The Collaborative Lubricating Oil Study on Emissions (CLOSE) project was a pilot investigation of how fuels and crankcase lubricants contribute to the formation of particulate matter (PM) and semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOC) in vehicle exhaust. As limited vehicles were tested, results are not representative of the whole on-road fleet. Long-term effects were not investigated. Pairs of vehicles (one normal PM emitting, one high-PM emitting) from four categories were selected: light-duty (LD) gasoline cars, medium-duty (MD) diesel trucks, heavy-duty (HD) natural-gas-fueled buses, and HD diesel buses. HD vehicles procured did not exhibit higher PM emissions, and thus were labeled high mileage (HM). Fuels evaluated were non-ethanol gasoline (E0), 10 percent ethanol (E10), conventional low-sulfur TxLED diesel, 20% biodiesel (B20), and natural gas. Temperature effects (20 degrees F, 72 degrees F) were evaluated on LD and MD vehicles. Lubricating oil vintage effects (fresh and aged) were evaluated on all vehicles. LD and MD vehicles were operated on a dynamometer over the California Unified Driving Cycle, while HD vehicles followed the Heavy Duty Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule. Regulated and unregulated emissions were measured. Chemical markers from the unregulated emissions measurements and a tracer were utilized to estimate the lubricant contribution to PM.

This presentation describes how you could conceivably allocate variability and reserve requirements, including how to allocate aggregation benefits. Conclusions of this presentation are: (1) Aggregation provides benefits because individual requirements are not 100% correlated; (2) Method needed to allocate reduced requirement among participants; (3) Differences between allocation results are subtle - (a) Not immediately obvious which method is 'better'; (b) Many are numerically 'correct', they sum to the physical requirement; (c) Many are not 'fair', Results depend on sub-aggregation and/or the order individuals are included; and (4) Vector allocation method is simple and fair.

Research reveals active role of cluster symmetries on the size-sensitive, diverse melting behaviors of metallic nanoclusters, providing insight to understanding phase changes of nanoparticles for thermal energy storage. Unlike macroscopic bulk materials, intermediate-sized nanoclusters with around 55 atoms inherently exhibit size-sensitive melting changes: adding just a single atom to a nanocluster can cause a dramatic change in melting behavior. Microscopic understanding of thermal behaviors of metal nanoclusters is important for nanoscale catalysis and thermal energy storage applications. However, it is a challenge to obtain a structural interpretation at the atomic level from measured thermodynamic quantities such as heat capacity. Using ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) revealed a clear correlation between the diverse melting behaviors of aluminum nanoclusters and cluster core symmetries. These simulations reproduced, for the first time, the size-sensitive heat capacities of aluminum nanoclusters, which exhibit several distinctive shapes associated with the diverse melting behaviors of the clusters. The size-dependent, diverse melting behaviors of the aluminum clusters are attributed to the reduced symmetry (from Td {yields} D2d {yields} Cs) with increasing the cluster sizes and can be used to help design thermal storage materials.

A low-power time-to-digital convertor (TDC) for an application inside a vacuum has been implemented based on the Wave Union TDC scheme in a low-cost field programmable gate array (FPGA) device. Bench top tests have shown that a time measurement resolution better than 30 ps (standard deviation of time differences between two channels) is achieved. Special firmware design practices are taken to reduce power consumption. The measurements indicate that with 32 channels fitting in the FPGA device, the power consumption on the FPGA core voltage is approximately 9.3 mW/channel and the total power consumption including both core and I/O banks is less than 27 mW/channel.

In this CRADA, NREL's Silicon group members performed the following research activities: (1) investigation of the role of hydrogen in growth of a mixed-phase nc-Si:H/a-Si:H material; (2) role of hydrogen in light-induced degradation of a-Si:H and development of Staebler-Wronski effect resistive a-Si:H; and (3) performing characterizations of UniSolar's a-Si:H and nc-Si materials, with goal to help optimizing large-area uniformity and quality of the UniSolar's nanocrystalline Si:H.

This issue is dedicated to the heroes and professionals who helped protect the world from nuclear disasters and to those who were displaced by these catastrophes.

