The purpose of this task was to determine if mixing was an issue for the entrainment and dispersion of the Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction (CSSX) Unit (MCU) solvent in the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) Strip Effluent Feed Tank (SEFT). The MCU strip effluent stream containing the Cs removed during salt processing will be transferred to the DWPF for immobilization in HLW glass. In lab-scale DWPF chemical process cell testing, mixing of the solvent in the dilute nitric acid solution proved problematic, and the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) was requested to perform scaled SEFT mixing tests to evaluate whether the problem was symptomatic of the lab-scale set-up or of the solvent. The solvent levels tested were 228 and 235 ppm, which represented levels near the estimated DWPF solvent limit of 239 ppm in 0.001M HNO{sub 3} solution. The 239 ppm limit was calculated by Norato in X-CLC-S-00141. The general approach for the mixing investigation was to: (1) Investigate the use of fluorescent dyes to aid in observing the mixing behavior. Evaluate and compare the physical properties of the fluorescent dyed MCU solvents to the baseline Oak Ridge CSSX solvent. Based on the data, use the dyed MCU solvent …

Pallavi Pharkya thinks a lot about the future. Pharkya, a Ph.D. candidate in materials science and engineering, works in the area of corrosion science, predicting how materials will perform over extended periods of time. Her particular focus is a nickel-chromium-molybdenum alloy called C-22, a highly corrosion-resistant metal. Pharkya's aim is to help determine whether containers made from C-22 can be used to store high-energy nuclear waste--for 10,000 years and longer. Pharkya's work is part of a plan by the U.S. Department of Energy to consolidate the country's nuclear waste in a single proposed repository. The proposed repository is in Yucca Mountain located in a remote Nevada desert. Currently about 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste are divided between approximately 100 sites around the country. The undertaking, Pharkya emphasizes, is massive. To study just the corrosion aspects of the packaging, Case is collaborating with eight other universities, five national labs and Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Even with so many players, the study will likely take several years to complete. Heading the entire group is Joe Payer, a professor of materials science and engineering at Case and Pharkya's mentor. ''I came here to have the opportunity …

Pharkya, a Ph.D. candidate in materials science and engineering, works in the area of corrosion science, predicting how materials will perform over extended periods of time. Her particular focus is a nickel-chromium-molybdenum alloy called C-22, a highly corrosion-resistant metal. Pharkya's aim is to help determine whether containers made from C-22 can be used to store high-energy nuclear waste--for 10,000 years and longer. Pharkya's work is part of a plan by the U.S. Department of Energy to consolidate the country's nuclear waste in a single proposed repository. The proposed repository is in Yucca Mountain located in a remote Nevada desert. Currently about 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste are divided between approximately 100 sites around the country. The undertaking, Pharkya emphasizes, is massive. To study just the corrosion aspects of the packaging, Case is collaborating with eight other universities, five national labs and Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Even with so many players, the study will likely take several years to complete. Heading the entire group is Joe Payer, a professor of materials science and engineering at Case and Pharkya's mentor. ''I came here to have the opportunity to work with Dr. Payer, an expert in …

Cummins Power Generation (CPG) as the prime contractor and SOFCo-EFS Holdings LLC (SOFCo), as their subcontractor, teamed under the Solid-state Energy Conversion Alliance (SECA) program to develop 3-10kW solid oxide fuel cell systems for use in recreational vehicles, commercial work trucks and stand-by telecommunications applications. The program goal is demonstration of power systems that meet commercial performance requirements and can be produced in volume at a cost of $400/kW. This report summarizes the team's activities during the seventh six-month period (July-December 2005) of the four-year Phase I effort. While there has been significant progress in the development of the SOFC subsystems that can support meeting the program Phase 1 goals, the SOFCo ceramic stack technology has progressed significantly slower than plan and CPG consider it unlikely that the systemic problems encountered will be overcome in the near term. SOFCo has struggled with a series of problems associated with inconsistent manufacturing, inadequate cell performance, and the achievement of consistent, durable, low resistance inter-cell connections with reduced or no precious materials. A myriad of factors have contributed to these problems, but the fact remains that progress has not kept pace with the SECA program. A contributing factor in SOFCo's technical difficulties is …

This report is a compilation of the calendar year 2005 groundwater sampling results from the Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Site. In additon to providing groundwater monitoring results, this report also includes information regarding site hydrogeology, well construction, sample collection, and meteorological data measured at the Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Site at the Nevada Test Site, Ny County, Nevada.

