Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) diodes fabricated from 0.52eV lattice-matched InGaAsSb alloys are grown by Metal Organic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE) on GaSb substrates. 4cm{sup 2} multi-chip diode modules with front-surface spectral filters were tested in a vacuum cavity and attained measured efficiency and power density of 19% and 0.58 W/cm{sup 2} respectively at operating at temperatures of T{sub radiator} = 950 C and T{sub diode} = 27 C. Device modeling and minority carrier lifetime measurements of double heterostructure lifetime specimens indicate that diode conversion efficiency is limited predominantly by interface recombination and photon energy loss to the GaSb substrate and back ohmic contact. Recent improvements to the diode include lattice-matched p-type AlGaAsSb passivating layers with interface recombination velocities less than 100 cm/s and new processing techniques enabling thinned substrates and back surface reflectors. Modeling predictions of these improvements to the diode architecture indicate that conversion efficiencies from 27-30% and {approx}0.85 W/cm{sup 2} could be attained under the above operating temperatures.

Creation of 20-year data set of surface infrared fluxes from satellite measurements. A reliable estimate of the surface downwelling longwave radiation flux (DLF) is a glaring void in available forcing data sets for models of Arctic sea ice and ocean circulation. We have developed a new method to estimate the DLF from a combination of satellite sounder retrievals and brightness temperatures from the TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS), which has flown on NOAA polar-orbiting satellites continuously since late 1979. The overarching goal of this project was to generate a 20-year data set of surface downwelling longwave flux measurements from TOVS data over the Arctic Ocean. Daily gridded fields of DLF were produced with a spatial resolution of (100 km){sup 2} north of 60{sup o}N for 22.5 years rather than only 20. Surface measurements from the field station at Barrow, AK--part of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program --and from the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) were used to validate the satellite-derived fluxes and develop algorithm improvements for conditions that had resulted in systematic errors in early versions of the algorithm. The resulting data set has already been sent to two other investigators for incorporation into their research, and …

A chemical diffusion model was incorporated into the thermal-hydraulics package of the MELCOR Severe Accident code (Reference 1) for analyzing air ingress events for a very high temperature gas-cooled reactor.

The high-density infrared (HDI) transient-liquid coating (TLC) process was successfully developed and demonstrated excellent, enhanced (5 times higher than the current material and process) wear performance for the selected functionally graded material (FGM) coatings under laboratory simulated, in-service conditions. The mating steel component exhibited a wear rate improvement of approximately one and a half (1.5) times. After 8000 cycles of. wear testing, the full-scale component testing demonstrated that the coating integrity was still excellent. Little or no spalling was observed to occur.

The Department of Energy Environmental Management Program is faced with two major issues involving two-phase flow in fractured rock; specifically, transport of dissolved contaminants in the Vadose Zone, and the fate of Dense Nonaqueous Phase Liquids (DNAPLs) below the water table. Conceptual models currently used to address these problems do not correctly include the influence of the fractures, thus leading to erroneous predictions. Recent work has shown that it is crucial to understand the topology, or ''structure'' of the fluid phases (air/water or water/DNAPL) within the subsurface. It has also been shown that even under steady boundary conditions, the influence of fractures can lead to complex and dynamic phase structure that controls system behavior, with or without the presence of a porous rock matrix. Complicated phase structures within the fracture network can facilitate rapid transport, and lead to a sparsely populated and widespread distribution of concentrated contaminants; these qualities are highly difficult to describe with current conceptual models. The focus of our work is to improve predictive modeling through the development of advanced conceptual models for two-phase flow in fractured rock.

This document reviews the work performed during the quarter April-June 2004. Task 1 (Site Preparation) had been completed 2003, along with three weeks of oxycombustion tests in Task 2 (experimental test performance) of the project. In current reporting period, the experimental testing has been completed: one additional week of tests has been performed to finalize the optimization of the combustion characteristics in O{sub 2}/CO{sub 2} environment ; two more days of testing were dedicated to mercury sampling in air-fired or O{sub 2}-fired conditions, and to characterization of heat transfer in O{sub 2} conditions vs. to air-blown conditions. Task 3 (Techno-Economic Study) has also been completed in current quarter: 250MWe, 500MWe and 1000MWe oxygen-fired PC unit have been simulated and quoted, and their performance and cost have been compared to same-capacity air-fired pulverized coal (PC) unit and IGCC. New and retrofit cases have been evaluated. The comparison has been completed in terms of capital cost, operating cost, cost of electricity and cost of CO{sub 2} avoided. The scope of task 4 (Conceptual Boiler Design) had been modified as per DOE request in previous quarter. Engineering calculations are currently in progress. Next steps include detail review of the experimental data collected during …

