Previous studies of the safety and environmental (S and E) aspects of the HYLIFE-II inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plant design have used simplistic assumptions in order to estimate radioactivity releases under accident conditions. Conservatisms associated with these traditional analyses can mask the actual behavior of the plant and have revealed the need for more accurate modeling and analysis of accident conditions and radioactivity mobilization mechanisms. In the present work a set of computer codes traditionally used for magnetic fusion safety analyses (CHEMCON, MELCOR) has been applied for simulating accident conditions in a simple model of the HYLIFE-II IFE design. Here the authors consider a severe lost of coolant accident (LOCA) producing simultaneous failures of the beam tubes (providing a pathway for radioactivity release from the vacuum vessel towards the containment) and of the two barriers surrounding the chamber (inner shielding and containment building it self). Even though containment failure would be a very unlikely event it would be needed in order to produce significant off-site doses. CHEMCON code allows calculation of long-term temperature transients in fusion reactor first wall, blanket, and shield structures resulting from decay heating. MELCOR is used to simulate a wide range of physical phenomena including …

The success of bandgap engineering has made high efficiency broadband multi-junction solar cells possible with photo-response out to the band edge of Ge. Modeling has been conducted which suggests that current double layer anti-reflection coating technology is not adequate for these devices in certain cases. Approaches for the development of higher performance anti-reflection coatings are examined. A new AR coating structure based on the use of Herpin equivalent layers is presented. Optical modeling suggests a decrease in the solar weighted reflectance of over 2.5{percent} absolute as a result. This structure requires no additional optical material development and characterization because no new optical materials are necessary. Experimental results and a sensitivity analysis are presented.

Electro-osmosis, a coupled-flow phenomenon in which an applied electrical potential gradient drives water flow, may be used to induce water flow through fine-grained sediments. We plan to use this technology to remediate chlorinated solvent-contaminated clayey zones at the LLNL site. The electro-osmotic conductivity (k{sub e}) determined from bench-top studies for a core extracted from a sediment zone 36.4-36.6 m below surface was initially 7.37 x 10{sup -10} m{sup 2}/s-V, decreasing to 3.44 x 10{sup -10} m{sup 2}/s-V, after electro-osmotically transporting 0.70 pore volumes of water through it (195 ml). Hydraulic conductivity (k{sub h}) of the same core was initially measured to be 5.00 x 10{sup -10} m/s, decreasing to 4.08 x 10{sup -10} m/s at the end of processing. This decline in permeability is likely due to formation of a chemical precipitation zone within the core. Water splitting products and ions electromigrate and precipitate within the core; H{sup +} and metal cations migrate toward the cathode, and OH{sup -} from the cathode moves toward the anode. We are now exploring how to minimize this effect using pH control. The significance of this technology is that for this core, a 3 V/cm voltage gradient produced an initial effective hydraulic conductivity of …

The Plutonium Immobilization Project is currently undertaking formulation and process development to demonstrate the immobilization of surplus plutonium in a titanate-based ceramic. These ceramic forms will be encapsulated within canisters containing high level waste glass for geologic disposal. Process development work is being conducted with sub-scale, process prototypic equipment. Final validation of the process will be done using actual plutonium material and functionally prototypic equipment within a glovebox. Due to the radioactive nature of the material, remote material handling is necessary to reduce the radiation exposure to the operators. A remote operated Material Transfer System to interface with process equipment has been developed.

SEU is studied in SOI transistors and circuits with various body tie structures. The importance of impact ionization effects, including single-event snapback, is explored. Implications for hardness assurance testing of SOI integrated circuits are discussed.

The application of coatings over large areas can be approached through the use of large deposition sources. A versatile alternative, e.g. to long rectangular magnetrons, are linear arrays of circular planar magnetrons to process coatings over wide path lengths. They investigate the feasibility of using a linear array of 76 mm diameter magnetron sources operated in the rf mode to deposit oxide target materials across a path in excess of 0.7 m wide. Specific results are given for the case of a 2 {micro}m thick, alumina coating.