Advanced fuel injection experimental results on a single cylinder engine operating at part load show the path to NOx vs SFC tradeoffs. Hybrid battery vibration tests have been performed. Analysis of advanced Battery Management System field validation results showed effective SOC estimation. A fuel optimizer simulation lab has been completed.

The fuel injection hardware on the single cylinder research engine was upgraded and performance trends were quantified. The effects of fuel injection rate shapes were studied. Long-term cycling of subscale battery cell assemblies has identified aging trends. Follow-up vibration testing of an instrumented COTS battery was performed. Optimal trip planning algorithms were implemented and demonstrated in the interactive, real-time simulation environment.

In this paper, we present a three-dimensional model forself-consistently modeling ion beam formation from plasma ion sources andtransporting in low energy beam transport systems. A multi-sectionoverlapped computational domain has been used to break the originaltransport system into a number of weakly coupled subsystems. Within eachsubsystem, macro-particle tracking is used to obtain the charge densitydistribution in this subdomain. The three-dimensional Poisson equation issolved within the subdomain after each particle tracking to obtain theself-consistent space-charge forces and the particle tracking is repeateduntil the solution converges. Two new Poisson solvers based on acombination of the spectral method and the finite difference multigridmethod have been developed to solve the Poisson equation in cylindricalcoordinates for the straight beam transport section and in Frenet-Serretcoordinates for the bending magnet section. This model can have importantapplication in design and optimization of the low energy beam line opticsof the proposed Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) front end.

In this paper we report on IMPACT-T, a 3D beam dynamics code for modeling high brightness beams in photoinjectors and rf linacs. IMPACT-T is one of the few codes used in the photoinjector community that has a parallel implementation, making it very useful for high statistics simulations of beam halos and beam diagnostics. It has a comprehensive set of beamline elements, and furthermore allows arbitrary overlap of their fields. It is unique in its use of space-charge solvers based on an integrated Green function to efficiently and accurately treat beams with large aspect ratio, and a shifted Green function to efficiently treat image charge effects of a cathode. It is also unique in its inclusion of energy binning in the space-charge calculation to model beams with large energy spread. Together, all these features make IMPACT-T a powerful and versatile tool for modeling beams in photoinjectors and other systems. In this paper we describe the code features and present results of IMPACT-T simulations of the LCLS photoinjectors. We also include a comparison of IMPACT-T and PARMELA results.

The Explosive Component Water Gap Test (ECWGT) has been validated to assess the shock sensitivity of lead and booster components having a diameter larger than 5 mm. Several countries have investigated by experiments and numerical simulations the effect of confinement on the go/no go threshold for Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN) pellets having a height and diameter of 3 mm, confined by a steel annulus of wall thickness 1-3.5 mm. Confinement of the PETN by a steel annulus of the same height of the pellet with 1-mm wall thickness makes the component more sensitive (larger gap). As the wall thickness is increased to 2-mm, the gap increases a lesser amount, but when the wall thickness is increased to 3.5-mm a decrease in sensitivity is observed (smaller gap). This decrease of the water gap has been reproduced experimentally. Recent numerical simulations using Ignition and Growth model [1] for the PETN Pellet have reproduced the experimental results for the steel confinement up to 2 mm thick [2]. The presence of a stronger re-shock following the first input shock from the water and focusing on the axis have been identified in the pellet due to the steel confinement. The double shock configuration is well-known to …

