N/A

This document is the final report for the ''Advanced Compressor Engine Controls to Enhance Operation, Reliability, and Integrity'' project. SwRI conducted this project for DOE in conjunction with Cooper Compression, under DOE contract number DE-FC26-03NT41859. This report addresses an investigation of engine controls for integral compressor engines and the development of control strategies that implement closed-loop NOX emissions feedback.

Li-ion cells are being developed for high-power applications in hybrid electric vehicles currently being designed for the FreedomCAR (Freedom Cooperative Automotive Research) program. These cells offer superior performance in terms of power and energy density over current cell chemistries. Cells using this chemistry are the basis of battery systems for both gasoline and fuel cell based hybrids. However, the safety of these cells needs to be understood and improved for eventual widespread commercial application in hybrid electric vehicles. The thermal behavior of commercial and prototype cells has been measured under varying conditions of cell composition, age and state-of-charge (SOC). The thermal runaway behavior of full cells has been measured along with the thermal properties of the cell components. We have also measured gas generation and gas composition over the temperature range corresponding to the thermal runaway regime. These studies have allowed characterization of cell thermal abuse tolerance and an understanding of the mechanisms that result in cell thermal runaway.

This report discusses the issue of children that have been left as orphans due to AIDS taking their parents lives. Moreover, the report details that between 2001 and 2003 the number of children orphaned from AIDS increased by 3.5 million. The rate of orphaned children is only expected to increase in the future if massive spending is not issued to curb the problem.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Alvin, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

A proof-of-technology demonstration for the River Protection Project (RPP) Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) was performed by SRS. As part of this demonstration, samples from a low-activity AZ-102 glass waste form were characterized. The sample handling, preparation, and analyses were performed according to standard United States of America Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) protocol to facilitate use of these results for regulatory applications.

This report provides appropriations of Transportation, Treasury, Postal Service, Executive Office of the President, General Government, and Related Agencies for FY2004

The ASCI Grid Services (initially called Distributed Resource Management) project was started under DisCom{sup 2} when distant and distributed computing was identified as a technology critical to the success of the ASCI Program. The goals of the Grid Services project has and continues to be to provide easy, consistent access to all the ASCI hardware and software resources across the nuclear weapons complex using computational grid technologies, increase the usability of ASCI hardware and software resources by providing interfaces for resource monitoring, job submission, job monitoring, and job control, and enable the effective use of high-end computing capability through complex-wide resource scheduling and brokering. In order to increase acceptance of the new technology, the goal included providing these services in both the unclassified as well as the classified user's environment. This paper summarizes the many accomplishments and lessons learned over approximately five years of the ASCI Grid Services Project. It also provides suggestions on how to renew/restart the effort for grid services capability when the situation is right for that need.

The injection of sorbents upstream of a particulate control device is one of the most promising methods for controlling mercury emissions from coal-fired utility boilers with electrostatic precipitators and fabric filters. Studies carried out at the bench-, pilot-, and full-scale have shown that a wide variety of factors may influence sorbent mercury removal effectiveness. These factors include mercury species, flue gas composition, process conditions, existing pollution control equipment design, and sorbent characteristics. The objective of the program is to obtain the necessary information to assess the viability of lower cost alternatives to commercially available activated carbon for mercury control in coal-fired utilities. Prior to injection testing, a number of sorbents were tested in a slipstream fixed-bed device both in the laboratory and at two field sites. Based upon the performance of the sorbents in a fixed-bed device and the estimated cost of mercury control using each sorbent, seventeen sorbents were chosen for screening in a slipstream injection system at a site burning a Western bituminous coal/petcoke blend, five were chosen for screening at a site burning a subbituminous Powder River Basin (PRB) coal, and nineteen sorbents were evaluated at a third site burning a PRB coal. Sorbents evaluated during the …