In this article the authors concisely present several modern strategies that are applicable to drift-dominated carrier transport in higher-order deterministic models such as the drift-diffusion, hydrodynamic, and quantum hydrodynamic systems. The approaches include extensions of upwind and artificial dissipation schemes, generalization of the traditional Scharfetter-Gummel approach, Petrov-Galerkin and streamline-upwind Petrov Galerkin (SUPG), entropy variables, transformations, least-squares mixed methods and other stabilized Galerkin schemes such as Galerkin least squares and discontinuous Galerkin schemes. The treatment is representative rather than an exhaustive review and several schemes are mentioned only briefly with appropriate reference to the literature. Some of the methods have been applied to the semiconductor device problem while others are still in the early stages of development for this class of applications. They have included numerical examples from the recent research tests with some of the methods. A second aspect of the work deals with algorithms that employ unstructured grids in conjunction with adaptive refinement strategies. The full benefits of such approaches have not yet been developed in this application area and they emphasize the need for further work on analysis, data structures and software to support adaptivity. Finally, they briefly consider some aspects of software frameworks. These include dial-an-operator approaches …

This paper demonstrates the use of appropriate consequence evaluation criteria in conjunction with generic likelihood of occurrence data to produce consistent hazard analysis results for nonreactor nuclear facility Safety Analysis Reports (SAR). An additional objective is to demonstrate the use of generic likelihood of occurrence data as a means for deriving defendable accident sequence frequencies, thereby enabling the screening of potentially incredible events (<10{sup {minus}6} per year) from the design basis accident envelope. Generic likelihood of occurrence data has been used successfully in performing SAR hazard and accident analyses for two nonreactor nuclear facilities at Sandia National Laboratories. DOE-STD-3009-94 addresses and even encourages use of a qualitative binning technique for deriving and ranking nonreactor nuclear facility risks. However, qualitative techniques invariably lead to reviewer requests for more details associated with consequence or likelihood of occurrence bin assignments in the test of the SAR. Hazard analysis data displayed in simple worksheet format generally elicits questions about not only the assumptions behind the data, but also the quantitative bases for the assumptions themselves (engineering judgment may not be considered sufficient by some reviewers). This is especially true where the criteria for qualitative binning of likelihood of occurrence involves numerical ranges. Oftentimes reviewers …

Growth of InAs/AlAs short-period superlattices on appropriately miscut (001) InP substrates is shown to alter the microstructure of composition modulation from a 2D organization of short compositionally enriched wires to a single dominant modulation direction and wire lengths up to {approximately}1 {micro}m. The effects of miscut are interpreted in terms of surface step orientation and character. The material is strongly modulated and exhibits intense optical emission. The 1D modulations appear potentially useful for new devices that take advantage of the preferred direction formed in the growth plane.

For highly crosslinked, polymer networks bonded to a solid surface, the effect of interfacial bond density as well as system size on interfacial fracture is studied molecular dynamics simulations. The correspondence between the stress-strain curve and the sequence of molecular deformations is obtained. The failure strain for a fully bonded surface is equal to the strain necessary to make taut the average minimal path through the network from the bottom solid surface to the top surface. At bond coverages less than full, nanometer scale cavities form at the surface yielding an inhomogeneous strain profile. The failure strain and stress are linearly proportional to the number of bonds at the interface unless the number of bonds is so few that van der Waals interactions dominate. The failure is always interfacial due to fewer bonds at the interface than in the bulk.

The atomic process, kinetics, and equilibrium thermodynamics underlying the gettering of transition-metal impurities in Si are reviewed from a mechanistic perspective. Methods for mathematical modeling of gettering are reviewed and illustrated. Needs for further research are discussed.