Using Chandra HETG data we present light curves for individual spectral lines of Mg XI and Mg XII for EX Hydrae, an intermediate-polar type cataclysmic variable. The Mg XI light curve, folded on the white dwarf spin period, shows two spikes that are not seen in the Mg XII or broad-band light curves. Occultation of the accretion column by the body of the white dwarf would produce such spikes for an angle between the rotation axis and the accretion columns of {alpha} = 18{sup o} and a height of the Mg XI emission above the white dwarf surface of {approx}< 0.0004 white dwarf radii or {approx}< 4 km. The absence of spikes in the Mg XII and broad-band light curves could then be explained if the bulk of its emission forms at much larger height, > 0.004 white dwarf radii or > 40 km, above the white dwarf surface. The technique described in this letter demonstrates that high signal-to-noise ratio and high spectral resolution X-ray spectra can be used to map the temperature and density structure of accretion flows in magnetic cataclysmic variables. The Mg XI and Mg XII light curves are not consistent with the temperature and density structure …

For ground-based adaptive optics point source imaging, differential atmospheric refraction and flexure introduce a small drift of the point spread function (PSF) with time, and seeing and sky transmission variations modify the PSF flux. These effects need to be corrected to properly combine the images and obtain optimal signal-to-noise ratios, accurate relative astrometry and photometry of detected companions as well as precise detection limits. Usually, one can easily correct for these effects by using the PSF core, but this is impossible when high dynamic range observing techniques are used, like coronagraphy with a non-transmissive occulting mask, or if the stellar PSF core is saturated. We present a new technique that can solve these issues by using off-axis satellite PSFs produced by a periodic amplitude or phase mask conjugated to a pupil plane. It will be shown that these satellite PSFs track precisely the PSF position, its Strehl ratio and its intensity and can thus be used to register and to flux normalize the PSF. This approach can be easily implemented in existing adaptive optics instruments and should be considered for future extreme adaptive optics coronagraph instruments and in high-contrast imaging space observatories.

We developed an ultrasonic longitudinal field time-reversal and MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) based detection algorithm for identifying and mapping flaws in fused silica NIF optics. The algorithm requires a fully multistatic data set, that is one with multiple, independently operated, spatially diverse transducers, each transmitter of which, in succession, launches a pulse into the optic and the scattered signal measured and recorded at every receiver. We have successfully localized engineered ''defects'' larger than 1 mm in an optic. We confirmed detection and localization of 3 mm and 5 mm features in experimental data, and a 0.5 mm in simulated data with sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio. We present the theory, experimental results, and simulated results.

This RD&D project is a three year team effort to develop a hybrid solar lighting (HSL) system that transports daylight from a paraboloidal dish concentrator to a luminaire via a bundle of polymer fiber optics. The luminaire can be a device to distribute sunlight into a space for the production of algae or it can be a device that is a combination of daylighting and electric lighting for space/task lighting. In this project, the sunlight is collected using a one-meter paraboloidal concentrator dish with two-axis tracking. For the third generation (beta) system, the secondary mirror is an ellipsoidal mirror that directs the visible light into a bundle of 3 mm diameter fibers. The IR spectrum is filtered out to minimize unnecessary heating at the fiber entrance region. This report describes the following investigations: Niche applications for HSL technology, Luminaire design characteristics for linear and point lighting fixtures, and Daylight affects on productivity.

This project produced algorithms for and software implementations of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) methods for solving practical solid and thermal mechanics problems on multiprocessor parallel computers using unstructured finite element meshes. The overall goal is to provide computational solutions that are accurate to some prescribed tolerance, and adaptivity is the correct path toward this goal. These new tools will enable analysts to conduct more reliable simulations at reduced cost, both in terms of analyst and computer time. Previous academic research in the field of adaptive mesh refinement has produced a voluminous literature focused on error estimators and demonstration problems; relatively little progress has been made on producing efficient implementations suitable for large-scale problem solving on state-of-the-art computer systems. Research issues that were considered include: effective error estimators for nonlinear structural mechanics; local meshing at irregular geometric boundaries; and constructing efficient software for parallel computing environments.

