A knowledge continuity management program for the energy, infrastructure and knowledge systems center, Sandia National Laboratories.

A growing recognition exists in companies worldwide that, when employees leave, they take with them valuable knowledge that is difficult and expensive to recreate. The concern is now particularly acute as the large ''baby boomer'' generation is reaching retirement age. A new field of science, Knowledge Continuity Management (KCM), is designed to capture and catalog the acquired knowledge and wisdom from experience of these employees before they leave. The KCM concept is in the final stages of being adopted by the Energy, Infrastructure, and Knowledge Systems Center and a program is being applied that should produce significant annual cost savings. This report discusses how the Center can use KCM to mitigate knowledge loss from employee departures, including a concise description of a proposed plan tailored to the Center's specific needs and resources

Advanced concepts for controlling energy surety microgrids.

Today, researchers, engineers, and policy makers are seeking ways to meet the world's growing demand for energy while addressing critical issues such as energy security, reliability, and sustainability. Many believe that distributed generators operating within a microgrid have the potential to address most of these issues. Sandia National Laboratories has developed a concept called energy surety in which five of these 'surety elements' are simultaneously considered: energy security, reliability, sustainability, safety, and cost-effectiveness. The surety methodology leads to a new microgrid design that we call an energy surety microgrid (ESM). This paper discusses the unique control requirement needed to produce a microgrid system that has high levels of surety, describes the control system from the most fundamental level through a real-world example, and discusses our ideas and concepts for a complete system

Copper corrosion and its relationship to solar collectors:a compendium.

Copper has many fine qualities that make it a useful material. It is highly conductive of both heat and electricity, is ductile and workable, and reasonably resistant to corrosion. Because of these advantages, the solar water heating industry has been using it since the mid-1970s as the material of choice for collectors, the fundamental component of a solar water heating system. In most cases copper has performed flawlessly, but in some situations it has been known to fail. Pitting corrosion is the usual failure mode, but erosion can also occur. In 2000 Sandia National Laboratories and the Copper Development Association were asked to analyze the appearance of pin-hole leaks in solar collector units installed in a housing development in Arizona, and in 2002 Sandia analyzed a pitting corrosion event that destroyed a collector system at Camp Pendleton. This report includes copies of the reports and accounts of these corrosion failures, and provides a bibliography with references to many papers and articles that might be of benefit to the solar community. It consolidates in a single source information that has been accumulated at Sandia relative to copper corrosion, especially as it relates to solar water heaters

Assembly and comparison of available solar hot water system reliability databases and information.

Solar hot water (SHW) systems have been installed commercially for over 30 years, yet few quantitative details are known about their reliability. This report describes a comprehensive analysis of all of the known major previous research and data regarding the reliability of SHW systems and components. Some important conclusions emerged. First, based on a detailed inspection of ten-year-old systems in Florida, about half of active systems can be expected to fail within a ten-year period. Second, valves were identified as the probable cause of a majority of active SHW failures. Third, passive integral and thermosiphon SHW systems have much lower failure rates than active ones, probably due to their simple design that employs few mechanical parts. Fourth, it is probable that the existing data about reliability do not reveal the full extent of fielded system failures because most of the data were based on trouble calls. Often an SHW system owner is not aware of a failure because the backup system silently continues to produce hot water. Thus, a repair event may not be generated in a timely manner, if at all. This final report for the project provides all of the pertinent details about this study, including the source of the data, the techniques to assure their quality before analysis, the organization of the data into perhaps the most comprehensive reliability database in existence, a detailed statistical analysis, and a list of recommendations for additional critical work. Important recommendations include the inclusion of an alarm on SHW systems to identify a failed system, the need for a scientifically designed study to collect high-quality reliability data that will lead to design improvements and lower costs, and accelerated testing of components that are identified as highly problematic

Laboratory tests of IEC DER object models for grid applications.

