Programmatic operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Plutonium Facility (TA-55) involve working with various amounts of plutonium and other highly toxic, alphaemitting materials. The spread of radiological contamination on surfaces and airborne contamination and excursions of contaminants into the operator's breathing zone are prevented through the use of a variety of gloveboxes. Through an integrated approach, controls have been developed and implemented through an efficient Glovebox Glove Integrity Program (GGJP). A key element of this program is to consider measures that lower the overall risk of glovebox operations. Line management owning glovebox processes through this program make decisions on which type of glovebox gloves (the weakest component of this safety significant system) would perform in these aggressive environments. As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) considerations must be balanced with glove durability and worker dexterity, both of which affect the final overall risk of the operation. In the past, lead-loaded (leaded) glovebox gloves made from Hypalon(reg.) had been the workhorse of programmatic operations at TA-55. Replacing leaded gloves with unleaded gloves for certain operations would lower the overall risk as well as reduced the amount of mixed TRU waste. This effort contributes to Los Alamos National Laboratory Continuous Improvement Program …

A way to explain the puzzling difference between the pion form factor as measured in e{sup +}e{sup -} annihilations and in {tau} decays is discussed. We show that isospin symmetry breaking, beside the already identified effects, produces also a full mixing between the {rho}{sup 0}, {omega} and {phi} mesons which generates an isospin 0 component inside the {rho}{sup 0} meson. This effect, not accounted for in current treatments of the problem, seems able to account for the apparent mismatch between e{sup +}e{sup -} and {tau} data below the {phi} mass.

In recent work (Nourgaliev, Liou, Theofanous, JCP in press) we demonstrated that numerical simulations of interfacial flows in the presence of strong shear must be cast in dynamically sharp terms (sharp interface treatment or SIM), and that moreover they must meet stringent resolution requirements (i.e., resolving the critical layer). The present work is an outgrowth of that work aiming to overcome consequent limitations on the temporal treatment, which become still more severe in the presence of phase change. The key is to avoid operator splitting between interface motion, fluid convection, viscous/heat diffusion and reactions; instead treating all these non-linear operators fully-coupled within a Newton iteration scheme. To this end, the SIM’s cut-cell meshing is combined with the high-orderaccurate implicit Runge-Kutta and the “recovery” Discontinuous Galerkin methods along with a Jacobian-free, Krylov subspace iteration algorithm and its physics-based preconditioning. In particular, the interfacial geometry (i.e., marker’s positions and volumes of cut cells) is a part of the Newton-Krylov solution vector, so that the interface dynamics and fluid motions are fully-(non-linearly)-coupled. We show that our method is: (a) robust (L-stable) and efficient, allowing to step over stability time steps at will while maintaining high-(up to the 5th)-order temporal accuracy; (b) fully conservative, …

CRAB (CMS Remote Analysis Builder) is the tool used by CMS to enable running physics analysis in a transparent manner over data distributed across many sites. It abstracts out the interaction with the underlying batch farms, grid infrastructure and CMS workload management tools, such that it is easily usable by non-experts. CRAB can be used as a direct interface to the computing system or can delegate the user task to a server. Major efforts have been dedicated to the client-server system development, allowing the user to deal only with a simple and intuitive interface and to delegate all the work to a server. The server takes care of handling the users jobs during the whole lifetime of the users task. In particular, it takes care of the data and resources discovery, process tracking and output handling. It also provides services such as automatic resubmission in case of failures, notification to the user of the task status, and automatic blacklisting of sites showing evident problems beyond what is provided by existing grid infrastructure. The CRAB Server architecture and its deployment will be presented, as well as the current status and future development. In addition the experience in using the system for …

