In the planning for FY2020 in the U.S. DOE NE-81 Spent Fuel and Waste Science and Technology (SFWST) Campaign, the DOE requested development of a plan for activities in the Disposal Research (DR) Research and Development (R&D) over a five (5)-year period, and DOE requested periodic updates to this plan. The DR R&D 5-year plan was provided to the DOE based on the FY2020 priorities and program structure (Sassani et al., 2020) and represents a strategic guide to the work within the DR R&D technical areas (i.e., the Control Accounts), focusing on the highest priority technical thrusts. This FY2021 report is the first update to the DR R&D 5-year plan for the SFWST Campaign DR R&D activities. This 5-year plan will be a living document and is planned to be updated periodically to provide review of accomplishments and for prioritization changes based on aspects including mission progress, external technical work, and changes in SFWST Campaign objectives and/or funding levels (i.e., Program Direction). The updates to this 5-year plan will address the DR R&D that has been completed (accomplishments) and the additional knowledge gaps to be investigated, with any updates to the DR R&D priorities for the next stages of activities.
The failure of subsurface seals (i.e., wellbores, shaft and drift seals in a deep geologic nuclear waste repository) has important implications for US Energy Security. The performance of these cementitious seals is controlled by a combination of chemical and mechanical forces, which are coupled processes that occur over multiple length scales. The goal of this work is to improve fundamental understanding of cement-geomaterial interfaces and develop tools and methodologies to characterize and predict performance of subsurface seals. This project utilized a combined experimental and modeling approach to better understand failure at cement-geomaterial interfaces. Cutting-edge experimental methods and characterization methods were used to understand evolution of the material properties during chemo-mechanical alteration of cement-geomaterial interfaces. Software tools were developed to model chemo-mechanical coupling and predict the complex interplay between reactive transport and solid mechanics. Novel, fit-for-purpose materials were developed and tested using fundamental understanding of failure processes at cement- geomaterial interfaces. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors wish to acknowledge the Earth Sciences Research Foundation for their generous support over the last three years. In particular, we thank Erik Webb for his numerous suggestions, comments, feedback, and encouragement over the course of the project. There many who helped bring this project to fruition, including: Dave Borns, Steve Bauer, Pania Newell, Heeho Park, and Doug Blankenship. There are many support personnel who we thank for their valuable contributions to the logistics and business of management side of the project, including: Tracy Woolever, Libby Sanzero, and Nancy Vermillion.
Critical infrastructure resilience has become a national priority for the U. S. Department of Homeland Security. System resilience has been studied for several decades in many different disciplines, but no standards or unifying methods exist for critical infrastructure resilience analysis. Few quantitative resilience methods exist, and those existing approaches tend to be rather simplistic and, hence, not capable of sufficiently assessing all aspects of critical infrastructure resilience. This report documents the results of a late-start Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project that investigated the development of quantitative resilience through application of control design methods. Specifically, we conducted a survey of infrastructure models to assess what types of control design might be applicable for critical infrastructure resilience assessment. As a result of this survey, we developed a decision process that directs the resilience analyst to the control method that is most likely applicable to the system under consideration. Furthermore, we developed optimal control strategies for two sets of representative infrastructure systems to demonstrate how control methods could be used to assess the resilience of the systems to catastrophic disruptions. We present recommendations for future work to continue the development of quantitative resilience analysis methods.
In this paper, we consider a boundary control problem governed by the two-dimensional Burgers equation for a configuration describing convective flow over an obstacle. Flows over obstacles are important as they arise in many practical applications. Burgers equations are also significant as they represent a simpler form of the more general Navier-Stokes momentum equation describing fluid flow. The aim of the work is to develop a reduced-order boundary control-oriented model for the system with subsequent nonlinear control law design. The control objective is to drive the full order system to a desired 2D profile. Reduced-order modeling involves the application of an L{sub 2} optimization based actuation mode expansion technique for input separation, demonstrating how one can obtain a reduced-order Galerkin model in which the control inputs appear as explicit terms. Controller design is based on averaging and center manifold techniques and is validated with full order numerical simulation. Closed-loop results are compared to a standard linear quadratic regulator design based on a linearization of the reduced-order model. The averaging/center manifold based controller design provides smoother response with less control effort and smaller tracking error.