This annual technical progress report summarizes the work accomplished during the second year of the program, January-December 2003, in the following task areas: Task 1--Conceptual Design, Task 2--Laboratory Scale Evaluations, Task 3--OTM Development, Task 4--Economic Evaluation and Commercialization Planning and Task 5--Program Management. The program has experienced significant delays due to several factors. The budget has also been significantly under spent. Based on recent technical successes and confirmation of process economics, significant future progress is expected. Concepts for integrating Oxygen Transport Membranes (OTMs) into boilers and process heaters to facilitate oxy-fuel combustion have been investigated. OTM reactor combustion testing was delayed to insufficient reliability of the earlier OTM materials. Substantial improvements to reliability have been identified and testing will recommence early in 2004. Promising OTM material compositions and OTM architectures have been identified that improve the reliability of the ceramic elements. Economic evaluation continued. Information was acquired that quantified the attractiveness of the advanced oxygen-fired boiler. CO{sub 2} capture and compression are still estimated to be much less than $10/ton CO{sub 2}.

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) systems have traditionally been used to image subsurface objects. The main focus of this paper is to evaluate an advanced signal analysis technique. Instead of compiling spatial data for the analysis, this technique conducts object recognition procedures based on spectral statistics. The identification feature of an object type is formed from the training vectors by a singular-value decomposition procedure. To illustrate its capability, this procedure is applied to experimental data and compared to the performance of the neural-network approach.

The goal of the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Vehicle Testing Activity (AVTA) is to increase the body of knowledge as well as the awareness and acceptance of electric drive and other advanced technology vehicles (ATV). The AVTA accomplishes this goal by testing ATVs on test tracks and dynamometers (Baseline Performance testing), as well as in real-world applications (Fleet and Accelerated Reliability testing and public demonstrations). This enables the AVTA to provide Federal and private fleet managers, as well as other potential ATV users, with accurate and unbiased information on vehicle performance and infrastructure needs so they can make informed decisions about acquiring and operating ATVs. The ATVs currently in testing include vehicles that burn gaseous hydrogen (H2) fuel and hydrogen/CNG (H/CNG) blended fuels in internal combustion engines (ICE), and hybrid electric (HEV), urban electric, and neighborhood electric vehicles. The AVTA is part of DOE's FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies Program.

Recent trends in today's office environment make it increasingly more difficult for conventional centralized HVAC systems to satisfy the environmental preferences of individual officer workers using the standardized approach of providing a single uniform thermal and ventilation environment. Since its original introduction in West Germany during the 1950s, the open plan office containing modular workstation furniture and partitions is now the norm. Thermostatically controlled zones in open plan offices typically encompass relatively large numbers of workstations in which a diverse work population having a wide range of preferred temperatures must be accommodated. Modern office buildings are also being impacted by a large influx of heat-generating equipment (computers, printers, etc.) whose loads may vary considerably from workstation to workstation. Offices are often reconfigured during the building's lifetime to respond to changing tenant needs, affecting the distribution of within-space loads and the ventilation pathways among and over office partitions. Compounding this problem, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of the comfort, health, and productivity of individual office workers, giving rise to an increased demand among employers and employees for a high-quality work environment. During recent years an increasing amount of attention has been paid to air distribution systems that …

The objective of this project is to enhance the capabilities of a real-time airborne particle mass spectrometer by implementing matrix-independent methods for sample ionization. The enhancements should result in improved sensitivity for trace substances and, more importantly, permit quantitative determination of the presence of target species in microparticle samples on an individual particle basis. We have used two different approaches to eliminate matrix effects on quantitative accuracy. Both rely on delayed ionization of ablated/desorbed neutral species so that ionization of target substances occurs after most of the expansion collisions have taken place. Resonance ionization by a tunable pulsed laser permits selective ionization of target species, with the laser tuned to a resonance transition from the ground state to an excited state of the target. Additional photons of the same (when possible) or different energy make up the energy required for ionization. The other approach is to perform the laser ablation step within a discharge so that desorbed neutrals are ionized by reactions with the plasma. Electron capture generates negative ions of substances with high electron affinity while electron impact ionization, associative ionization, and Penning ionization from excited metastable species produce positive ions in the discharge. Both atmospheric pressure Corona discharge …