This study examines the dynamics of two-phase drainage with experiments of air invasion into a translucent water-saturated porous medium, at low injection speeds. Air displaces the water by irregular bursts of motion, suddenly invading small portions of the medium. These periods of activity, followed by dormancy, are similar to descriptions of systems at a self-organized critical point, where a slight disturbance may induce an avalanche of activity. The fractal characteristics of the invading air structure at breakthrough are examined through static (box-counting) calculations of the air mass and through an evaluation of the time-dependent motion of the invading mass; results are compared with prior low-velocity two-phase studies in porous media. Dynamic, power-law scaling for invasion percolation is shown to be well suited to describing the structure of the invading fluid. To examine the applicability of self-organized criticality predictions to the invading fluid movement, a new image analysis procedure was developed to identify the location of individual bursting events during the drainage experiments. The predictions of selforganized criticality, namely the scaling of the occurrence of bursts to the mass of the bursts and a spatio-temporal randomness of different sized bursts, are also examined. Bursts of a wide range of sizes are …

A thermodynamic analysis of graded ferroelectric films demonstrates that in the equilibrium state the films are subdivided into a single-domain band and a polydomain band which consists of wedge-shape domains. Polarization under an external electrostatic field proceeds through an inter-band boundary movement due to growth or shrinkage of the wedge domains. It is shown how the domain structure and evolution are determined by the principal characteristics of the film: the distribution of the spontaneous polarization and dielectric constant. Graded films exhibit a sharp increase of polarization with the field for weak fields, with a drop of the dielectric constant when the field is increasing. A general approach to finding the dependence of the displacement and the wedge-domain shape on the field as well as analytical solutions for the p{sup 4} Landau-Devonshire and parabolic potentials are presented.

An ultra-fine, sub-micron discrete grid is used to capture the unsteady dynamics of a one-dimensional detonation in an inviscid O - O{sub 2} - O{sub 3} mixture. The ultra-fine grid is necessary to capture the length scales revealed by a complementary analysis of the steady detonation wave structure. For the unsteady calculations, shock-fitting coupled with a high order spatio-temporal discretization scheme combine to render numerical corruption negligible. As a result, mathematically verified solutions for a mixture initially of all O{sub 3} at one atmosphere and 298.15 K have been obtained; the solutions are converging at a rate much faster than the sub-first order convergence rate of all shock-capturing schemes. Additionally, the model has been validated against limited experimental data. Transient calculations show that strongly overdriven waves are stable and moderately overdriven waves unstable. New limit cycle behavior is revealed, and the first high resolution bifurcation diagram for etonation with detailed kinetics is found.

The X501 experiment was conducted in EBR II as part of the Integral Fast Reactor program to demonstrate minor actinide burning through the use of a homogeneous recycle scheme. The X501 subassembly contained two metallic fuel elements loaded with relatively small quantities of americium and neptunium. Interest in the behavior of minor actinides (MA) during fuel irradiation has prompted further examination of existing X501 data and generation of new data where needed in support of the U.S. waste transmutation effort. The X501 experiment is one of the few MA bearing fuel irradiation tests conducted worldwide, and knowledge can be gained by understanding the changes in fuel behavior due to addition of MAs. Of primary interest are the effect of the MAs on fuel cladding chemical interaction and the redistribution behavior of americium. The quantity of helium gas release from the fuel and any effects of helium on fuel performance are also of interest. It must be stressed that information presented at this time is based on the limited PIE conducted in 1995–1996 and, currently, represents a set of observations rather than a complete understanding of fuel behavior. This report provides a summary of the X501 fabrication, characterization, irradiation, and post …

A reference design for a commercial-scale high-temperature electrolysis (HTE) plant for hydrogen production was developed to provide a basis for comparing the HTE concept with other hydrogen production concepts. The reference plant design is driven by a high-temperature helium-cooled reactor coupled to a direct Brayton power cycle. The reference design reactor power is 600 MWt, with a primary system pressure of 7.0 MPa, and reactor inlet and outlet fluid temperatures of 540°C and 900°C, respectively. The electrolysis unit used to produce hydrogen consists of 4,009,177 cells with a per-cell active area of 225 cm2. A nominal cell area-specific resistance, ASR, value of 0.4 Ohm•cm2 with a current density of 0.25 A/cm2 was used, and isothermal boundary conditions were assumed. The optimized design for the reference hydrogen production plant operates at a system pressure of 5.0 MPa, and utilizes an air-sweep system to remove the excess oxygen that is evolved on the anode side of the electrolyzer. The inlet air for the air-sweep system is compressed to the system operating pressure of 5.0 MPa in a four-stage compressor with intercooling. The alternating current, AC, to direct current, DC, conversion is 96%. The overall system thermal-to-hydrogen production efficiency (based on the low …