Two differently heat-treated AerMet-100 alloy cylinders were explosively driven to fragmentation. Soft-captured fragments were studied to characterize the deformation and damage induced by high explosive loading. The characterization of the fragments reveals that the dominant failure mechanism appears to be dynamic fracture along adiabatic shear bands. These shear bands differ in size and morphology depending on the heat-treated conditions. Nanoindentation measurements of the adiabatic shear bands in either material condition indicate higher hardness in the bands compared to the matrix regions of the fragments.

With the recent passing of new legislation designed to permanently cap and reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired utilities, it is more important than ever to develop and improve upon methods of controlling mercury emissions. One promising technique is carbon sorbent injection into the flue gas of the coal-fired power plant. Currently, this technology is very expensive as costly commercially activated carbons are used as sorbents. There is also a significant lack of understanding of the interaction between mercury vapor and the carbon sorbent, which adds to the difficulty of predicting the amount of sorbent needed for specific plant configurations. Due to its inherent porosity and adsorption properties as well as on-site availability, carbons derived from gasifiers are potential mercury sorbent candidates. Furthermore, because of the increasing restricted use of landfilling, the coal industry is very interested in finding uses for these materials as an alternative to the current disposal practice. The results of laboratory investigations and supporting technical assessments conducted under DOE Subcontract No. DE-FG26-03NT41795 are reported for the period September 1, 2004 to August 31, 2005. This contract is with the University of Kentucky Research Foundation, which supports work with the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research …

Electric and hybrid-electric vehicle systems require an inverter to convert the direct current (DC) output of the energy generation/storage system (engine, fuel cells, or batteries) to the alternating current (AC) that vehicle propulsion motors use. Vehicle support systems, such as lights and air conditioning, also use the inverter AC output. Distributed energy systems require an inverter to provide the high quality AC output that energy system customers demand. Today's inverters are expensive due to the cost of the power electronics components, and system designers must also tailor the inverter for individual applications. Thus, the benefits of mass production are not available, resulting in high initial procurement costs as well as high inverter maintenance and repair costs. Electricore, Inc. (www.electricore.org) a public good 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit advanced technology development consortium assembled a highly qualified team consisting of AeroVironment Inc. (www.aerovironment.com) and Delphi Automotive Systems LLC (Delphi), (www.delphi.com), as equal tiered technical leads, to develop an advanced, modular construction, inverter packaging technology that will offer a 30% cost reduction over conventional designs adding to the development of energy conversion technologies for crosscutting applications in the building, industry, transportation, and utility sectors. The proposed inverter allows for a reduction of weight and …

Cleveland Tool and Machine (CTM) of Cleveland, Ohio in conjunction with Harrington Product Development Center (HPDC) of Cincinnati, Ohio have developed an advanced, dimensionally accurate, temperature-stable, energy-efficient and cost-effective material and process to manufacture patterns for the investment casting industry. In the proposed technology, FOPAT (aFOam PATtern material) has been developed which is especially compatible with the investment casting process and offers the following advantages: increased dimensional accuracy; increased temperature stability; lower cost per pattern; less energy consumption per pattern; decreased cost of pattern making equipment; decreased tooling cost; increased casting yield. The present method for investment casting is "the lost wax" process, which is exactly that, the use of wax as a pattern material, which is then melted out or "lost" from the ceramic shell. The molten metal is then poured into the ceramic shell to produce a metal casting. This process goes back thousands of years and while there have been improvements in the wax and processing technology, the material is basically the same, wax. The proposed technology is based upon an established industrial process of "Reaction Injection Molding" (RIM) where two components react when mixed and then "molded" to form a part. The proposed technology has been …

