Zhiqun Daniel Deng

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory | PNNL · Energy and Environment Directorate

As oceans cover over 70% of the planet's surface, they represent a large reservoir of resources that remained vastly untapped. Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) are becoming key technology for ocean exploration. Ocean thermal gradient is a permanent and reliable energy source that can be used to power UUVs using phase change material (PCM)-based...

American shad (Alosa sapidissima) are an anadromous fish species native to North America that have an extensive range, but their populations are declining. Acoustic telemetry can play a vital role in better understanding the behavior and survival of this sensitive species, but successfully handling and tagging juvenile American shad can be challeng...

Fish that undertake juvenile migration pass through habitats that vary in mortality risk. The ability to identify regions of persistently low survival would improve fishery management. We conducted a field study combined with predictive modeling of survival in downstream migrating juvenile sea lamprey using a new micro-acoustic telemetry tag design...

As oceans cover over 70% of the planet’s surface, they represent a large reservoir of resources that remained vastly untapped. Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) are becoming key technology for ocean exploration. Ocean thermal gradient is a permanent and reliable energy source that can be used to power UUVs using phase change material (PCM)-based...

Hydrogen evolution is one of the major side reactions that is detrimental to the health of all-vanadium redox flow batteries, especially for long-term cycling. Effective, low-cost, and accurate online prediction and detection methods for hydrogen generation are not yet available. In this work, we designed an online, noninvasive ultrasonic probing a...

Most marine renewable energy (MRE) technologies are still in their infancy. Many uncertainties remain regarding MRE systems’ impacts on the marine environment and species where they are deployed, which is one of the major hurdles for these systems to be widely adopted at a commercial scale. Currently, the primary technologies to monitor marine anim...

The potential effects of underwater anthropogenic sound and substrate vibration from offshore renewable energy development on the behavior, fitness, and health of aquatic animals is a continuing concern with increased deployments and installation of these devices. Initial focus of related studies concerned offshore wind. However, over the past deca...

Underwater anthropogenic sound can cause physical, physiological, and behavioral impacts on fishes. With the development of marine energy facilities, the impact of man-made underwater sound on fishes has become a growing regulatory concern. Large gaps remain in how to perform an underwater sound assessment. Such gaps mainly reside in scientific evi...

Background Little is known about the transformer stage of the parasitic lampreys, a brief but critical period that encompasses juvenile out-migration from rivers to lakes or oceans to begin parasitic feeding. Information about this life stage could have significant conservation implications for both imperiled and invasive lampreys. We investigated...

Underwater acoustic telemetry has emerged as a powerful tool for practical applications, including resource exploration, environmental monitoring, and aquatic animal tracking. However, current acoustic telemetry systems lack the capability to transmit the collected data continuously in real time, primarily because the acoustic networking bandwidth...

To evaluate the efficiency of tagging juvenile European eels with implanted 12 mm passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags or Eel/Lamprey acoustic transmitters (ELATs), the authors studied tag retention, survival and growth of eels (7–25 g). Experimental eels were obtained from an eel farm, tagged and then released in a series of shallow dug‐out p...

Objective Study the effects of downstream passage through a novel turbine designed for fish safety, the Restoration Hydro Turbine (RHT), on American Eels Anguilla rostrata in a recirculating turbine test facility. Methods A 55‐cm‐diameter RHT was operated under 10 m of hydraulic head and 667 revolutions/min. In total, 131 eels were passed through...

The development of a hydropower facility has, in nearly all cases, some impact on natural river flows and the wider environment. This impact often includes the effect on fish, most notably curtailment of migration routes and changes to their natural habitat and ecosystem services fish is dependent on. The general relationship between fish and hydro...

Global climate change, species invasion, and human activities such as the construction of hydraulic facilities are contributing to the worldwide degradation of fish stocks. As a pivotal environmental factor that affects fish migration and population distribution, the low‐velocity flow has not drawn enough attention despite its extensive presence in...

Acoustic emissions from current energy converters remain an environmental concern for regulators because of their potential effects on marine life and uncertainties about their effects stemming from a lack of sufficient observational data. Several recent opportunities to characterize tidal turbine sound emissions have begun to fill knowledge gaps a...

Thermal gradient energy-generation technologies for powering unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) or autonomous sensing systems in the ocean are mainly in the research development phase or commercially available at a limited scale, and salinity-gradient energy-generation technologies have not been adequately researched yet. The demand for self-power...

