A proprietary tritium loading bed developed by Molecular Separations, Inc (MSI) has been shown to selectively load tritiated water as waters of hydration at near ambient temperatures. Tests conducted with a 126 {micro}C{sub 1} tritium/liter water standard mixture showed reductions to 25 {micro}C{sub 1}/L utilizing two, 2-meter long columns in series. Demonstration tests with Hanford Site wastewater samples indicate an approximate tritium concentration reduction from 0.3 {micro}C{sub 1}/L to 0.07 {micro}C{sub 1}/L for a series of two, 2-meter long stationary column beds Further reduction to less than 0.02 {micro}C{sub 1}/L, the current drinking water maximum contaminant level (MCL), is projected with additional bed media in series. Tritium can be removed from the loaded beds with a modest temperature increase and the beds can be reused Results of initial tests are presented and a moving bed process for treating large quantities of wastewaters is proposed. The moving bed separation process appears promising to treat existing large quantities of wastewater at various US Department of Energy (DOE) sites. The enriched tritium stream can be grouted for waste disposition. The separations system has also been shown to reduce tritium concentrations in nuclear reactor cooling water to levels that allow reuse. Energy requirements to …

Two-phase characteristic curves are necessary for the simulation of water and vapor flow in porous media. Existing functions such as van Genuchten, Brooks and Corey, and Luckner et al. have significant limitations in the dry region as the liquid saturation goes to zero. This region, which is important in a number of applications including liquid and vapor flow and vapor-solid sorption, has been the subject of a number of previous investigations. Most previous studies extended standard capillary pressure curves into the adsorption region to zero water content and required a refitting of the revised curves to the data. In contrast, the present method provides for a simple extension of existing capillary pressure curves without the need to refit the experimental data. Therefore, previous curve fits can be used, and the transition between the existing fit and the relationship in the adsorption region is easily calculated. The data-model comparison shows good agreement. This extension is a simple and convenient way to extend existing curves to the dry region.

This report compiles the presentations made at the 1999 Photovoltaic Performance and Reliability Workshop, held on October 18-21, 1999, in Vail, Colorado. The theme of the workshop was ''Setting a Standard for PV Performance and Reliability,'' with the focus on testing, test methods, evaluation, and standards. The workshop provided a venue for technical discussions on four topical areas: module rating, module qualification, power processing, and systems. Includes the following. (1) Module Performance Rating. IEEE PAR 1479 ''Draft Recommended Practice for the Evaluation of Photovoltaic Module Energy Production'' - proceed with validating the models and inputs; look closely at the need to develop a similar activity for system energy rating. (2) Module Qualification Testing. IEEE Std.1262 ''Recommended Practice for Qualification of PV Modules'' - continue validation of proposed new qualification tests at NREL, ISPRA, and US PV industry and test lab facilities. Reliability testing should be done and should include module qualification. (3) Power Processing. The most pressing concerns expressed by individuals included system design and system components integration aspects; reliability assurance; interconnection and the need for a uniform, national approach; testing; and, infrastructure development. (4) Systems Evaluation. The most pressing concerns reiterated the concerns in the power processing session. IEEE …

Under the sponsorship of the US Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC) and the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), Saft has developed high-power lithium-ion (Li-Ion) batteries for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). These high-power Li-Ion batteries are being evaluated for the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Hybrid Vehicle Propulsion Program. As part of this program, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) characterized the thermal performance of the Saft (6-Ah) Li-Ion cells. The characterization included (1) obtaining thermal images of cells under a specified cycle, (2) measuring heat generation from the cells at various temperatures and under various charge/discharge profiles, and (3) determining the cells' capabilities for following a simulated power profile (driving cycle) at various initial states of charge and temperatures.

Common ceramic component manufacturing typically involves the processing of the raw materials in powder form. Granulated powder is formed into a green body of the desired size and shape by consolidation, often by simply pressing nominally dry powder. Ceramic powders are commonly pressed in steel dies or rubber bags with the aim of producing a near-net-shape green body for subsequent sintering. Density gradients in these compacts, introduced during the pressing operation, are often severe enough to cause distortions in the shape of the part during sintering due to nonuniform shrinkage. In such cases, green machining or diamond grinding operations may be needed to obtain the desired final shape and size part. In severe cases, nonuniform shrinkage may even cause fracture in the parts during sintering. Likewise, density gradients can result in green bodies that break during ejection from the die or that are too fragile to be handled during subsequent processing. Empirical relationships currently exist to describe powder compaction but provide little understanding of how to control die design or compaction parameters to minimize density gradients thereby forcing the designer to use expensive and time consuming trial and error procedures. For this reason, interest has grown in developing computational tools …

In today's marketplace, the cost per Terabyte of disks with EIDE interfaces is about a third that of disks with SCSI. Hence, three times as many particle physics events could be put online with EIDE. The modern EIDE interface includes many of the performance features that appeared earlier in SCSI. EIDE bus speeds approach 33 Megabytes/s and need only be shared between two disks rather than seven disks. The interal I/O rate of very fast (and expensive) SCSI disks is only 50% greater than EIDE disks. Hence, two EIDE disks whose combined cost is much less than one very fast SCSI disk can actually give more data throughput due to the advantage of multiple spindles and head actuators. The authors explore the use of 12 and 16 Gigabyte EIDE disks with motherboard and PCI bus card interfaces on a number of operating systems and CPUs. These include Red Hat Linux and Windows 95/98 on a Pentium, MacOS and Apple's Rhapsody/NeXT/UNIX on a PowerPC, and Sun Solaris on a UltraSparc 10 workstation.