The ability to more rapidly process high-level waste sludge and supernate, without sacrificing cost savings, continues to be a crucial challenge facing the Savannah River Site (SRS). There has, to date, not been any extensive investigation of alternative filter technologies for the SRS baseline process. To address this problem, a focused investigation into alternative, state-of-the art filtration technologies to facilitate the strontium and actinide removal process, which can be cost effectively implemented in existing facilities and current equipment designs, was completed. Filter technologies manufactured by Mott (0.1 µm and 0.5 µm) Graver (0.07 µm), Pall (0.1 µm and 0.8 µm) and GKN (0.1 µm) were evaluated. Membranes had a nominal inside diameter of 3/8 inches and an active membrane length of 2 feet. The investigation was performed in two phases. The first phase of testing evaluated the consistency or variability in flux through the different membranes using water and a standard 5.0 wt% strontium carbonate slurry. The second phase of testing evaluated the achievable permeate flux and clarity through the various membranes using the SRS average salt supernate simulant at solids loadings of 0.06, 0.29 and 4.5 wt%. Membrane variation data indicate that membranes having an asymmetric ceramic coating (Pall …

Research is being conducted under United States Department of Energy (DOE) Contract DEFC26-03NT41865 to develop a new technology to achieve very low levels of NOx emissions from pulverized coal fired boiler systems by employing a novel system level integration between the PC combustion process and the catalytic NOx reduction with CO present in the combustion flue gas. The combustor design and operating conditions will be optimized to achieve atypical flue gas conditions. This approach will not only suppress NOx generation during combustion but also further reduce NOx over a downstream catalytic reactor that does not require addition of an external reductant, such as ammonia. This report describes the work performed during the April 1 to June 30, 2004 time period.

The energy service company (ESCO) business model could become significantly more effective by integrating the energy-efficiency purveyor and their capital into the underlying building ownership and operation partnership, rather than the current model in which the ESCO remains an outsider with higher transaction costs and limited interest and participation in the value created by the cost savings. Resource conservation advocates rarely use the language of real estate to articulate the cost effectiveness of capital improvements aimed at reducing utility costs in commercial and residential income properties. Conventional methods that rely on rarefied academic notions of simple payback time or a narrow definition of return on investment fail to capture a significant component of the true market value created by virtue of reduced operating expenses. Improvements in energy and water efficiency can increase the fundamental profitability of real estate investments by raising Net Operating Income (NOI), and hence returns during the holding period, and, ultimately, proceeds at time of sale. We introduce the concept of an Energy Services Partner, who takes an equity interest in a real estate partnership in exchange for providing the expertise and capital required to reduce utility operating costs. Profit to all partners increases considerably as a …

Under anaerobic conditions and at circumneutral pH, cells of the widely-distributed, obligate chemolithoautotrophic bacterium Thiobacillus denitrificans oxidatively dissolved synthetic and biogenic U(IV) oxides (uraninite) in nitrate-dependent fashion: U(IV) oxidation required the presence of nitrate and was strongly correlated to nitrate consumption. This is the first report of anaerobic U(IV) oxidation by an autotrophic bacterium.

Identification of divertor operating regimes is of particular importance for heat and particle control optimization in high performance plasmas of a spherical torus, because of the magnetic geometry effects and compactness of the divertor region. Recent measurements of radiated power, heat and particle fluxes in lower single null and double null plasmas with 0.8 - 6 MW NBI heating suggest that the inner divertor is detached at {bar n} {sub e} {<=} 2-3x10{sub 19} m{sup -3} whereas the outer divertor is attached, operating in the high recycling regime. This resilient state exists in most L- and H-mode plasmas. The inner divertor transiently re-attaches in ELMy H-mode plasmas when heat pulses from type I or type III ELMs hit the divertor.

Presents an analysis of hybridization and implications energy storage devices concerning fuel cell vehicles.

