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The purpose of the project is to increase the productivity and economics of existing vacuum blasting technology. This technology is used to remove radioactive contamination, PCB's and lead-base paint and provides worker and environmental protection by continuously recycling the blast media and the full containment of the dust generated in the process.

In situ vacuum extraction, air or steam sparging, and vitrification are widely used methods of remediating soil contaminated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs). All of these processes produce a VOC.-laden air stream from which the VOC must be removed before the air can be discharged or recycled to the generating process. Treatment of these off-gases is often a major portion of the cost of the remediation project. Carbon adsorption and catalytic incineration, the most common methods of treating these gas streams, suffer from significant drawbacks. Membrane Technology and Research, Inc. (NITR) proposes an alternative treatment technology, based on permselective membranes that separate the organic components from the gas stream, producing a VOC-free air stream. The technology we propose to develop can be applied to all of these off-gas streams and is not tied to a particular off-gas generating source. We propose to develop a completely self-contained system because remediation projects are frequently in remote locations where access to trained operators and utilities is limited. The system will be a turnkey unit, skid-mounted and completely automatic, requiring power but no other utilities. The system will process the off-gas, producing a concentrated liquid VOC stream and a purified gas containing less than …

Effective removal of mercury contamination from water is a complex and difficult problem. In particular, mercury treatment of natural waters is difficult because of the low regulatory standards. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has established a national ambient water quality standard of 12 parts-per-trillion (ppt), whereas the standard is 1.8 ppt in the Great Lakes Region. In addition, mercury is typically present in several different forms, but sorption processes are rarely effective with more than one or two of these forms. To meet the low regulatory discharge limits, a sorption process must be able to address all forms of mercury present in the water. One approach is to apply different sorbents in series depending on the mercury speciation and the regulatory discharge limits. Four new sorbents have been developed to address the variety of mercury species present in industrial discharges and natural waters. Three of these sorbents have been field tested on contaminated creek water at the Y-12 Plant. Two of these sorbents have demonstrated very high removal efficiencies for soluble mercury species, with mercury concentrations at the outlet of a pilot-scale system less than 12 ppt for as long as six months. The other sorbent tested at the …

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The Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor (STAR) concept under development at Argonne National Laboratory provides a small (300 MWt) reactor module for steam supply that incorporates design features to attain proliferation resistance, heightened passive safety, and improved cost competitiveness through extreme simplification. Examples are the achievement of 100%+ natural circulation heat removal from the low power density/low pressure drop ultra-long lifetime core and utilization of lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) coolant enabling elimination of main coolant pumps as well as the need for an intermediate heat transport circuit. It is required to provide a passive means of removing decay heat and effecting reactor cooldown in the event that the normal steam generator heat sink, including its normal shutdown heat removal mode, is postulated to be unavailable. In the present approach, denoted as the Reactor Exterior Cooling System (RECS), passive decay heat removal is provided by cooling the outside of the containment/guard vessel with air. RECS is similar to the Reactor Vessel Auxiliary Cooling System (RVACS) incorporated into the PRISM design. However, to enhance the heat removal, RECS incorporates fins on the containment vessel exterior to enhance heat transfer to air as well as removable steel venetian conductors that provide a conduction heat transfer …

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) the authors have been developing an open architecture machine tool controller. This work has been patterned after the General Motors (GM) led Open Modular Architecture Controller (OMAC) work, where they have been involved since its inception. The OMAC work has centered on creating sets of implementation neutral application programming interfaces (APIs) for machine control software components. In the work at LLNL, they were among the early adopters of the Java programming language. As an application programming language, it is particularly well suited for component software development. The language contains many features, which along with a well-defined implementation API (such as the OMAC APIs) allows third party binary files to be integrated into a working system. Because of its interpreted nature, Java allows rapid integration testing of components. However, for real-time systems development, the Java programming language presents many drawbacks. For instance, lack of well defined scheduling semantics and threading behavior can present many unwanted challenges. Also, the interpreted nature of the standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM) presents an immediate performance hit. Various real-time Java vendors are currently addressing some of these drawbacks. The various pluses and minuses of using the Java programming language and …

