The Synthetic Theater of War program, under the leadership of the Advanced Distributed Simulation Office, was redesignated a probationary Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. This new designation makes the STOW program, and the enabling technology developments, one of only six major technology thrusts being supported by the Defense Research and Development organization. Support to this technology area, has been, and will continue to be a major thrust for this contract and the follow-on contract. Over the extended period of this contract we have supported a major experimental series, the Counter Target Acquistion System (CTAS), and initiated support and development effort for STOW-97 and participated in ongoing series of experiments known as the SAFAGANZA. These efforts have seen the development of significant experiment support and analysis tools, i.e. the integration of headeye tracking to manned tactical simulation and the Simulyzer analysis system. Recently, we have initiated the development of a customized data base analysis tool to enable analysis supporting selection of communications bandwidth reduction designs and concepts. This is in direct support of the STOW effort and intrinsic to the SAFAGANZA experiments.

In coal-fired boilers, the wet limestone-gypsum based flue gas desulfurization (FGD) plants produce large volumes of wastewater containing dissolved salts and heavy metals. Before discharging these wastes to the environment, the heavy metals must be removed. One of the preferred methods for removal of heavy metals is by co-precipitation of hydroxides and sulfides of heavy metals, followed by coagulation and flocculation techniques. As a post-treatment of the resulting wastewater stream, crossflow microfiltration is being considered as a cost effective and environmentally acceptable method. However, membrane `fouling` and `concentration polarization` in such applications remain serious problems and result in flux decline of product during filtration. In this exploratory research, we investigated a novel concept: flow oscillation as a means of controlling fouling and concentration polarization. The treatment of FGD plants wastewater (simulated) by enhancing microfiltration fluxes was studied here as an example to demonstrate the oscillatory flow system in combating concentration polarization and membrane fouling in crossflow filtration. Microfiltration experiments were conducted in a tubular membrane module. From limited experimental data, it was found that flow oscillation increases the transmembrane flux when compared with the non-oscillatory flow condition. A mathematical model has been developed to evaluate the performance of a tubular …

The overall objective of this research program was to provide the fundamental knowledge and experimental data from pilot scale operation for an alternative black liquor recovery technology which would have a higher overall energy efficiency, would not suffer from the smelt-water explosion hazard and would be lower in capital cost. In addition, the alternative process would be more flexible and well suited for incremental recovery capacity or for new pulping processes, such as the new sulfide-sulfide-AQ process. The research program consists of number of specific research objectives with the aim to achieve the ultimate objective of developing an alternative recovery process which is shown in Figure 1. The specific objectives are linked to individual unit operations and they represent the following research topics: (1) superheated steam drying of kraft black liquors; (2) fast pyrolysis of black liquor; (3) hydrogen sulfide absorption from flue gas; (4) reduction of sodium sulfate in solid phase with gaseous hydrogen; and (5) verification of the fundamental results in fluidized bed pilot plant. The accomplishments in each of these objectives are described.