Yankee Atomic Energy Company (YAEC) is considering allowing portions of existing structures at the Yankee Nuclear Power Station (YNPS) to remain on site at the time of license termination. Accordingly, release of residual radioactive contaminants (i.e., H-3, C-14, Co-60, Ni-63, Sr-90, and Cs-137) from remaining subsurface concrete structures (Darman, 2004) and dose due to that release must be evaluated. Analyses were performed using DUST-MS to assess the rate of release for each radionuclide from the concrete, based upon an assumed concentration of 1 pCi/g and a concrete density of 2.5 g/cm{sup 3}. Using the same assumptions that were applied to the soil DCGL calculation (and where appropriate, the same input parameters), RESRAD was used to calculate the dose from water pathways. Values for selected RESRAD input parameters were chosen to match the release rate calculated by DUST-MS. The results indicated that Cs-137 yielded the highest dose.

New or modified models have been proposed for the much-studied Si(111)-(2x1) surface structure, including: a reverse-tilted p-bonded chain model (by Zitzlsperger et al); a three-bond scission model (by Haneman et al); and a p-bonded chain model with enhanced vibrations (present work). These models are compared here to the generally accepted modified p-bonded chain model (by Himpsel et al, 1984), by analyzing low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) I-V curves measured earlier. Using the efficient automated tensor LEED technique, the models can be refined to a much greater degree than with earlier methods of LEED analysis. This study distinctly favors the earlier modified p-bonded chain model, but with strongly enhanced vibrations. To compare models that have different numbers of adjustable free parameters a Hamilton ratio test is used: it can distinguish between improvement due to a better model and improvement due only to more parameters.

This report addresses the development of automated video-screening technology to assist security forces in protecting our homeland against terrorist threats. A threat of specific interest to this project is the covert placement and subsequent remote detonation of bombs (e.g., briefcase bombs) inside crowded public facilities. Different from existing video motion detection systems, the video-screening technology described in this report is capable of detecting changes in the static background of an otherwise, dynamic environment - environments where motion and human activities are persistent. Our goal was to quickly detect changes in the background - even under conditions when the background is visible to the camera less than 5% of the time. Instead of subtracting the background to detect movement or changes in a scene, we subtracted the dynamic scene variations to produce an estimate of the static background. Subsequent comparisons of static background estimates are used to detect changes in the background. Detected changes can be used to alert security forces of the presence and location of potential threats. The results of this research are summarized in two MS Power-point presentations included with this report.

This paper discusses an innovative application of new Markov localization techniques that combat the problem of odometry drift, allowing a novel control architecture developed at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) to be utilized within a sensor characterization facility developed at the Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL) in Nevada. The new robotic capability provided by the INEEL will allow RSL to test and evaluate a wide variety of sensors including radiation detection systems, machine vision systems, and sensors that can detect and track heat sources (e.g. human bodies, machines, chemical plumes). By accurately moving a target at varying speeds along designated paths, the robotic solution allows the detection abilities of a wide variety of sensors to be recorded and analyzed.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report provides the Current and Proposed Safeguards of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or “Mad Cow Disease”).

Although small wind turbine technology and economics have improved in recent years, the small wind market in the United States continues to be driven in large part by state incentives, such as cash rebates, favorable loan programs, and tax credits. This paper examines the state-by-state economic attractiveness of small residential wind systems. Economic attractiveness is evaluated primarily using the break-even turnkey cost (BTC) of a residential wind system as the figure of merit. The BTC is defined here as the aggregate installed cost of a small wind system that could be supported such that the system owner would break even (and receive a specified return on investment) over the life of the turbine, taking into account current available incentives, the wind resource, and the retail electricity rate offset by on-site generation. Based on the analysis presented in this paper, we conclude that: (1) the economics of residential, grid-connected small wind systems is highly variable by state and wind resource class, (2) significant cost reductions will be necessary to stimulate widespread market acceptance absent significant changes in the level of policy support, and (3) a number of policies could help stimulate the market, but state cash incentives currently have the most …