A approach for quantifying meteorological uncertainty is via development of an ensemble of forecasts from slightly perturbed initial conditions (Sivillo et al., 1997) to predict the time evolution of the probability density function of atmospheric variables (Mullen and Baurnhefner, 1994). We create an ensemble of forecasts by varying the initial (and boundary) conditions for the COAMPS meteorological model. The variations in the initial conditions must be consistent with analysis error. Optimally, the range of initial conditions would encompass the ''true'' atmospheric state, but which is never actually known. Our method for creating varying initial conditions is to use different global data sets to derive the necessary data. We use two models from the National Weather Service (the AVN and ETA models) and one from the Navy (the NOGAPS model). In addition to those data sets we perturb the data from those models, using a normally distributed random number at each grid point in the COAMPS model. We perturb the (u,v) wind components, the temperature and the moisture. The size of the perturbation is determined by the variability within that variable field. The forecasts are run for 48 hours. We then use the output from the COAMPS model to drive a …

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) team drawing its members from the Materials Sciences Division (MSD), the Center for Beam Physics in the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division, and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) has succeeded in generating 300-femtosecond pulses of synchrotron radiation at the ALS synchrotron radiation machine. Though this ''proof-of-principle'' experiment made use of visible light on a borrowed beamline, the laser ''time-slicing'' technique at the heart of the demonstration will soon be applied in a new bend-magnet beamline designed explicitly for the production of femtosecond pulses of X-rays to study long-range and local order in condensed matter with ultrafast time resolution. An undulator beamline based on the same technique has been proposed that will dramatically increase the flux and brightness.

An integrated approach, including a continuum theory of sintering and mesostructure evolution analysis, is used for the solution of the problem of bi-layered structure sintering. Two types of bi-layered structures are considered: layers of the same material different by initial porosity, and layers of two different materials. The effective sintering stress and the normalized bulk modulus for the bi-layer powder sintering are derived based on mesoscale simulations. The combined effect of the layers' porosity and differences in sintering rate on shrinkage and warpage is studied for both sintering on a rigid substrate and free sintering.

A mesoscale kinetic Monte Carlo model is presented to simulate microstructural evolution during sintering of 2D complex microstructures which evolves by grain growth, pore migration and densification. No assumptions about the geometry of the evolving microstructure are made. The results of these simulations are used to generate sintering stress and normalize viscous bulk modulus for use in continuum level simulation of sintering. The advantage of these simulations is that they can be used to generate more accurate parameters as various assumptions regarding geometry and transport mechanism are made. The previous companion paper used the results from the mesoscale simulations to simulate shrinkage and warpage in sintering of bilayer ceramics.

Low cost SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) systems provide substantial CPU and I/O capacity. These features together with the ease of system integration make them an attractive and cost effective solution for a number of real-time applications in event selection. In ATLAS the authors consider them as intelligent input buffers (active ROB complex), as event flow supervisors or as powerful processing nodes. Measurements of the performance of one off-the-shelf commercial 4-processor PC with two PCI buses, equipped with commercial FPGA based data source cards (microEnable) and running commercial software are presented and mapped on such applications together with a long-term program of work. The SMP systems may be considered as an important building block in future data acquisition systems.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), located in southeast New Mexico, is a deep geologic repository for the permanent disposal of transuranic waste generated by DOE defense-related activities. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), in its role as scientific advisor to the DOE, is responsible for evaluating the long-term performance of the WIPP. This risk-based Performance Assessment (PA) is accomplished in part through the use of numerous scientific modeling codes, which rely for some of their inputs on data gathered during characterization of the site. The PA is subject to formal requirements set forth in federal regulations. In particular, the components of the calculation fall under the configuration management and software quality assurance aegis of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Nuclear Quality Assurance (NQA) requirements. This paper describes SNL's implementation of the NQA requirements regarding configuration management. The complexity of the PA calculation is described, and the rationale for developing a flexible, robust run-control process is discussed. The run-control implementation is described, and its integration with the configuration-management system is then explained, to show how a calculation requiring 37,000 CPU-hours, and involving 225,000 output files totaling 95 Gigabytes, was accomplished in 5 months by 2 …

The optical gain spectra for GaInNAs/GaAs quantum wells are computed using a microscopic laser theory. From these spectra, the peak gain and carrier radiative decay rate as functions of carrier density are determined. These dependences allow the study of the lasing threshold current density of GaInNAs/GaAs quantum well structures.