Cylindrical triboelectric nanogenerators (C-TENGs) have been designed for low frequency wave energy harvesting. However, the random and low amplitude and frequency of the ocean waves represent a major challenge for the operation and performance of most C-TENGs. A C-TENG must be able to operate and be triggered by any wave conditions, even in the mi...

The global prevalence of pumped-storage hydropower (PSH) is expected to grow exponentially as countries transition to renewable energy sources. Compared to conventional hydropower, little is currently known regarding PSH impacts on aquatic biota. This study estimated the survival of five life stages (egg, two larval stages, juvenile and adult) of r...

Insufficient service life and the resulting need for battery replacements have been a great challenge for implantable electronic devices. This is particularly true for animal tracking applications, because recapturing animals is often unlikely once they are released to the wild. To tackle this problem, we developed a biomechanical energy harvester...

Background A new technology for a self-powered acoustic tag (SPT) was developed for active tracking of juvenile fish, intended to avoid the typical battery life constraints associated with active telemetry technology. We performed a laboratory study to evaluate a subdermal tagging technique for the SPT and effects of the tag on survival, tag retent...

This paper presents the conceptual design, preliminary experimental validation, and performance evaluation of a novel bio-inspired bi-stable piezoelectric energy harvester for self-powered animal telemetry tags. The overall conceptual design, which includes a bio-inspired attachment and a bi-stable piezoelectric energy harvester, is introduced firs...

Climbing on a vertical ship hull underwater while using surface cleaning tools remains a great challenge for climbing robots. In this study, we design a negative-pressure adsorptive underwater climbing robot using the Bernoulli negative-pressure generation mechanism. Computational fluid dynamics modelling is performed with a sliding mesh to explore...

In vivo electronic monitoring systems for underwater applications are promising technologies for obtaining information about aquatic animals. State-of-the-art devices are constrained by limits on the number of integrated sensors, large dimensions and weight, and short device longevity. Here, we report the Lab-on-a-Fish: the world’s first biotelemet...

Hydropower is the largest renewable energy source, accounting for about 60% of all renewable electricity globally.1 In the U.S., hydropower provides nearly 7% of the nation’s electricity and 52% of its renewable electricity generation,2 as well as supports about 87,000 jobs in project development and deployment, manufacturing, and operations and ma...

In animal tracking applications, smaller transmitters can reduce the impact of the transmitter on the tagged animal and thus provide more accurate data about animal behavior. By combining a novel circuit design and a newly developed micro-battery, we developed frequency-programmable and more powerful radio frequency transmitters that are about 40%...

Acoustic telemetry has been used extensively to study the behavior of aquatic animals. The Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System (JSATS) is one such system; it was developed for studying juvenile salmonids but has been used to study numerous species. A recent innovation of the JSATS system is an acoustic transmitter that is small enough to be i...

Adult American eels (Anguilla rostrata) are vulnerable to hydropower turbine mortality during outmigration from growth habitat in inland waters to the ocean where they spawn. Imaging sonar is a reliable and proven technology for monitoring of fish passage and migration; however, there is no efficient automated method for eel detection. We designed...

Conservation of aquatic species requires in-depth understanding of their movement and behavior and their interactions with man-made hydraulic structures. Acoustic telemetry is a primary method to remotely track in 3 dimensions (3D) aquatic animals implanted with transmitters. The transmitter’s weight and size are the major limiting factors because...

Two laboratory studies evaluated small Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (36–99 mm fork length [FL], 0.7–26.7% tag burden) survival, tag retention, and growth (n = 539), and critical swimming speed (Ucrit; n = 241). Fish were implanted with a new active acoustic tag and compared to untagged controls at 12 °C and 17 °C. Across studies no tempe...

Light environment significantly impacts the effectiveness of fish population restoration in developed watersheds, subserving fish passage reconstruction in hydraulic complex and habitat rehabilitation. To develop an interior connection between light-related fish response from the laboratory and field fish conservation practice, we employed a new in...

Renewable power generated from ocean wave energy has faced technological and cost barriers that have hindered its penetration into utility-scale electricity markets. As an alternative, the production of chemical fuels—for example, ammonia (NH 3 ), which has high energy density (11.5 MJ/L) and facile storage properties—may open wave energy to new ma...

Pumped hydroelectric energy storage (PHES) projects are being considered worldwide to achieve renewable energy targets and to stabilize baseload energy supply from intermittent renewable energy sources. Unlike conventional hydroelectric systems that only pass water downstream, a feature of PHES schemes is that they rely on bi-directional water flow...