Under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy/National Energy Technology Laboratory, a multi-disciplinary team led by the Advanced Power and Energy Program of the University of California at Irvine is defining the system engineering issues associated with the integration of key components and subsystems into advanced power plant systems with goals of achieving high efficiency and minimized environmental impact while using fossil fuels. These power plant concepts include ''Zero Emission'' power plants and the ''FutureGen'' H{sub 2} co-production facilities. The study is broken down into three phases. Phase 1 of this study consisted of utilizing advanced technologies that are expected to be available in the ''Vision 21'' time frame such as mega scale fuel cell based hybrids. Phase 2 includes current state-of-the-art technologies and those expected to be deployed in the nearer term such as advanced gas turbines and high temperature membranes for separating gas species and advanced gasifier concepts. Phase 3 includes identification of gas turbine based cycles and engine configurations suitable to coal-based gasification applications and the conceptualization of the balance of plant technology, heat integration, and the bottoming cycle for analysis in a future study. Also included in Phase 3 is the task of acquiring/providing turbo-machinery …

As electronic assemblies become more compact and increase in processing bandwidth, escalating thermal energy has become more difficult to manage. The major limitation has been nonmetallic joining using poor thermal interface materials (TIM). The interfacial, versus bulk, thermal conductivity of an adhesive is the major loss mechanism and normally accounts for an order magnitude loss in conductivity per equivalent thickness. The next generation TIM requires a sophisticated understanding of material and surface sciences, heat transport at submicron scales, and the manufacturing processes used in packaging of microelectronics and other target applications. Only when this relationship between bond line manufacturing processes, structure, and contact resistance is well-understood on a fundamental level will it be possible to advance the development of miniaturized microsystems. This report examines using thermal and squeeze-flow modeling as approaches to formulate TIMs incorporating nanoscience concepts. Understanding the thermal behavior of bond lines allows focus on the interfacial contact region. In addition, careful study of the thermal transport across these interfaces provides greatly augmented heat transfer paths and allows the formulation of very high resistance interfaces for total thermal isolation of circuits. For example, this will allow the integration of systems that exhibit multiple operational temperatures, such as cryogenically …

Uranium-(VI) phases are the primary alteration products of the UO{sub 2} in spent nuclear fuel and the UO{sub 2+x}, in natural uranium deposits. The U(VI)-phases generally form sheet structures of edge-sharing UO{sub 2}{sup 2+} polyhedra. The complexity of these structures offers numerous possibilities for coupled-substitutions of trace metals and radionuclides. The incorporation of radionuclides into U(VI)-structures provides a potential barrier to their release and transport in a geologic repository that experiences oxidizing conditions. In this study, we have used natural samples of UO{sub 2+x}, to study the U(VI)-phases that form during alteration and to determine the fate of the associated trace elements.

This paper studies AMG (algebraic multigrid) methods that utilize energy minimization construction of the interpolation matrices locally, in the setting of element agglomeration AMG. The coarsening in element agglomeration AMG is done by agglomerating fine-grid elements, with coarse element matrices defined by a local Galerkin procedure applied to the matrix assembled from the individual fine-grid element matrices. This local Galerkin procedure involves only the coarse basis restricted to the agglomerated element. To construct the coarse basis, one exploits previously proposed constraint energy minimization procedures now applied to the local matrix. The constraints are that a given set of vectors should be interpolated exactly, not only globally, but also locally on every agglomerated element. The paper provides algorithmic details, as well as a convergence result based on a ''local-to-global'' energy bound of the resulting multiple-vector fitting AMG interpolation mappings. A particular implementation of the method is illustrated with a set of numerical experiments.

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) spent nuclear fuel (SNF) consists of hundreds of different fuel types in various conditions. In order to analyze and model the DOE SNF for its suitability for repository disposal, several generalizations and simplifications were necessary. This paper describes the methodology used to arrive at a suitable DOE SNF surrogate and summarizes the proposed analysis of this DOE SNF surrogate for its appropriateness as a representative SNF.