CDF has obtained new results on quarkonium production in p{anti p} collisions at {radical}s = 1.8 TeV. The author reports on measurements of {Upsilon} meson production, {Upsilon}(1S) production from {chi}{sub b} feeddown, and the production polarization of {Upsilon}(1S), J/{psi} and {psi}(2S) mesons.

The author reviewed the successes of quantum chromodynamics. Then he assessed the current state of the electroweak theory, making brief comments about the search for the Higgs boson and some of the open issues for the theory. He sketches the problems of mass and mass scales, and points to a speculative link between the question of identity and large extra dimensions. To conclude, he returns to QCD and the possibility that its phase structure might inform the understanding of electroweak symmetry breaking.

Large scale QCD Monte Carlo calculations have typically been performed on either commercial supercomputers or specially built massively parallel computers such as Fermilab's ACPMAPS. Commodity computer systems offer impressive floating point performance-to-cost ratios which exceed those of commercial supercomputers. As high performance networking components approach commodity pricing, it becomes reasonable to assemble a massively parallel supercomputer from commodity parts. The authors describe the work and progress to date of a collaboration working on this problem.

The author presents new results on top quark production and decay properties. These results include measurements of the transverse momentum of top quarks produced in t{anti t} events, the invariant mass of the t{anti t} system, and the W boson helicity in top quark decays. The author also presents limits on single top quark production for the W* and W-gluon channels.

The microstructure of lateral composition modulation in InAs/AlAs superlattices grown by MBE on InP is examined. The use of x-ray diffraction, TEM, AFM, and STEM to characterize the modulations is discussed. Combining the information from these techniques gives increased insight into the phenomenon and how to manipulate it. Diffraction measures the intensity of modulation and its wavelength, and is used to identify growth conditions giving strong modulation. The TEM and STEM analyses indicate that local compositions are modulated by as much as 0.38 InAs mole fraction. Plan-view images show that modulated structures consists of short ({approx_lt}0.2 {micro}m) In-rich wires with a 2D organization in a (001) growth plane. However, growth on miscut substrates can produce a single modulation along the miscut direction with much longer wires ({approx_gt}0.4 {micro}m), as desired for potential applications. Photoluminescence studies demonstrate that the modulation has large effects on the bandgap energy of the superlattice.

The void percolation threshold is calculated for a distribution of overlapping spheres with equal radii, and for a binary sized distribution of overlapping spheres, where half of the spheres have radii twice as large as the other half. Using systems much larger than previous work, the authors determine a much more precise value for the percolation thresholds and correlation length exponent. The values for the percolation thresholds are shown to be significantly different, in contrast with previous, less precise works that speculated that the threshold might be universal with respect to sphere size distribution.

The authors present a new technique for the design of approximation algorithms that can be viewed as a generalization of randomized rounding. They derive new or improved approximation guarantees for a class of generalized congestion problems such as multicast congestion, multiple TSP etc. Their main mathematical tool is a structural decomposition theorem related to the integrality gap of a relaxation.

Energy dispersive x-ray (EDX) spectrum imaging has been performed in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) on a metal/ceramic braze to characterize the elemental distribution near the interface. Statistical methods were utilized to extract the relevant information (i.e., chemical phases and their distributions) from the spectrum image data set in a robust and unbiased way. The raw spectrum image was over 15 Mbytes (7500 spectra) while the statistical analysis resulted in five spectra and five images which describe the phases resolved above the noise level and their distribution in the microstructure.

The authors present a more detailed account of the study (hep-ph/9903238) for the supersymmetry reach of the Tevatron in channels with isolated leptons and identified tau jets. They review the theoretical motivations for expecting such signatures, and describe the relevant parameter space in the minimal supergravity and the minimal gauge-mediated models. With explicit Monte Carlo simulations they then show that for certain parameter ranges, channels with two leptons and one tau jet offer a better reach in Run 2 than the clean trilepton signal. They emphasize that improving on tau ID is an important prerequisite for successful searches in multiple tau jet channels. Finally, they discuss some triggering issues.

Pressure studies have provided new insights into the physics of compositionally-disordered ABO{sub 3} oxide relaxors. Specifically, results will be presented and discussed on a pressure-induced ferroelectric-to-relaxer crossover phenomenon, the continuous evolution of the energetic and dynamics of the relaxation process, and the interplay between pressure and electric field in determining the dielectric response.

A pressure-induced crossover from normal Ferroelectric-to-Relaxer behavior has been observed in single crystal [Pb(Zn{sub 1/3}Nb{sub 2/3})O{sub 3}]{sub 0.905}(PbTiO{sub 3}){sub 0.0095}, or PZN - 9.5% PT. Analogy with similar observations for other perovskites indicates that this crossover is a general feature of compositionally-disordered soft mode ferroelectrics. The Pressure-Temperature phase diagram has been also determined.