Article on the dissociation of water on defective carbon substrates.

Article on collective polarization effects in β-polyvinylidene fluoride and its copolymers with tri- and tetrafluoroethylene.

A 20-month field study was conducted to measure the energy performance of south-facing large-area tungsten-oxide absorptive electrochromic (EC) windows with a broad switching range in a private office setting. The EC windows were controlled by a variety of means to bring in daylight while minimizing window glare. For some cases, a Venetian blind was coupled with the EC window to block direct sun. Some tests also involved dividing the EC window wall into zones where the upper EC zone was controlled to admit daylight while the lower zone was controlled to prevent glare yet permit view. If visual comfort requirements are addressed by EC control and Venetian blinds, a 2-zone EC window configuration provided average daily lighting energy savings of 10 {+-} 15% compared to the reference case with fully lowered Venetian blinds. Cooling load reductions were 0 {+-} 3%. If the reference case assumes no daylighting controls, lighting energy savings would be 44 {+-} 11%. Peak demand reductions due to window cooling load, given a critical demand-response mode, were 19-26% maximum on clear sunny days. Peak demand reductions in lighting energy use were 0% or 72-100% compared to a reference case with and without daylighting controls, respectively. Lighting energy …

The IAEA Marine Environment Laboratory (IAEA-MEL) in Monaco has conducted intercomparison exercises on radionuclides in marine samples for many years as part of its contribution to the IAEA's program of Analytical Quality Control Services (AQCS). An important part of the AQCS program has been a production of Reference Materials (RMs) and their provision to radioanalytical laboratories. The RMs have been developed for different marine matrices (sediment, water, biota), with accuracy and precision required for the present state of the art of radiometrics and mass spectrometry methods. The RMs have been produced as the final products of world-wide intercomparison exercises organized during last 30 years. A total of 44 intercomparison exercises were undertaken and 39 RMs were produced for radionuclides in the marine environment. All required matrices (seawater, biota, sediment) have been covered with radionuclide concentrations ranging from typical environmental levels to elevated levels affected by discharges from nuclear reprocessing plants. The long-term availability of RMs (over 10 years) requires the use of very specific techniques to collect and pretreat large quantities of material (e.g., in excess of 100 kg) in order to ensure sample stability and homogenization of any analytes of interest. The production of a RM is therefore a …

We have been developing a semiconductor Compton telescope to explore the universe in the energy band from several tens of keV to a few MeV. We use a Si strip and CdTe pixel detector for the Compton telescope to cover an energy range from 60 keV. For energies above several hundred keV, the higher efficiency of CdTe semiconductor in comparison with Si is expected to play an important role as an absorber and a scatterer. In order to demonstrate the spectral and imaging capability of a CdTe-based Compton Telescope, we have developed a Compton telescope consisting of a stack of CdTe pixel detectors as a small scale prototype. With this prototype, we succeeded in reconstructing images and spectra by solving the Compton equation from 122 keV to 662 keV. The energy resolution (FWHM) of reconstructed spectra is 7.3 keV at 511 keV and 3.1 keV at 122 keV, respectively. The angular resolution obtained at 511 keV is measured to be 12.2{sup o}(FWHM).

An explosive bonding procedure for joining 9.5 mm thick niobium plate to 203 mm thick 6061-T651 Al plate has been developed in order to maximize the bond tensile and impact strengths and the amount of bonded material across the surface of the plate. This procedure improves upon previous efforts, in which the 9.5 mm thick niobium plate is bonded directly to 6061-T4 Al plate. In this improved procedure, thin Nb and Al interlayers are explosively clad between the thicker niobium and aluminum plates. Bonds produced using these optimized parameters display a tensile strength of approximately 255 MPa and an impact strength per unit area of approximately 0.148 J/mm{sup 2}. Specialized mechanical testing geometries and procedures are required to measure these bond properties because of the unique bond geometry. In order to ensure that differences in the thermal expansion coefficients of aluminum and niobium do not adversely affect the bond strength, the effects of thermal cycling at temperatures between -22 C and 45 C on the mechanical properties of these bonds have also been investigated by testing samples in both the as-received and thermal cycled conditions. Based on the results obtained from this series of mechanical tests, thermal cycling is shown …

A scheme for the solution of the time dependent Maxwell's equations on composite overlapping grids is described. The method uses high-order accurate approximations in space and time for Maxwell's equations written as a second-order vector wave equation. High-order accurate symmetric difference approximations to the generalized Laplace operator are constructed for curvilinear component grids. The modified equation approach is used to develop high-order accurate approximations that only use three time levels and have the same time-stepping restriction as the second-order scheme. Discrete boundary conditions for perfect electrical conductors and for material interfaces are developed and analyzed. The implementation is optimized for component grids that are Cartesian, resulting in a fast and efficient method. The solver runs on parallel machines with each component grid distributed across one or more processors. Numerical results in two- and three-dimensions are presented for the fourth-order accurate version of the method. These results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the approach.

