Report on activities working with stakeholders in the emerging marine and hydrokinetic energy industry during FY09, for DOE EERE Office of Waterpower.

This research program was designed to look at basic radiation damage and effects and mechanical properties in Fe and ferritic alloys. The program scope included a number of materials ranging from pure single crystal Fe to more complex Fe-Cr-C alloys. The range of materials was designed to examine materials response and performance on ideal/model systems and gradually move to more complex systems. The experimental program was coordinated with a modeling effort. The use of pure and model alloys also facilitated the ability to develop and employ atomistic-scale modeling techniques to understand the inherent physics underlying materials performance

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been tasked by Bechtel National Inc. (BNI) on the River Protection Project-Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (RPP-WTP) project to perform research and development activities to resolve technical issues identified for the Pretreatment Facility (PTF). The Pretreatment Engineering Platform (PEP) was designed, constructed, and operated as part of a plan to respond to issue M12, “Undemonstrated Leaching Processes” of the External Flowsheet Review Team (EFRT) issue response plan.(a) The PEP is a 1/4.5-scale test platform designed to simulate the WTP pretreatment caustic leaching, oxidative leaching, ultrafiltration solids concentration, and slurry washing processes. The PEP replicates the WTP leaching processes using prototypic equipment and control strategies. The PEP also includes non-prototypic ancillary equipment to support the core processing.

WPP is a computer program for simulating seismic wave propagation on parallel machines. WPP solves the governing equations in second order formulation using a node-based finite difference approach. The basic numerical method is described in [9]. WPP implements substantial capabilities for 3-D seismic modeling, with a free surface condition on the top boundary, non-reflecting far-field boundary conditions on the other boundaries, point force and point moment tensor source terms with many predefined time dependencies, fully 3-D heterogeneous material model specification, output of synthetic seismograms in the SAC [4] format, output of GMT [11] scripts for laying out simulation information on a map, and output of 2-D slices of (derived quantites of) the solution field as well as the material model. Version 2.0 of WPP allows the free surface boundary condition to be imposed on a curved topography. For this purpose a curvilinear mesh is used near the free surface, extending into the computational domain down to a user specified level. The elastic wave equations and the free surface boundary conditions are discretized on the curvilinear mesh using the energy conserving technique described in [2]. A curvilinear mesh generator is built into WPP and the curvilinear mesh is automatically generated from …

New chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms are developed for two of the five major components of biodiesel fuel, methyl stearate and methyl oleate. The mechanisms are produced using existing reaction classes and rules for reaction rates, with additional reaction classes to describe other reactions unique to methyl ester species. Mechanism capabilities were examined by computing fuel/air autoignition delay times and comparing the results with more conventional hydrocarbon fuels for which experimental results are available. Additional comparisons were carried out with measured results taken from jet-stirred reactor experiments for rapeseed methyl ester fuels. In both sets of computational tests, methyl oleate was found to be slightly less reactive than methyl stearate, and an explanation of this observation is made showing that the double bond in methyl oleate inhibits certain low temperature chain branching reaction pathways important in methyl stearate. The resulting detailed chemical kinetic reaction mechanism includes more approximately 3500 chemical species and more than 17,000 chemical reactions.