the radio signatures of coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events, and would also detect the magnetospheres for the nearest candidate habitable exoplanets. Simultaneously, FARSIDE would be used to characterize similar activity in our own solar system, from the Sun to the outer planets. Through precision calibration via an orbiting beacon, and exquisite foreground characterization, FARSIDE would also measure the Dark Ages global 21-cm signal at redshifts from 50-100. It will also be a pathfinder for a larger 21-cm power spectrum instrument by carefully measuring the foreground with high dynamic range

Efficient Reliability Modelling & Analysis of Complex Systems with Application to Nuclear Power Plant Safety

Nuclear power may be our best chance at a permanent solution to the world's energy challenges, owing to its sustainability and environmental friendliness. However, it also poses a great risk to life, property, and the economy, given the possibility of severe accidents during its generation. These accidents are a result of the susceptibility of the generating plants to component failure, human error, extreme environmental events, targeted attacks, and natural disasters. Given the complexity and high interconnectivity of the systems in question, a small glitch, otherwise known as an initiating event, could cascade to catastrophic consequences. It is, therefore, vital that the vulnerability of a plant to these glitches and their ensuing consequences be ascertained, to ensure that the appropriate mitigating actions are taken. The reliability of a system is the likelihood that it survives a defined period and its availability is the likelihood of it being capable of performing its required functions on demand. These quantities are important to a nuclear power plant's safety because, a nuclear power plant by default is equipped with safety systems to inhibit the propagation of an initiating event. An accident ensues if the safety systems required to mitigate some initiating event are unavailable or incapacitated by the initiating event. It is, therefore, easy to see that the reliability, as well as the availability of these systems, shape the safety of the plant. These crucial quantities, currently, are estimated using legacy techniques like static fault and event tree analyses or their derivatives. Despite their popularity and widely acclaimed success, these legacy techniques lack the flexibility to implement fully the operational dynamics of the majority of systems. Most importantly, their ease of application deteriorates with increasing system size and complexity, such that the analyst is often forced to make unrealistic assumptions. These unrealistic assumptions sometimes compromise the accuracy of the results obtained and subsequently, the quality of the risk management decisions reached. Their inadequacy is often amplified if the system is composed of multi-state components or characterised by epistemic uncertainties, induced by vague or imprecise data. The ideal approach, therefore, should be sufficiently robust to not necessitate unrealistic assumptions but flexible enough to accommodate realistic system attributes, while guaranteeing accuracy. This dissertation provides a detailed account of a series of computationally efficient system reliability analysis techniques proposed to address the limitations of the existing probabilistic risk assessment approaches. The proposed techniques are based mainly, on an advanced hybrid event-driven Monte Carlo simulation technique that invokes load-flow principles to resolve, intuitively, the difficulties associated with the topological complexity of systems and the multi-state attributes of their components. In addition to their intuitiveness and relative completeness, a key advantage of the proposed techniques is their general applicability. They have been applied, for instance, to a variety of problems, ranging from the production availability of an offshore oil installation and the maintenance strategy optimization of the IEEE-24 bus test system to the probabilistic risk assessment of station blackout accidents at the Maanshan nuclear power plant in Taiwan. The proposed techniques, therefore, should influence robust decisions in the risk management of not only nuclear power plants but other critical systems as well. They have been incorporated into the open-source uncertainty quantification tool, OpenCossan, to render them readily available to industry and other researchers

NASA SBIR abstracts of 1990 phase 1 projects

The research objectives of the 280 projects placed under contract in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 1990 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 program are described. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses in response to NASA's 1990 SBIR Phase 1 Program Solicitation. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 280, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. The document also includes Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference in the 1990 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA field center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number

MOOSE: Manned On-Orbit Servicing Equipment

The ability to service satellites has thus far been limited to low earth orbit platforms within reach of the Space Shuttle. Other orbits, such as geosynchronous orbits containing high-value spacecraft have not been attainable by a servicing vehicle. The useful life of a satellite can be extended by replacing spent propellant and damaged orbital replacement units, forestalling the need for eventual replacement. This growing need for satellite on-orbits servicing can be met by the Manned On-Orbit Servicing Equipment (MOOSE). Missions requiring orbit transfer capability, precision manipulation and maneuvering, and man-in-the-loop control can be accomplished using MOOSE. MOOSE is a flexible, reusable, single operator, aerobraking spacecraft designed to refuel, repair, and service orbiting spacecraft. MOOSE will be deployed from Space Station Freedom, (SSF), where it will be stored, resupplied, and refurbished

Technology 2002: the Third National Technology Transfer Conference and Exposition, Volume 1

The proceedings from the conference are presented. The topics covered include the following: computer technology, advanced manufacturing, materials science, biotechnology, and electronics