Large-scale, high-throughput production of nano-structured materials (i.e. nanomanufacturing) is a strategic area in manufacturing, with markets projected to exceed $1T by 2015. Nanomanufacturing is still in its infancy; process/product developments are costly and only touch on potential opportunities enabled by growing nanoscience discoveries. The greatest promise for high-volume manufacturing lies in age-old coating and imprinting operations. For materials with tailored nm-scale structure, imprinting/embossing must be achieved at high speeds (roll-to-roll) and/or over large areas (batch operation) with feature sizes less than 100 nm. Dispersion coatings with nanoparticles can also tailor structure through self- or directed-assembly. Layering films structured with these processes have tremendous potential for efficient manufacturing of microelectronics, photovoltaics and other topical nano-structured devices. This project is designed to perform the requisite R and D to bring Sandia's technology base in computational mechanics to bear on this scale-up problem. Project focus is enforced by addressing a promising imprinting process currently being commercialized.

This project seeks to identify a new signature for actinide element detection in active interrogation. This technique works by exciting and identifying long-lived nuclear excited states (isomers) in the actinide isotopes and/or primary fission products. Observation of isomers in the fission products will provide a signature for fissile material. For the actinide isomers, the decay time and energy of the isomeric state is unique to a particular isotope, providing an unambiguous signature for SNM. This project entails isomer identification and characterization and neutron population studies. This document summarizes activities from its third year - completion of the isomer identification characterization experiments and initialization of the neutron population experiments. The population and decay of the isomeric state in 235U remain elusive, although a number of candidate gamma rays have been identified. In the course of the experiments, a number of fission fragment isomers were populated and measured [Ressler 2010]. The decays from these isomers may also provide a suitable signature for the presence of fissile material. Several measurements were conducted throughout this project. This report focuses on the results of an experiment conducted collaboratively by PNNL, LLNL and LBNL in December 2010 at LBNL. The measurement involved measuring the gamma-rays emitted …

This 2-page fact sheet describes NREL's offshore wind research and development efforts and capabilities. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is internationally recognized for offshore wind energy research and development (R&D). Its experience and capabilities cover a wide spectrum of wind energy disciplines. NREL's offshore wind R&D efforts focus on critical areas that address the long-term needs of the offshore wind energy industry and the Department of Energy (DOE). R&D efforts include: (1) Developing offshore design tools and methods; (2) Collaborating with international partners; (3) Testing offshore systems and developing standards; (4) Conducting economic analyses; (5) Characterizing offshore wind resources; and (6) Identifying and mitigating offshore wind grid integration challenges and barriers. NREL has developed and maintains a robust, open-source, modular computer-aided engineering (CAE) tool, known as FAST. FAST's state-of-the-art capabilities provide full dynamic system simulation for a range of offshore wind systems. It models the coupled aerodynamic, hydrodynamic, control system, and structural response of offshore wind systems to support the development of innovative wind technologies that are reliable and cost effective. FAST also provides dynamic models of wind turbines on offshore fixed-bottom systems for shallow and transitional depths and floating-platform systems in deep water, thus enabling design innovation and risk …

This report describes operations at SunLine Transit Agency for their newest prototype fuel cell bus and five compressed natural gas (CNG) buses. In May 2010, SunLine began operating its sixth-generation hydrogen fueled bus, an Advanced Technology (AT) fuel cell bus that incorporates the latest design improvements to reduce weight and increase reliability and performance. The agency is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to evaluate the bus in revenue service. This is the second results report for the AT fuel cell bus since it was placed in service, and it focuses on the newest data analysis and lessons learned since the previous report. The appendices, referenced in the main report, provide the full background for the evaluation. They will be updated as new information is collected but will contain the original background material from the first report.

This report presents the results of an evaluation of juvenile Chinook salmonid (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) behavior in the immediate forebay of the Water Temperature Control (WTC) tower at Cougar Dam in 2010. The study was conducted by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The overall goal of the study was to characterize juvenile salmonid behavior and movement patterns in the immediate forebay of the WTC tower for fisheries resource managers to use to make decisions on bioengineering designs for long-term structures and/or operations to facilitate safe downstream passage for juvenile salmonids. We collected acoustic imaging (Dual-Frequency Identification Sonar; DIDSON) data from February 1, 2010 through January 31, 2011 to evaluate juvenile salmonid behavior year-round in the immediate forebay surface layer of the WTC tower (within 20 m, depth 0-5 m). From October 28, 2010 through January 31, 2011 a BlueView acoustic camera was also deployed in an attempt to determine its usefulness for future studies as well as augment the DIDSON data. For the DIDSON data, we processed a total of 35 separate 24-h periods systematically covering every other week in the 12-month study. Two different 24-hour periods were processed for the BlueView data for …