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) has tested more than 100 prototype HEVs built by colleges and universities since 1994 and has learned that using standardized dynamometer testing procedures can be problematic. This paper addresses the issues related to HEV dynamometer testing procedures and proposes a new testing approach. The proposed ANL testing procedure is based on careful hybrid operation mode characterization that can be applied to certification and R and D. HEVs also present new emissions measurement challenges because of their potential for ultra-low emission levels and frequent engine shutdown during the test cycles.

Ab initio DFT electronic structure calculations involve an iterative process to solve the Kohn-Sham equations for an Hamiltonian depending on the electronic density. We discretize these equations on a grid by finite differences. Trial eigenfunctions are improved at each step of the algorithm using multigrid techniques to efficiently reduce the error at all length scale, until self-consistency is achieved. In this paper we focus on an iterative eigensolver based on the idea of inexact inverse iteration, using multigrid as a preconditioner. We also discuss how this technique can be used for electrons described by general non-orthogonal wave functions, and how that leads to a linear scaling with the system size for the computational cost of the most expensive parts of the algorithm.

The relatively poor efficiency of phosphor materials in cathodoluminescence with low accelerating voltages is a major concern in the design of field emission flat panel displays operated below 5 kV. The authors research on rare-earth-activated phosphors indicates that mechanisms involving interactions of excited activators have a significant impact on phosphor efficiency. Persistence measurements in photoluminescence (PL) and cathodoluminescence (CL) show significant deviations from the sequential relaxation model. This model assumes that higher excited manifolds in an activator de-excite primarily by phonon-mediated sequential relaxation to lower energy manifolds in the same activator ion. In addition to sequential relaxation, there appears to be strong coupling between activators, which results in energy transfer interactions. Some of these interactions negatively impact phosphor efficiency by nonradiatively de-exciting activators. Increasing activator concentration enhances these interactions. The net effect is a significant degradation in phosphor efficiency at useful activator concentrations, which is exaggerated when low-energy electron beams are used to excite the emission.

Low energy electron microscopy (LEEM) is used to investigate the dynamics of Pb overlayer growth on Cu(100). By following changes in surface morphology during Pb deposition, the amount of Cu transported to the surface as the Pb first alloys into the surface during formation of the c(4x4) phase and subsequently de-alloys during conversion to the c(2x2) phase is measured. The authors find that the added coverage of Cu during alloying is consistent with the proposed model for the c(4x4) alloy phase, but the added coverage during de-alloying is not consistent with the accepted model for the c(2x2) phase. To account for the discrepancy, the authors propose that Cu atoms are incorporated in the c(2x2) structure. Island growth and step advancement during the transition from the c(2x2) to c(5{radical}2x{radical}2)R45{degree} structure agrees with this model. The authors also use the LEEM to identify the order and temperature of the two-dimensional melting phase transitions for the three Pb/Cu(100) surface structures. Phase transitions for the c(5{radical}2x{radical}2)R45{degree} and c(4x4) structures are first-order, but the c(2x2) transition is second order. They determine that rotational domains of the c(5{radical}2x{radical}2)R45{degree} structure coarsen from nanometer- to micron-sized dimensions with relatively mild heating ({approximately}120 C), whereas coarsening of c(4x4) domains …

The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) started plasma operations in February 1999, In the first extended period of experiments, NSTX achieved high current, inner wall limited, double null, and single null plasma discharges, initial Coaxial Helicity Injection, and High Harmonic Fast Wave results. As expected, discharge reproducibility and performance were strongly affected by wall condition. In this paper, the authors describe the internal geometry, and initial plasma discharge, impurity control, wall conditioning, erosion, and deposition results.

The switching and memory retention time has been measured in 50 {micro}m gatelength pseudo-non-volatile memory MOSFETS containing, protonated 40 nm gate oxides. Times of the order of 3.3 seconds are observed for fields of 3 MV cm{sup {minus}1}. The retention time with protons placed either at the gate oxide/substrate or gate oxide/gate electrode interfaces is found to better than 96{percent} after 5,000 seconds. Measurement of the time dependence of the source-drain current during switching provides clear evidence for the presence of dispersive proton transport through the gate oxide.