Savannah River Site has five dormant nuclear production reactors. Long term disposition will require filling some reactor buildings with grout up to ground level. Portland cement based grout will be used to fill the buildings with the exception of some reactor tanks. Some reactor tanks contain significant quantities of aluminum which could react with Portland cement based grout to form hydrogen. Hydrogen production is a safety concern and gas generation could also compromise the structural integrity of the grout pour. Therefore, it was necessary to develop a non-Portland cement grout to fill reactors that contain significant quantities of aluminum. Grouts generate heat when they set, so the potential exists for large temperature increases in a large pour, which could compromise the integrity of the pour. The primary purpose of the testing reported here was to measure heat of hydration, specific heat, thermal conductivity and density of various reactor grouts under consideration so that these properties could be used to model transient heat transfer for different pouring strategies. A secondary purpose was to make qualitative judgments of grout pourability and hardened strength. Some reactor grout formulations were unacceptable because they generated too much heat, or started setting too fast, or required …

We present a fourth-order accurate finite-volume method for solving time-dependent hyperbolic systems of conservation laws on Cartesian grids with multiple levels of refinement. The underlying method is a generalization of that in [5] to nonlinear systems, and is based on using fourth-order accurate quadratures for computing fluxes on faces, combined with fourth-order accurate Runge?Kutta discretization in time. To interpolate boundary conditions at refinement boundaries, we interpolate in time in a manner consistent with the individual stages of the Runge-Kutta method, and interpolate in space by solving a least-squares problem over a neighborhood of each target cell for the coefficients of a cubic polynomial. The method also uses a variation on the extremum-preserving limiter in [8], as well as slope flattening and a fourth-order accurate artificial viscosity for strong shocks. We show that the resulting method is fourth-order accurate for smooth solutions, and is robust in the presence of complex combinations of shocks and smooth flows.

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Heusler intermetallics Mn{sub 2}Y Ga and X{sub 2}MnGa (X; Y =Fe, Co, Ni) undergo tetragonal magnetostructural transitions that can result in half metallicity, magnetic shape memory, or the magnetocaloric effect. Understanding the magnetism and magnetic behavior in functional materials is often the most direct route to being able to optimize current materials for todays applications and to design novel ones for tomorrow. Synchrotron soft x-ray magnetic spectromicroscopy techniques are well suited to explore the the competing effects from the magnetization and the lattice parameters in these materials as they provide detailed element-, valence-, and site-specifc information on the coupling of crystallographic ordering and electronic structure as well as external parameters like temperature and pressure on the bonding and exchange. Fundamental work preparing the model systems of spintronic, multiferroic, and energy-related compositions is presented for context. The methodology of synchrotron spectroscopy is presented and applied to not only magnetic characterization but also of developing a systematic screening method for future examples of materials exhibiting any of the above effects. The chapter progression is as follows: an introduction to the concepts and materials under consideration (Chapter 1); an overview of sample preparation techniques and results, and the kinds of characterization methods employed …

A radiation bioassay program relies on a set of standard human phantoms to calibrate and assess radioactivity levels inside a human body for radiation protection and nuclear medicine imaging purposes. However, the methodologies in the development and application of anthropomorphic phantoms, both physical and computational, had mostly remained the same for the past 40 years. We herein propose a 3-year research project to develop medical image-based physical and computational phantoms specifically for radiation bioassay applications involving internally deposited radionuclides. The broad, long-term objective of this research was to set the foundation for a systematic paradigm shift away from the anatomically crude phantoms in existence today to realistic and ultimately individual-specific bioassay methodologies. This long-term objective is expected to impact all areas of radiation bioassay involving nuclear power plants, U.S. DOE laboratories, and nuclear medicine clinics.

. This study investigates the geometric effects of 90-degree vertical elbows and flow configurations in two-phase flow. The study shows that the elbows make a significant effect on the transport characteristics of two-phase flow, which includes the changes in interfacial structures, bubble interaction mechanisms and flow regime transition. The effect of the elbows is characterized for global and local two-phase flow parameters. The global two-phase flow parameters include two-phase pressure, interfacial structures and flow regime transition. In order to characterize the frictional pressure drop and minor loss across the vertical elbows, pressure measurements are obtained across the test section over a wide range of flow conditions in both single-phase and two-phase flow conditions. A two-phase pressure drop correlation analogous to Lockhart-Martinelli correlation is proposed to predict the minor loss across the elbows. A high speed camera is employed to perform extensive flow visualization studies across the elbows in vertical upward, horizontal and vertical downward sections and modified flow regime maps are proposed. It is found that modified flow regime maps immediately downstream of the vertical upward elbow deviate significantly from the conventional flow regime map. A qualitative assessment of the counter-current flow limitation characteristics specific to the current experimental facility …

This test program sets a multi-phased development path to support the development of the Lithium Hydrotalcite process, in order to raise its Technology Readiness Level from 3 to 6, based on tasks ranging from laboratory scale scientific research to integrated pilot facilities.

Memory size has long limited large-scale applications on high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Since compute nodes frequently do not have swap space, physical memory often limits problem sizes. Increasing core counts per chip and power density constraints, which limit the number of DIMMs per node, have exacerbated this problem. Further, DRAM constitutes a significant portion of overall HPC system cost. Therefore, instead of adding more DRAM to the nodes, mechanisms to manage memory usage more efficiently - preferably transparently - could increase effective DRAM capacity and thus the benefit of multicore nodes for HPC systems. MPI application processes often exhibit significant data similarity. These data regions occupy multiple physical locations across the individual rank processes within a multicore node and thus offer a potential savings in memory capacity. These regions, primarily residing in heap, are dynamic, which makes them difficult to manage statically. Our novel memory allocation library, SBLLmalloc, automatically identifies identical memory blocks and merges them into a single copy. SBLLmalloc does not require application or OS changes since we implement it as a user-level library. Overall, we demonstrate that SBLLmalloc reduces the memory footprint of a range of MPI applications by 32.03% on average and up to 60.87%. Further, …

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We propose LR (Laced Ring) - a simple data structure for representing the connectivity of manifold triangle meshes. LR provides the option to store on average either 1.08 references per triangle or 26.2 bits per triangle. Its construction, from an input mesh that supports constant-time adjacency queries, has linear space and time complexity, and involves ordering most vertices along a nearly-Hamiltonian cycle. LR is best suited for applications that process meshes with fixed connectivity, as any changes to the connectivity require the data structure to be rebuilt. We provide an implementation of the set of standard random-access, constant-time operators for traversing a mesh, and show that LR often saves both space and traversal time over competing representations.

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We have used resonant, coherent soft x-ray scattering to measure wave vector re- solved magnetic domain memory in Co/Pd multilayers. The technique uses angular cross correlation functions and can be applied to any system with circular annuli of constant values of scattering wave vector q. In our Co/Pd film, the memory exhibits a maximum at q = 0.0384 nm-1 near initial reversal that decreases in magnitude as the magnetization is further reversed. The peak is attributed to bubble domains that nucleate reproducibly near initial reversal and which grow into a labyrinth domain structure that is not reproduced from one magnetization cycle to the next.