There are two strategies to lower overall project costs to an extent that will make many potential sustainable hydropower sites economically viable: (1) design standardized/modular components; (2) use advanced tools to reduce environmental evaluation costs. In this study an autonomous sensor device (Sensor Fish) was used to study a Francis turbine...

Monitoring at a carbon storage site is necessary to track the movement of CO2 and assure permanence for geologic storage. Therefore, advanced monitoring technologies and effective methods to transmit data from downhole to the surface are needed to decrease the cost and uncertainty in measurements and satisfy regulations for tracking the fate of sub...

Rechargeable lithium metal batteries are being intensively studied in recent years because of their high energy density which potentially could double the cell energy of state-of-art Li-ion batteries. However, cell design of realistic high-energy Li metal batteries is quite different with Li-ion batteries, not mentioning prediction of cycle life. A...

An automatic system that utilizes data analytics and machine learning to identify adult American eel in data obtained by imaging sonars is created in this study. Wavelet transform has been applied to de-noise the ARIS sonar data and a convolutional neural network model has been built to classify eels and non-eel objects. Because of the unbalanced a...

High-energy rechargeable lithium metal batteries have been intensively revisited in recent years. Since more researchers started to use pouch cell as the platform to study the fundamentals at relevant scales, safe testing and handling of lithium metal and high-energy lithium metal batteries have become critical. Cautions and safety procedures are n...

In article number 1900494 by Zhiqun Daniel Deng, Wei Wang, and co‐workers, an ultrasonic probing approach that can measure the acoustic properties of a vanadium redox flow battery electrolyte is designed to monitor the state‐of‐charge (SOC) of flow batteries online noninvasively. The SOC estimated from the acoustic attenuation coefficient is found...

Recently, an acoustic microtag, called the Eel–Lamprey Acoustic Tag (ELAT), was developed for use in juvenile American Eel Anguilla rostrata and Pacific Lamprey Entosphenus tridentatus. The ELAT (12.0 × 2.0 mm; 0.088 g in air) has the potential to be used to study other small‐bodied fishes. In this pilot study, juvenile Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus...

A machine-learning-based method is developed to detect American eels from ARIS sonar data through several analyses: (1) utilize wavelet transform to filter noises and enhance sonar images; (2) extract individual targets from the training image data with a screening and threshold approach; (3) identify multiple candidate objects from training and te...

Recent research conducted by NOAA’s Manchester Research Laboratory has provided strong evidence of a substantial migration interference and increased mortality risk of steelhead smolts associated with the Hood Canal Bridge, which drives the need to investigate the sound and vibration generated by the vehicles crossing the bridge. A month-long monit...

Redox flow battery technology has been increasingly recognized as a promising option for large‐scale grid energy storage. Access to high‐fidelity information on the health status of the electrolyte, including the state‐of‐charge (SOC), is vital to maintaining optimal and economical battery operation. In this study, an ultrasonic probing cell that c...

The Mekong River is one of the most biodiverse rivers on Earth. Many communities located near the river rely on fisheries for sustenance and economics. Along the Mekong River mainstem there are plans for 11 new hydropower projects, with potentially several hundred smaller projects along tributaries. To understand the hydraulic conditions at existin...

Irrigation modernisation is booming globally because of the increasing demand on water and food. However, irrigation infrastructures can injure fish or entrain them into irrigation water. Screening is an effective method to mitigate fish entrainment. In this study, two autonomous sensor devices, developed and manufactured at Pacific Northwest Natio...

Many riverine fish species disperse downstream as eggs, juveniles, or adults, which can expose them to injury and death at hydraulic structures. Low-head weirs are one example of a structure that can kill fish, and this impact has been shown to be substantially higher for undershot weirs when compared to overshot weirs. In this study, autonomous se...

The effect of the fish body on the source level and beam pattern of an acoustic fish tag signal was investigated through laboratory experiments and an analytical method. In laboratory experiments, the source level and beam pattern were measured in both a tag-only group and a tag-in-fish group. In the analytical method, both forward and backward sca...

Structural simplification and efficient hydraulic performance are key to effectively utilizing ultra-low head water power resources and reducing hydroelectric unit costs. In this study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method was used to predict hydraulic performance of an axial turbine at the Gaoliangjian power station. CFD results agreed well...

Water temperature has manifold effects on the biology of Pacific salmon. Thermal optima enable Pacific salmon to maximize growth while temperatures above thermal optima can induce stress and lead to mortality. This study investigated the impacts of climatic changes and water management practices on Chinook and Steelhead smolts in the Columbia River...