This report describes a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District (SRP) and Sandia National Laboratories to jointly develop advanced methods of controlling distributed energy resources (DERs) that may be located within SRP distribution systems. The controls must provide a standardized interface to allow plug-and-play capability and should allow utilities to take advantage of advanced capabilities of DERs to provide a value beyond offsetting load power. To do this, Sandia and SRP field-tested the IEC 61850-7-420 DER object model (OM) in a grid environment, with the goal of validating whether the model is robust enough to be used in common utility applications. The diesel generator OM tested was successfully used to accomplish basic genset control and monitoring. However, as presently constituted it does not enable plug-and-play functionality. Suggestions are made of aspects of the standard that need further development and testing. These problems are far from insurmountable and do not imply anything fundamentally unsound or unworkable in the standard

Fundamental quantum optics experiments conceivable with satellites -- reaching relativistic distances and velocities

Physical theories are developed to describe phenomena in particular regimes, and generally are valid only within a limited range of scales. For example, general relativity provides an effective description of the Universe at large length scales, and has been tested from the cosmic scale down to distances as small as 10 meters. In contrast, quantum theory provides an effective description of physics at small length scales. Direct tests of quantum theory have been performed at the smallest probeable scales at the Large Hadron Collider, ${\sim} 10^{-20}$ meters, up to that of hundreds of kilometers. Yet, such tests fall short of the scales required to investigate potentially significant physics that arises at the intersection of quantum and relativistic regimes. We propose to push direct tests of quantum theory to larger and larger length scales, approaching that of the radius of curvature of spacetime, where we begin to probe the interaction between gravity and quantum phenomena. In particular, we review a wide variety of potential tests of fundamental physics that are conceivable with artificial satellites in Earth orbit and elsewhere in the solar system, and attempt to sketch the magnitudes of potentially observable effects. The tests have the potential to determine the applicability of quantum theory at larger length scales, eliminate various alternative physical theories, and place bounds on phenomenological models motivated by ideas about spacetime microstructure from quantum gravity. From a more pragmatic perspective, as quantum communication technologies such as quantum key distribution advance into Space towards large distances, some of the fundamental physical effects discussed here may need to be taken into account to make such schemes viable.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figures. Journal version, modified to respond to numerous suggestion

Advanced concepts for controlling energy surety microgrids.

Today, researchers, engineers, and policy makers are seeking ways to meet the world's growing demand for energy while addressing critical issues such as energy security, reliability, and sustainability. Many believe that distributed generators operating within a microgrid have the potential to address most of these issues. Sandia National Laboratories has developed a concept called energy surety in which five of these 'surety elements' are simultaneously considered: energy security, reliability, sustainability, safety, and cost-effectiveness. The surety methodology leads to a new microgrid design that we call an energy surety microgrid (ESM). This paper discusses the unique control requirement needed to produce a microgrid system that has high levels of surety, describes the control system from the most fundamental level through a real-world example, and discusses our ideas and concepts for a complete system

Report on the analysis of field data relating to the reliability of solar hot water systems.

Utilities are overseeing the installations of thousand of solar hot water (SHW) systems. Utility planners have begun to ask for quantitative measures of the expected lifetimes of these systems so that they can properly forecast their loads. This report, which augments a 2009 reliability analysis effort by Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), addresses this need. Additional reliability data have been collected, added to the existing database, and analyzed. The results are presented. Additionally, formal reliability theory is described, including the bathtub curve, which is the most common model to characterize the lifetime reliability character of systems, and for predicting failures in the field. Reliability theory is used to assess the SNL reliability database. This assessment shows that the database is heavily weighted with data that describe the reliability of SHW systems early in their lives, during the warranty period. But it contains few measured data to describe the ends of SHW systems lives. End-of-life data are the most critical ones to define sufficiently the reliability of SHW systems in order to answer the questions that the utilities pose. Several ideas are presented for collecting the required data, including photometric analysis of aerial photographs of installed collectors, statistical and neural network analysis of energy bills from solar homes, and the development of simple algorithms to allow conventional SHW controllers to announce system failures and record the details of the event, similar to how aircraft black box recorders perform. Some information is also presented about public expectations for the longevity of a SHW system, information that is useful in developing reliability goals