California's recently enacted Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS, Senate Bill 1078) requires the state's investor-owned utilities (IOUs) to increase the renewable portion of their energy mix, with a goal of 20% renewable energy generation by 2017. Renewable generation projects will compete with each other to supply the IOUs, with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) establishing a process to select the''least-cost, best-fit'' projects. The California Energy Commission (CEC), in support of the CPUC, organized a team to study integration costs in the context of RPS implementation. The analysis team, collectively referred to as the Methods Group, consists of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and staff members from the California Independent System Operator, Dynamic Design Engineering, and the California Wind Energy Collaborative. This RPS Integration Study is motivated by the RPS's ''least-cost, best-fit'' bid selection criterion, which requires that indirect costs be considered in addition to the energy bid price when selecting eligible renewable projects. This paper summarizes the key results from the Phase I report. Specific issues examined in the report include capacity credit, regulation impacts and costs, and preliminary load-following impacts via the supplemental energy market in California. We also discuss the status …

Integral to the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) Program’s proposed closed nuclear fuel cycle, the fission products cesium and strontium in the dissolved spent nuclear fuel stream are to be separated and managed separately. A comprehensive literature survey is presented to identify cesium and strontium separation technologies that have the highest potential and to focus research and development efforts on these technologies. Removal of these high-heat-emitting fission products reduces the radiation fields in subsequent fuel cycle reprocessing streams and provides a significant short-term (100 yr) heat source reduction in the repository. This, along with separation of actinides, may provide a substantial future improvement in the amount of fuel that could be stored in a geologic repository. The survey and review of the candidate cesium and strontium separation technologies are presented herein. Because the AFCI program intends to manage cesium and strontium together, technologies that simultaneously separate both elements are of the greatest interest, relative to technologies that separate only one of the two elements.

This report describes the Characterization of Peeling-Ballooning Stability Limits on the Pedestal.

Quarterly newsletter features success stories, coalition news, upcoming events, a coordinator profile and an article on technical assistance.

Physically interacting proteins or parts of proteins are expected to evolve in a coordinated manner that preserves proper interactions. Such coevolution at the amino acid-sequence level is well documented and has been used to predict interacting proteins, domains, and amino acids. Interacting proteins are also often precisely coexpressed with one another, presumably to maintain proper stoichiometry among interacting components. Here, we show that the expression levels of physically interacting proteins coevolve. We estimate average expression levels of genes from four closely related fungi of the genus Saccharomyces using the codon adaptation index and show that expression levels of interacting proteins exhibit coordinated changes in these different species. We find that this coevolution of expression is a more powerful predictor of physical interaction than is coevolution of amino acid sequence. These results demonstrate previously uncharacterized coevolution of gene expression, adding a different dimension to the study of the coevolution of interacting proteins and underscoring the importance of maintaining coexpression of interacting proteins over evolutionary time. Our results also suggest that expression coevolution can be used for computational prediction of protein protein interactions.

The objective of the research described in this report is the development and application of a methodology for comprehensively assessing the hydrogeologic uncertainties involved in dose assessment, including uncertainties associated with conceptual models, parameters, and scenarios. This report describes and applies a statistical method to quantitatively estimate the combined uncertainty in model predictions arising from conceptual model and parameter uncertainties. The method relies on model averaging to combine the predictions of a set of alternative models. Implementation is driven by the available data. When there is minimal site-specific data the method can be carried out with prior parameter estimates based on generic data and subjective prior model probabilities. For sites with observations of system behavior (and optionally data characterizing model parameters), the method uses model calibration to update the prior parameter estimates and model probabilities based on the correspondence between model predictions and site observations. The set of model alternatives can contain both simplified and complex models, with the requirement that all models be based on the same set of data. The method was applied to the geostatistical modeling of air permeability at a fractured rock site. Seven alternative variogram models of log air permeability were considered to represent data …

Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) has increased dramatically since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as a result of human activities (Keeling and others 1995, Houghton and others 2001). The primary cause of CO2 increases are worldwide fossil fuel burning, biomass burning, and cement manufacturing. These activities are, in turn, tied to the expanding world population and a rising demand for energy. If the steady increase of CO2 continues, there may be profound effects on the environment and the world economy from a "greenhouse effect" that has led to global warming of the atmosphere (Houghton and others 2001).