Juvenile Pacific Lamprey and American eels were used for laboratory evaluations to determine potential effects from tag implantation. Telemetry technology has been identified as a way to obtain more detailed information on movement and behavior across a broader spatial scale than is possible with other known technology. The purpose of this method i...

Stream sites are abundantly available for small, ultra low head, hydropower applications with minimal environmental and ecological impacts compared to large-scale hydropower projects. However, little attention has been paid to these resources because of the relatively high weight and deployment costs of small turbines compared to the amount of powe...

The development of flexible and stretchable sensors has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. In particular, stretchable, skin-like, wearable sensors are desirable for a variety of potential applications such as personalized health monitoring, human-machine interfaces, and environmental sensing. In this paper, we review recent advanc...

One of the most cost-effective and environmentally sound methods of developing hydropower is through the uprating of hydroelectric turbines. In many countries hydroelectric dams have turbines that are approaching their expected service life, with plans underway to install replacement turbines that are expected to improve fish passage survival. To v...

Siphon turbines are an attractive type of small-scale hydropower turbines because they can be retrofitted into existing structures where there is already a drop in water elevation. A siphon turbine conveys water from an upper reservoir to a lower reservoir through the use of a siphon structure that goes over the top of the dam. A small, neutrally b...

Fish-collection and transportation systems (FCTS) have been introduced and applied as innovative approaches to facilitate fish passage in China for several years. The efficacy of FCTSs depends directly on the efficiency of the fish-guidance measures employed. In this study, the effects of three parameters—water flow, artificial lighting, and bubble...

Hydropower is one of the most important energy sources: it accounts for more than 80% of the world’s renewable electricity and 16% of the world’s electricity. Significantly more hydropower capacity is planned to be developed. However, hydro-structures, including hydroelectric dams, may have adverse biological effects on fish, especially on migrator...

Egg and larval fish drifting downstream are likely to encounter river infrastructure leading to mortality. Elevated fluid shear is one likely cause. To confirm this and determine tolerable strain rates resulting from fluid shear, egg and larvae of three Australian species were exposed to a high-velocity, submerged jet in a laboratory flume. Mortali...

Machine learning classification and regression algorithms were applied to calibrate the localization errors of a time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA)-based acoustic sensor array used for tracking salmon passage through a hydroelectric dam on the Snake River, Washington, USA. The locations of stationary and mobile acoustic tags were first tracked using...

The current minimum size for tagging Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha in the Columbia River Basin with acoustic transmitters is ≥ 95 mm fork length (FL). Using a newly developed cylindrical micro‐acoustic transmitter (AT; weight in air = 0.22 g), our objective was to evaluate the minimum size for tagging Chinook Salmon. We measured survival...

Approximately 16% of the world's electricity and over 80% of the world's renewable electricity is generated from hydropower resources, and there is potential for developing significantly more new hydropower capacity. In practice, however, optimizing the use of potential hydropower resources is limited by various factors, including environmental eff...

To acquire 3-D tracking data on juvenile salmonids, Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System (JSATS) cabled hydrophone arrays were deployed in the forebays of two dams on the Snake River and at a mid-reach reservoir between the dams. The depth distributions of fish were estimated by statistical analyses performed on large 3-D tracking data sets fr...

Spillway passage is one of the commonly accepted dam passage alternatives for downstream-migrating salmonids and other species. Fish passing in spill near the water surface may have improved chances of survival over fish that pass deeper in the water column near spillway structures. In this study, an autonomous sensor device (Sensor Fish) was deplo...

Crystalline Li7P3S11 is a promising solid electrolyte for all solid state lithium/lithium ion batteries. A controllable liquid phase synthesis of Li7P3S11 is more desirable compared to conventional mechanochemical synthesis, but recent attempts suffer from reduced ionic conductivities. Here we elucidate the formation mechanism of crystalline Li7P3S...

Knowing the kinds of physical stress experienced by fish passing through hydropower turbines can help optimise technologies and improve fish passage. This paper assesses the hydraulic conditions experienced through three different low-head turbines (a very low head (VLH), Archimedes screw and horizontal Kaplan turbine), taken using an autonomous se...

Surface bypasses are downstream migration structures that can help reduce hydropower-induced damage to migrating fish. However, no comprehensive design concept that facilitates good surface bypass performance for a wide range of sites and species is available. This is why fish-passage efficiencies at recently built bypass structures vary widely bet...

Global hydropower development is one solution proposed to address the increase in energy needs. However, hydropower-related impacts on riverine ecological systems are not well understood. The Mekong River Basin (MRB) is one of the world's largest waterways and is presently experiencing significant hydropower expansion. It is also one of the most bi...