LOCO is a computer code for analysis of the linear optics in a storage ring based on the closed orbit response to steering magnets. The analysis provides information on focusing errors, BPM gain and rotation errors, and local coupling. Here, we discuss the details of the LOCO implementation at the KEK-ATF Damping Ring, and report the initial results. Some of the information obtained, for example on the BPM gain and coupling errors, has not previously been determined. We discuss the possibility of using the data provided by the LOCO analysis to reduce the vertical emittance of the ATF beam.

This work summarizes recent data on minority carrier lifetime in n- and p-type double heterostructures (DHs) of 0.5-0.6 eV GaInAsSb confined with GaSb and AlGaAsSb cap layers. Recombination times were measured by time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) and by optical frequency response (OFR) to sinusoidal excitation. It was shown that one of the mechanisms responsible for interface recombination in GaSb/GaInAsSb/GaSb DHs is thermionic emission of carriers over the heterobarrier. Considerable improvement of carrier confinement was obtained with 1 eV AlGaAsSb cap layers. Optimization of the epitaxial growth resulted in a recombination velocity at GaInAsSb/AlGaAsSb interface as low as 30 cm/s.

After a brief introduction and work motivation, static and dynamic methods for minority carrier lifetime measurements will be compared. Data on recombination velocity at heterointerfaces for both p-type and n-type quaternaries will be summarized. Radiative recombination and effect of photon recycling will be considered in detail.

The orbital vibrator source (a fluid-coupled shear wave source) has many unique properties that are useful for cross-well, single-well, and borehole-to-surface imaging of both P- (compressional)and S-(shear) wave velocities of reservoir rocks. To this day, however, no standard models for this source have been established, and the mechanism of wave generation and the characteristics of wave field around the source are not well understood yet. In this article, we develop both two and three-dimensional analytical models of the orbital vibrator source, which allow us to examine the source characteristics such as radiation patterns, frequency-dependence of the wave energy, and guided-wave generation. These models are developed in the frequency-wave number domain using the partial wave expansion of the wavefield within and outside the borehole. The results show that the developed models successfully reproduce many characteristics of orbital vibrator source that have been observed in the field, including formation property-dependent vibrator amplitudes, uniform isotropic shear wave radiation pattern, and small tube-wave generation.

The genome sequence of the solvent producing bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum ATCC824, has been determined by the shotgun approach. The genome consists of a 3.94 Mb chromosome and a 192 kb megaplasmid that contains the majority of genes responsible for solvent production. Comparison of C. acetobutylicum to Bacillus subtilis reveals significant local conservation of gene order, which has not been seen in comparisons of other genomes with similar, or, in some cases, closer, phylogenetic proximity. This conservation allows the prediction of many previously undetected operons in both bacteria.

Aqueous radioactive wastes from Savannah River Site (SRS) separations and vitrification processes are contained in large underground carbon steel tanks. Inspections made during 2003 to evaluate these vessels and other waste handling facilities along with evaluations based on data from previous inspections are the subject of this report. The 2003 inspection program revealed that the structural integrity and waste confinement capability of the Savannah River Site waste tanks remained unchanged from 2002. A total of 4249 photographs were made, 1178 visual and video inspections were performed, and 12 helium leak tests were conducted. Ultrasonic testing was performed on five High Level Waste Tanks in accordance with approved inspection plans that met the In-Service Inspection Program requirements.

As was reported in our previous work, accurate, nondisturbing near-anode measurements of the plasma density, electron temperature, and plasma potential performed with biased and emissive probes allowed the first experimental identification of both electron-repelling (negative anode fall) and electron-attracting (positive anode fall) anode sheaths in Hall thrusters. An interesting new phenomenon revealed by the probe measurements is that the anode fall changes from positive to negative upon removal of the dielectric coating, which appears on the anode surface during the course of Hall thruster operation. As reported in the present work, energy dispersion spectroscopy analysis of the chemical composition of the anode dielectric coating indicates that the coating layer consists essentially of an oxide of the anode material (stainless steel). However, it is still unclear how oxygen gets into the thruster channel. Most importantly, possible mechanisms of anode fall formation in a Hall thruster with a clean and a coated anodes are analyzed in this work; practical implication of understanding the general structure of the electron-attracting anode sheath in the case of a coated anode is also discussed.