The authors present two figures of merit based on singular value decomposition which can be used to assess the noise immunity of a complete Stokes polarimeter. These are used to optimize a polarimeter consisting of a rotatable retarder and fixed polarizer. A retardance of 132{degree} (approximately three eights wave) and retarder orientation angles of {+-}51.7{degree} and {+-}15.1{degree} are found to be optimal when four measurements are used. Use of this retardance affords a factor of 1.5 improvement in signal-to-noise ratio over systems employing a quarter wave plate. A geometric means of visualizing the optimization process is discussed, and the advantages of the use of additional measurements are investigated. No advantage of using retarder orientation angles spaced uniformly through 360{degree} is found over repeated measurements made at the four angles given previously.

The development of practical strategies for the assembly of semiconductor and metal colloid nanoparticles into ordered architectures is an area of considerable current interest, since it offers an opportunity for exploiting the optical and electronic properties of these colloids for device development. Prior research has explored creating such organized nanoparticle assemblies by Langmuir-Blodgett techniques or controlled solvent evaporation on suitable substrates. These approaches suffer from several limitations, however, most notably the generation of relatively simple structures and the lack of structural tailorability, preventing full exploitation of these materials. More recently, directed assembly using chemisorption of streptavidin-biotin or thiol-derivatized gold nanoparticles onto substrates has been described. Alternative approaches to achieving two-dimensional confinement of nanoparticles that do not involve substrate-supported materials, but rather organize the nanoparticles into mesoscopically-ordered soft condensed matter, may offer the advantage of enhanced processability and may permit construction of nanocomposite structures based on functional nanoparticles embedded in a processable, polymer-based matrix. This work describes the development of an alternative strategy for constructing 2-D arrays of functional metal and semiconductor nanoparticles. The approach involves directing the organization of nanocrystals into a processable (i.e., by externally applied magnetic and electric fields) polymer-grafted lipid-based complex fluid. By altering the surface chemistry …

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The distorted wave Born approximation (DWBA) is applied to evaluate the diffraction pattern of neutrons (or X-rays) from a 2D array of dots deposited onto a dissimilar substrate. With the radiation impinging on the surface at a grazing incidence angle {alpha}, the intensities diffracted both in and out the plane of specular reflection are calculated as a function of the periodicity of the array, height and diameter of the dots. The results are presented in the form of diffracted intensity contours in a plane with coordinates {alpha} and {alpha}{prime}, the latter being the glancing angle of scattering. The optimization of the experimental conditions for polarized neutron experiments on submicron dots is discussed. The feasibility of such measurements is confirmed by a test experiment.

It was shown via powder-in-tube (PIT) processing that the (Bi,Pb)-1212 phase readily forms inside a silver sheath at 920 C in air. Composition, oxygen pressure, time, and temperature were all varied to study their effects on (Bi,Pb)-1212 phase purity and superconductivity.

Certain applications for pulse power require narrow, high current pulses for their implementation. This work was performed to determine if MCTS (MOS Controlled Thyristors) could be used for these applications. The MCTS were tested as discharge switches in a low inductance circuit delivering 1 {micro}s pulses at currents between roughly 3 kA and 11 kA, single shot and repetitively at 1, 10 and 50 Hz. Although up to 9000 switching events could be obtained, all the devices failed at some combination of current and repetition rate. Failure was attributed to temperature increases caused by average power dissipated in the thyristor during the switching sequence. A simulation was performed to confirm that the temperature rise was sufficient to account for failure. Considerable heat sinking, and perhaps a better thermal package, would be required before the MCT could be considered for pulse power applications.

Inverter type thyristors were switched repetitively to failure with 1 {micro}s pulses at repetition rates of 10, 50 and 100 pps and at peak currents up to 12 kA. Millions of pulses could be obtained before failure if the peak current were held at around 6 kA.