A condition for Electron Cyclotron Resonance (ECR) can be established inside a fully assembled RF cavity without the need for removing high-power couplers. As such, plasma generated by this process can be used as a final cleaning step, or as an alternative cleaning step in place of other techniques. Tests showed filtered dry air plasma can successfully remove sulfur particles on niobium surface while the surface oxygen content remains intact.

We study the edge states in graphene in the presence of a magnetic field perpendicular to the plane of the lattice. Most of the work done so far discusses the edge states in either zigzag or armchair edge graphene considering an isotropic electron hopping. In practice, graphene can have a mixture of armchair and zigzag edges and the electron hopping can be anisotropic, which is the subject of this article. We predict that the mixed edges smear the enhanced local density of states (LDOS) at E=0 of the zigzag edge and, on the other hand, the anisotropic hopping gives rise to the enhanced LDOS at E=0 in the armchair edge. The behavior of the LDOS can be studied using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments. We suggest that care must be taken while interpreting the STM data, because the clear distinction between the zigzag edge (enhanced LDOS at E=0) and armchair edge (suppressed LDOS at E=0) can be lost if the hopping is not isotropic and if the edges are mixed.

The effect of H2S on the performance of a hydrogen separation membrane with the composition Pd4Pt was evaluated at 350, 400 and 450°C. Exposure to hydrogen containing 1000 ppm H2S and 10%He resulted in two performance trends. At 350°C, a continuous decline in flux was observed which was attributed to the growth of sulphide corrosion on the membrane surface linked to surface contamination by stainless steel derived particles. At 400 and 450°C, the H2 flux decreased sharply followed by a slow recovery. This trend was attributed to Pt enrichment of the surface resulting from extraction of Pd through the formation of Pd4Pt. Also at 400 and 450°C, stainless steel based particle contamination was found to modify and/or enhance the corrosive effects of the H2S containing test gas. The implications of the metallic and/or metal sulphide surface contaminant effects are significant in that these contaminants could result in severe performance degradation and ultimately even mechanical failure.

Identifying community structure can be a potent tool in the analysis and understanding of the structure of complex networks. Up to now, methods for evaluating the performance of identification algorithms use ad-hoc networks with communities of equal size. We show that inhomogeneities in community sizes can and do affect the performance of algorithms considerably, and propose an alternative method which takes these factors into account. Furthermore, we propose a simple modification of the algorithm proposed by Newman for community detection (Phys. Rev. E 69 066133) which treats communities of different sizes on an equal footing, and show that it outperforms the original algorithm while retaining its speed.

We have studied hydrogen diffusion in plasma hydrogenated Si/SiGe/Si heterostructure at different temperatures. At low temperature, intrinsic point defects in the molecular beam epitaxy grown Si capping layer are found to compete with the buried strain SiGe layer for hydrogen trapping. The interaction of hydrogen with point defects affects the hydrogen long-range diffusion, and restricts the amount of hydrogen available for trapping by the SiGe layer. However, hydrogen trapping by the capping layer is attenuated with increasing hydrogenation temperature allowing more hydrogen to be trapped in the strain SiGe layer with subsequent surface blister formation. A potential temperature window for plasma hydrogenation induced layer separation is identified based on the combined considerations of trap-limited diffusion at low temperature and outdiffusion of H{sub 2} molecule together with the dissociation of Si-H bonds inside of H platelet at high temperature.

