The primary objective of this project was to evaluate the utility of a device called the {open_quotes}beach cone{close_quotes} in combating coastal erosion. Seven initial sites were selected for testing beach cones in a variety of geometric configurations. Permits were obtained from the State of Louisiana and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to perform the work associated with this study. Six hundred beach cones were actually installed at six of the sites in late July and early August, 1992. Findings indicate that beach cones accreted significant amounts of materials along the beach of a barrier island, and they might have been instrumental in repairing an approximately 200 meter gap in the island. At the eighth installation the amount of accreted material was measured by surveys to be 2200 cubic meters (2900 cubic yards) in February of 1993, when the cones were found to have been completely covered by the material. At other test sites, accretion rates have been less dramatic but importantly, no significant additional erosion has occurred, which is a positive result. The cost of sediment accretion using beach cones was found to be about $13.72 per cubic yard, which would be much lower if the cones were mass …

This document presents sampling data resulting from the April 27, 1995, sampling of SST 241-TY-104 using the vapor sampling system.

Collaboration is increasing as physics research becomes concentrated on a few large, expensive facilities, particularly in magnetic fusion energy research, with national and international participation. These facilities are designed for steady state operation and interactive, real-time experimentation. We are developing tools to provide for the establishment of geographically distant centers for interactive operations; such centers would allow scientists to participate in experiments from their home institutions. A testbed is being developed for a Remote Experimental Environment (REE), a ``Collaboratory.`` The testbed will be used to evaluate the ability of a remotely located group of scientists to conduct research on the DIII-D Tokamak at General Atomics. The REE will serve as a testing environment for advanced control and collaboration concepts applicable to future experiments. Process-to-process communications over high speed wide area networks provide real-time synchronization and exchange of data among multiple computer networks, while the ability to conduct research is enhanced by adding audio/video communication capabilities. The Open Software Foundation`s Distributed Computing Environment is being used to test concepts in distributed control, security, naming, remote procedure calls and distributed file access using the Distributed File Services. We are exploring the technology and sociology of remotely participating in the operation of a …

Newsletter distributed to the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Forum members describing current news, policies, and legislation, as well as other information relevant to the management of low-level radioactive waste.

This paper examines the effects of relaxed synchronization on both the numerical and parallel efficiency of parallel genetic algorithms (GAs). We describe a coarse-grain geographically structured parallel genetic algorithm. Our experiments show that asynchronous versions of these algorithms have a lower run time than-synchronous GAs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this improvement in performance is partly due to the fact that the numerical efficiency of the asynchronous genetic algorithm is better than the synchronous genetic algorithm. Our analysis includes a critique of the utility of traditional parallel performance measures for parallel GAs, and we evaluate the claims made by several researchers that parallel GAs can have superlinear speedup.

The authors demonstrated a fast, wide-area, precise thermal NDE imaging system to quantify aircraft corrosion damage, such as percent metal loss, above a threshold of 5% with 3% overall uncertainties. The DBIR precise thermal imaging and detection method has been used successfully to characterize defect types, and their respective depths, in aircraft skins, and multi-layered composite materials used for wing patches, doublers and stiffeners. This precise thermal NDE inspection tool has long-term potential benefits to evaluate the structural integrity of airframes, pipelines and waste containers. They proved the feasibility of the DBIR thermal NDE imaging system to inspect concrete and asphalt-concrete bridge decks. As a logical extension to the successful feasibility study, they plan to inspect a concrete bridge deck from a moving vehicle to quantify the volumetric damage within the deck and the percent of the deck which has subsurface delaminations. Potential near-term benefits are in-service monitoring from a moving vehicle to inspect the structural integrity of the bridge deck. This would help prioritize the repair schedule for a reported 200,000 bridge decks in the US which need substantive repairs. Potential long-term benefits are affordable, and reliable, rehabilitation for bridge decks.

Newsletter of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service discussing marketing and policy information for county extension agents.