This is the final report of a five-month, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The authors performed a preliminary design study to explore the plausibility of using pulse-tube refrigeration to cool instruments in a hot down-hole environment for the oil and gas industry or geothermal industry. They prepared and distributed a report showing that this appears to be a viable technology.

The proposed "catalytic membrane sensor" (CMS) was developed to generate a device which would selectively identify a specific reagent in a complex mixture of gases. This was to be accomplished by modifying an existing Hz sensor with a series of thin films. Through selectively sieving the desired component from a complex mixture and identifying it by decomposing it into Hz (and other by-products), a Hz sensor could then be used to detect the presence of the select component. The proposed "sandwich-type" modifications involved the deposition of a catalyst layered between two size selective sol-gel layers on a Pd/Ni resistive Hz sensor. The role of the catalyst was to convert organic materials to Hz and organic by-products. The role of the membraneo was to impart both chemical specificity by molecukir sieving of the analyte and converted product streams, as well as controlling access to the underlying Pd/Ni sensor. Ultimately, an array of these CMS elements encompassing different catalysts and membranes were to be developed which would enable improved selectivity and specificity from a compiex mixture of organic gases via pattern recognition methodologies. We have successfully generated a CMS device by a series of spin-coat deposited methods; however, it was determined that …

A review of spectroscopic imaging issues, applications, and technology is presented. Compton cameras based on solid state semiconductor detectors stands out as the best system for the nondestructive assay of special nuclear materials. A camera for this application has been designed based on an efficient specific purpose Monte Carlo code developed for this project. Preliminary experiments have been performed which demonstrate the validity of the Compton camera concept and the accuracy of the code. Based on these results, a portable prototype system is in development. Proposed future work is addressed.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report describes information pertaining to environmental issues, toxicity, environmental transport, and fate of alkanolamines and glycols associated with natural gas sweetening and dehydration operations. Waste management associated with the operations is also discussed.

Weekly Jewish newspaper from Fort Worth, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly Jewish newspaper from Fort Worth, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly Jewish newspaper from Fort Worth, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly Jewish newspaper from Fort Worth, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.

This report represents the Final Technical Progress Report for Phase II of the overall program for a cooperative research agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy - MORGANTOWN Energy Technology Center (DOE-METC) and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC). Under the agreement, SIUC will develop and demonstrate technologies for the handling, transport, and placement in abandoned underground coal mines of dry flue gas desulfurization by-products, such as fly ash, scrubber sludge, fluidized bed combustion by-products, and will assess the environmental impact of such underground placement. The overall program is divided into three (3) phases. Phase II of the program is primarily concerned with developing and testing the hardware for the actual underground placement demonstrations. Two technologies have been identified and hardware procured for full-scale demonstrations: (1) hydraulic placement, where coal combustion by-products (CCBs) will be placed underground as a past-like mixture containing about 70 to 75 percent solids; and (2) pneumatic placement, where CCBs will be placed underground as a relatively dry material using compressed air. 42 refs., 36 figs., 36 tabs.

Monthly travel magazine discussing locations and events in Texas to encourage travel within the state.

The authors present a detection process capable of directly imaging the transverse amplitude, phase, and if desired, Doppler shift of coherent electromagnetic fields. Based on coherent detection principles governing conventional heterodyned RADAR/LIDAR systems, Fourier Transform Heterodyne (FTH) incorporates transverse spatial encoding of the local oscillator for image capture. Appropriate selection of spatial encoding functions, or basis set, allows image retrieval by way of classic Fourier manipulations. Of practical interest: (1) imaging is accomplished on a single element detector requiring no additional scanning or moving components, and (2) a wide variety of appropriate spatial encoding functions exist that may be adaptively configured in real-time for applications requiring optimal detection. In this paper, they introduce the underlying principles governing FTH imaging, followed by demonstration of concept via a simple experimental setup based on a HeNe laser and a 69 element spatial phase modulator.

Alpha particle physics experiments were done on the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) during its deuterium-tritium (DT) run from 1993-1997. These experiments utilized several new alpha particle diagnostics and hundreds of DT discharges to characterize the alpha particle confinement and wave-particle interactions. In general, the results from the alpha particle diagnostics agreed with the classical single-particle confinement model in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) quiescent discharges. Also, the observed alpha particle interactions with sawteeth, toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes (TAE), and ion cyclotron resonant frequency (ICRF) waves were roughly consistent with theoretical modeling. This paper reviews what was learned and identifies what remains to be understood.