In 2005, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) began discussing regulatory policy for reactive-power procurement and pricing in competitive electricity markets. This paper summarizes findings from a unique, interdisciplinary program of public-interest research that lays a formal foundation for evaluating aspects of FERC staff recommendations and offers early insights that should be useful in guiding policy implementation, specifically by: (1) clarifying the consumers and economic characteristics of reactive power as a basis for creating incentives to appropriately price it, (2) defining specific challenges in creating a competitive market for reactive power as well as new tools needed to help ensure such a market functions efficiently, and (3) demonstrating the importance of accounting for the physical characteristics of the transmission network in planning for reactive power and avoiding the exercise of market power by suppliers.

We present a numerical framework to model the electrokinetic transport in microchannels with random roughness. The three-dimensional microstructure of the rough channel is generated by a random generation-growth method with three statistical parameters to control the number density, the total volume fraction, and the anisotropy characteristics of roughness elements. The governing equations for the electrokinetic transport are solved by a high-efficiency lattice Poisson?Boltzmann method in complex geometries. The effects from the geometric characteristics of roughness on the electrokinetic transport in microchannels are therefore modeled and analyzed. For a given total roughness volume fraction, a higher number density leads to a lower fluctuation because of the random factors. The electroosmotic flow rate increases with the roughness number density nearly logarithmically for a given volume fraction of roughness but decreases with the volume fraction for a given roughness number density. When both the volume fraction and the number density of roughness are given, the electroosmotic flow rate is enhanced by the increase of the characteristic length along the external electric field direction but is reduced by that in the direction across the channel. For a given microstructure of the rough microchannel, the electroosmotic flow rate decreases with the Debye length. It is …

New photovoltaic and photocatalysis applications have been recently proposed based on the hybrid Ru(II)-bipyridine-complex/semiconductor quantum dot systems. In order to attach the Ru(II) complex to the surface of a semiconductor, a linking bridge -- a carboxyl group -- needs to be added to one or two of the 2,2'-bipyridine (bpy) ligands. Such changes in the ligand structure affect electronic and optical properties and, consequently, the charge transfer reactivity of Ru(II)-systems. In this study, we analyze the effects brought by functionalization of bipyridine ligands with the methyl, carboxyl, and carboxilate groups on the electronic structure and optical response of the [Ru(bpy){sub 3}]{sup 2+} complex. First principle calculations based on density functional theory (DFT) and time dependent DFT (TDDFT) are used to simulate the ground and excited-state properties, respectively, of functionalized Ru-complexes in the gas phase and acetonitrile solution. In addition, an effective Frenkel exciton model is used to explain the optical activity and splitting patterns of the low-energy excited states in all molecules. All theoretical results nicely complement and allow for detailed interpretation of experimental absorption spectra of Ru-complexes that have been done in parallel with our theoretical investigations. We found that the carboxyl group breaks the degeneracy of two low-energy …

There are a large number of purification and processing operations involving actinide species that rely on high-temperature molten salts as the solvent medium. One such application is the electrorefining of impure actinide metals to provide high purity material for subsequent applications. There are some drawbacks to the electrodeposition of actinides in molten salts including relatively low yields, lack of accurate potential control, maintaining efficiency in a highly corrosive environment, and failed runs. With these issues in mind we have been investigating the electrodeposition of actinide metals, mainly uranium, from room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) and relatively high-boiling organic solvents. The RTILs we have focused on are comprised of 1,3-dialkylimidazolium or quaternary ammonium cations and mainly the {sup -}N(SO{sub 2}CF{sub 3}){sub 2} anion [bis(trif1uoromethylsulfonyl)imide {equivalent_to} {sup -}NTf{sub 2}]. These materials represent a class of solvents that possess great potential for use in applications employing electrochemical procedures. In order to ascertain the feasibility of using RTILs for bulk electrodeposition of actinide metals our research team has been exploring the electron transfer behavior of simple coordination complexes of uranium dissolved in the RTIL solutions. More recently we have begun some fundamental electrochemical studies on the behavior of uranium and plutonium complexes in the …