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The production of hydrogen via the thermochemical splitting of water is being considered as a primary means for utilizing the heat from advanced nuclear reactors to provide fuel for a hydrogen economy. The Hybrid Sulfur (HyS) Process is one of the baseline candidates identified by the U.S. Department of Energy [1] for this purpose. The HyS Process is a two-step hybrid thermochemical cycle that only involves sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen compounds. Recent work has resulted in an improved process design with a calculated overall thermal efficiency (nuclear heat to hydrogen, higher heating value basis) approaching 50%. Economic analyses indicate that a nuclear hydrogen plant employing the HyS Process in conjunction with an advanced gas-cooled nuclear reactor system can produce hydrogen at competitive prices. Experimental work has begun on the sulfur dioxide depolarized electrolyzer, the major developmental component in the cycle. Proof-of-concept tests have established proton-exchange-membrane cells (a state-of-the-art technology) as a viable approach for conducting this reaction. This is expected to lead to more efficient and economical cell designs than were previously available. Considerable development and scale-up issues remain to be resolved, but the development of a viable commercial-scale HyS Process should be feasible in time to meet the commercialization …

Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) accelerating structures present a unique design environment for the high-power radio frequency (RF) antennas that deliver power to the cavity to establish the electromagnetic fields and ultimately accelerate beam. These RF couplers need to reliably transmit high power RF with low reflection and insertion loss, while simultaneously maintaining cavity vacuum, minimizing heat leak into the cryomodule, and not adversely affecting the RF cavity or cryomodule mechanics upon cool down. While a majority of research and development (R&D) on SRF couplers have been focused on electron accelerators, advances made in high-power ion accelerator design for the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (JPARC), and the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) have necessitated developing high-power RF couplers for these applications as well. This paper examines the present state of RF coupler development and R&D for superconducting ion accelerator applications.

The recent advent of parallel machines with tens of thousands of processors is presenting new challenges for obtaining scalability. A particular challenge for large-scale scientific software is determining the inter-processor communications required by the computation when a global description of the data is unavailable or too costly to store. We present a type of rendezvous algorithm that determines communication partners in a scalable manner by assuming the global distribution of the data. We demonstrate the scaling properties of the algorithm on up to 32,000 processors in the context of determining communication patterns for a matrix-vector multiply in the hypre software library. Our algorithm is very general and is applicable to a variety of situations in parallel computing.

A Bragg waveguide consisting of multiple dielectric layers with alternating index of refraction becomes an excellent option to form electron accelerating structure powered by high power laser sources. It provides confinement of a synchronous speed-of-light mode with extremely low loss. However, laser field can not be coupled into the structure collinearly with the electron beam. There are three requirements in designing input coupler for a Bragg electron accelerator: side-coupling, selective mode excitation, and high coupling efficiency. We present a side coupling scheme using a distributed grating-assisted coupler to inject the laser power into the waveguide. Side coupling is achieved by a grating with a period on the order of an optical wavelength. The phase matching condition results in resonance coupling thus providing selective mode excitation capability. The coupling efficiency is limited by profile matching between the outgoing beam and the incoming beam, which has normally, a Gaussian profile. We demonstrate a non-uniform distributed grating structure generating an outgoing beam with a Gaussian profile, therefore, increasing the coupling efficiency.

Monocrystalline copper samples with orientations of [001] and [221] were shocked at pressures ranging from 20 GPa to 60 GPa using two techniques: direct drive lasers and explosively driven flyer plates. The pulse duration for these techniques differed substantially: 40 ns for the laser experiments at 0.5 mm into the sample and 1.1 {approx} 1.4 {micro}s for the flyer-plate experiments at 5 mm into the sample. The residual microstructures were dependent on orientation, pressure, and shocking method. The much shorter pulse duration in the laser driven shock yielded microstructures closer to the ones generated at the shock front. For the flyer-plate experiments, the longer pulse duration allows shock-generated defects to reorganize into lower energy configurations. Calculations show that the post-shock cooling for the laser driven shock is 10{sup 3} {approx} 10{sup 4} faster than that for plate-impact shock, propitiating recovery and recrystallization conditions for the latter. At the higher pressure level, extensive recrystallization was observed in the plate-impact samples, while it was absent in the laser driven shock. An effect that is proposed to contribute significantly to the formation of recrystallized regions is the existence of micro-shear-bands, which increase the local temperature beyond the prediction from adiabatic compression.