Surface and underground mining operations generate seismic ground motions which are created by chemical explosions and ground failures. It may come as a surprise to some that the ground failures (coal bumps, first caves, pillar collapses, rockbursts, etc.) can send signals whose magnitudes are as strong or stronger than those from any mining blast. A verification system that includes seismic, infrasound, hydroacoustic and radionuclide sensors is being completed as part of the CTBT. The largest mine blasts and ground failures will be detected by this system and must be identified as distinct from signals generated by small nuclear explosions. Seismologists will analyze the seismic records and presumably should be able to separate them into earthquake-like and non earthquake-like categories, using a variety of so-called seismic discriminants. Non-earthquake essentially means explosion- or implosion-like. Such signals can be generated not only by mine blasts but also by a variety of ground failures. Because it is known that single-fired chemical explosions and nuclear explosion signals of the same yield give very similar seismic records, the non-earthquake signals will be of concern to the Treaty verification community. The magnitude of the mine-related events is in the range of seismicity created by smaller nuclear explosions …

This volume of the LLE Review, covering the period October--December 1998, includes two articles addressing issues applicable to direct-drive ICF on the National Ignition Facility (NIF): laser-plasma interactions and laser-irradiation uniformity. Additional highlights of the research presented in this issue are: (1) P.B. Radha and S. Skupsky present a novel charged-particle diagnostic that performs simultaneous {rho}R measurements of the fuel, shell, and ablator regions of a compressed ICF target, consisting of an inner DT fuel region, a plastic (CH) shell, and an ablator (CD), by measuring the knock-on deuteron spectrum. (2) F. Dahmani, S. Burns, J. Lambropoulos, S. Papernov, and A. Schmid report results from stress-inhibited laser-driven crack propagation and stress-delayed damage-initiation experiments in fused silica at 351 nm. Research is underway presently to determine the ramifications of these findings for large-aperture systems, such as OMEGA. (3) V. Goncharov presents an analytic theory of the ablative Richtmyer-Meshkov instability, which shows that the main stabilizing mechanism of the ablation-front perturbations is the dynamic overpressure of the blowoff plasma with respect to the target material. The perturbation evolution during the shock transit time is studied to determine the initial conditions for the Rayleigh-Taylor phase of the instability and to analyze the level …

Weekly newspaper from De Leon, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Magazine discussing natural resources, parks, hunting and fishing, and other information related to the outdoors in Texas.

Weekly newspaper from Big Lake, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

The characteristics of fractures in unit 2 of the Tshirege Member of the Bandelier Tuff were documented in Pit 39, a newly excavated 13.7 m deep disposal pit at Material Disposal Area G on Mesita del Buey. The average spacing between fractures is about 1.0 to 1.3 m, the average fracture aperture is about 3 to 5 mm, and the average fracture dip is about 76o to 77o. Fracture spacing and dip in Pit 39 are generally consistent with that reported from other fracture studies on the Pajarito Plateau, although the fracture apertures in Pit 39 are less than reported elsewhere. Measured fracture orientations are strongly affected by biases imparted by the orientations of the pit walls, which, combined with a small data set, make identification of potential preferred orientations dlfflcult. The most prominent fracture orientations observed in Pit 39, about E-W and N20E, are often not well represented elsewhere on the Pajarito Plateau. Fracture fills contain smectite to about 3 m depth, and calcite and opal may occur at all depths, principally associated with roots or root fossils (rhizoliths). Roots of pifion pine extend in fractures to the bottom of the pit along the north side, perhaps indicating a …

We describe a general strategy we have found effective for parallelizing solid mechanics simula- tions. Such simulations often have several computationally intensive parts, including finite element integration, detection of material contacts, and particle interaction if smoothed particle hydrody- namics is used to model highly deforming materials. The need to balance all of these computations simultaneously is a difficult challenge that has kept many commercial and government codes from being used effectively on parallel supercomputers with hundreds or thousands of processors. Our strategy is to load-balance each of the significant computations independently with whatever bal- ancing technique is most appropriate. The chief benefit is that each computation can be scalably paraIlelized. The drawback is the data exchange between processors and extra coding that must be written to maintain multiple decompositions in a single code. We discuss these trade-offs and give performance results showing this strategy has led to a parallel implementation of a widely-used solid mechanics code that can now be run efficiently on thousands of processors of the Pentium-based Sandia/Intel TFLOPS machine. We illustrate with several examples the kinds of high-resolution, million-element models that can now be simulated routinely. We also look to the future and dis- cuss what possibilities …

The geological structure of the Tshirege Member of the Bandelier Tuff at Mesita del Buey, Technical Area 54, was examined using precise surveying of the contact between tuff units Iv and 2 for 3.5 km along the north wall of Pajarito Canyon and 0.6 km along the north wall of a tributary to Caiiada del Buey. Estimated structure contours on this contact indicate typical strikes of N40E to N70E along this part of Mesita del Buey, although the apparent stfike of the tuff is E-W at the western part of the survey. Typical dips are 1.OO to 2.0o to the east or southeast, with an estimated maximum dip of 3.2o near the west end of Material Disposal AreaG. Thirty seven faults with vertical displacements of 5 to 65 cm were observedin outcrops along the Pajarito Canyon traverse, and, due to the incomplete exposure of the contact between unit lV and unit 2, many more faults of this magnitude undoubtedly exist. The faults have a wide range in strike and have either down-to-the-west or down-to-the-east components of offset, although about 65% of the observed displacement is down-to-the-west or northwest. The general absence of larger-scale offsets or inflections along the contact between …

Semiweekly newspaper from Pawhuska, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semiweekly newspaper from Pawhuska, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.