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Statewide surveys of furbearers in Illinois indicate gray (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) and red (Vulpes vulpes) foxes have experienced substantial declines in relative abundance, whereas other species such as raccoons (Procyon lotor) and coyotes (Canis latrans) have exhibited dramatic increases during the same time period. The cause of the declines of gray and red foxes has not been identified, and the current status of gray foxes remains uncertain. Therefore, I conducted a large-scale predator survey and tracked radiocollared gray foxes from 2004 to 2007 in order to determine the distribution, survival, cause-specific mortality sources and land cover associations of gray foxes in an urbanized region of northeastern Illinois, and examined the relationships between the occurrence of gray fox and the presence other species of mesopredators, specifically coyotes and raccoons. Although generalist mesopredators are common and can reach high densities in many urban areas their urban ecology is poorly understood due to their secretive nature and wariness of humans. Understanding how mesopredators utilize urbanized landscapes can be useful in the management and control of disease outbreaks, mitigation of nuisance wildlife issues, and gaining insight into how mesopredators shape wildlife communities in highly fragmented areas. I examined habitat associations of raccoons, opossums (Didelphis virginiana), …

The cost of energy as part of the total production costs in the cement industry is significant, warranting attention for energy efficiency to improve the bottom line. Historically, energy intensity has declined, although more recently energy intensity seems to have stabilized with the gains. Coal and coke are currently the primary fuels for the sector, supplanting the dominance of natural gas in the 1970s. Most recently, there is a slight increase in the use of waste fuels, including tires. Between 1970 and 1999, primary physical energy intensity for cement production dropped 1 percent/year from 7.3 MBtu/short ton to 5.3 MBtu/short ton. Carbon dioxide intensity due to fuel consumption and raw material calcination dropped 16 percent, from 609 lb. C/ton of cement (0.31 tC/tonne) to 510 lb. C/ton cement (0.26 tC/tonne). Despite the historic progress, there is ample room for energy efficiency improvement. The relatively high share of wet-process plants (25 percent of clinker production in 1999 in the U.S.) suggests the existence of a considerable potential, when compared to other industrialized countries. We examined over 40 energy efficient technologies and measures and estimated energy savings, carbon dioxide savings, investment costs, and operation and maintenance costs for each of the measures. …

The U.S. fruit and vegetable processing industry--defined in this Energy Guide as facilities engaged in the canning, freezing, and drying or dehydrating of fruits and vegetables--consumes over $800 million worth of purchased fuels and electricity per year. Energy efficiency improvement isan important way to reduce these costs and to increase predictable earnings, especially in times of high energy price volatility. There are a variety of opportunities available at individual plants in the U.S. fruit and vegetable processing industry to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner. This Energy Guide discusses energy efficiency practices and energy-efficient technologies that can be implemented at the component, process, facility, and organizational levels. A discussion of the trends, structure, and energy consumption characteristics of the U.S. fruit and vegetable processing industry is provided along with a description of the major process technologies used within the industry. Next, a wide variety of energy efficiency measures applicable to fruit and vegetable processing plants are described. Many measure descriptions include expected savings in energy and energy-related costs, based on case study data from real-world applications in fruit and vegetable processing facilities and related industries worldwide. Typical measure payback periods and references to further information in the technical literature …

The motor vehicle industry in the U.S. spends about $3.6 billion on energy annually. In this report, we focus on auto assembly plants. In the U.S., over 70 assembly plants currently produce 13 million cars and trucks each year. In assembly plants, energy expenditures is a relatively small cost factor in the total production process. Still, as manufacturers face an increasingly competitive environment, energy efficiency improvements can provide a means to reduce costs without negatively affecting the yield or the quality of the product. In addition, reducing energy costs reduces the unpredictability associated with variable energy prices in today?s marketplace, which could negatively affect predictable earnings, an important element for publicly-traded companies such as those in the motor vehicle industry. In this report, we first present a summary of the motor vehicle assembly process and energy use. This is followed by a discussion of energy efficiency opportunities available for assembly plants. Where available, we provide specific primary energy savings for each energy efficiency measure based on case studies, as well as references to technical literature. If available, we have listed costs and typical payback periods. We include experiences of assembly plants worldwide with energy efficiency measures reviewed in the report. …

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