NREL research helps answer a fundamental question regarding electric vehicles: Is the grid ready to handle them? Environmental, economic and security concerns regarding oil consumption make electrifying the transportation sector a high national priority. NREL's Center for Transportation Technologies & Systems (CTTS) has developed a framework for utilities to evaluate the plug-in vehicle (PEV) readiness of distribution transformers. Combining a wealth of vehicle performance statistics with load data from partner utilities including the Hawaiian Electric Company and Xcel Energy, NREL analyzed the thermal loading characteristics of distribution transformers due to vehicle charging. After running millions of simulations replicating varying climates and conditions, NREL is now able to predict aging rates for transformers when PEVs are added to existing building loads. With the NREL tool, users define simulation parameters by inputting vehicle trip and weather data; transformer load profiles and ratings; PEV penetration, charging rates and battery sizes; utility rates; the number of houses on each transformer; and public charging availability. Transformer load profiles, drive cycles, and ambient temperature data are then run through the thermal model to produce a one-year timeseries of the hotspot temperature. Annual temperature durations are calculated to help determine the annual aging rate. Annual aging rate …

The D0 and CDF detectors at the Fermilab Tevatron have each accumulated more that 9 fb{sup -1} of integrated luminosity. The corresponding large datasets enable the two experiments to perform unprecedented studies of heavy flavor hadron properties. We present recent D0 and CDF measurements, focusing on rare decays and CP violation in B-meson decays. Flavor Physics probes new phenomena by either searching for small deviations from the Standard Model (SM) based theoretical predictions or by measuring quantities which are highly suppressed within the SM. Searching for small deviations from the SM are performed using large strange, charm or bottom hadron samples, mostly by kaon experiments of B factories. Measurements of highly suppressed quantities, such as CP violation phases and asymmetries in the neutral B{sub s}-meson system or searches for rare B decays, are performed with the hope that new physics effects would be large enough to significantly affect the measured quantities and so, lead to observations of deviations from the SM expectations. The D0 and CDF detectors at the Fermilab Tevatron have each accumulated more that 9 fb{sup -1} of integrated luminosity. The corresponding large datasets enable the two experiments to perform unprecedented studies of heavy flavor hadron properties. We …

A Study Prepared in Partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency for the RE-Powering America's Land Initiative: Siting Renewable Energy on Potentially Contaminated Land and Mine Sites. The Brunswick Naval Air Station is a naval air facility and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Super Fund site that is being cleaned up, and closed down. The objective of this report is not only to look at the economics of individual renewable energy technologies, but also to look at the systemic benefits that can be gained when cost-effective renewable energy technologies are integrated with other systems and businesses in a community; thus multiplying the total monetary, employment, and quality-of-life benefits they can provide to a community.

Results from a simulation of the background for a muon collider, and the response of a silicon tracking detector to this background are presented. The background caused by decays of the 750-GeV muon beams was simulated using the MARS15 program, which included the infrastructure of the beam line elements near the detector and the 10{sup o} nozzles that shield the detector from this background. The ILCRoot framework, along with the Geant4 program, was used to simulate the response of the tracker and vertex silicon detectors to the muon-decay background remaining after the shielding nozzles. Results include the hit distributions in these detectors, the fractions of type-specific background particles producing these hits and illustrate the use of timing of the hits to suppress the muon beam background.

This brochure provides an overview of the challenges and successes of San Jose, CA, a 2008 Solar America City awardee, on the path toward becoming a solar-powered community. Accomplishments, case studies, key lessons learned, and local resource information are given.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been conducting research to investigate the feasibility of producing mixed alcohols from biomass-derived synthesis gas (syngas). In recent years, this research has primarily involved the further development of catalysts containing rhodium and manganese based on the results of earlier catalyst screening tests. Research during FY 2011 continued to examine the performance of RhMn catalysts on alternative supports including selected zeolite, silica, and carbon supports. Catalyst optimization continued using both the Davisil 645 and Merck Grade 7734 silica supports. Research also was initiated in FY 2011, using the both Davisil 645 silica and Hyperion CS-02C-063 carbon supports, to evaluate the potential for further improving catalyst performance, through the addition of one or two additional metals as promoters to the catalysts containing Rh, Mn, and Ir.

This paper proposes methodology for providing robustness and resilience for a highly threaded distributed- and shared-memory environment based on well-defined inputs and outputs to lightweight tasks. These inputs and outputs form a failure 'barrier', allowing tasks to be restarted or duplicated as necessary. These barriers must be expanded based on task behavior, such as communication between tasks, but do not prohibit any given behavior. One of the trends in high-performance computing codes seems to be a trend toward self-contained functions that mimic functional programming. Software designers are trending toward a model of software design where their core functions are specified in side-effect free or low-side-effect ways, wherein the inputs and outputs of the functions are well-defined. This provides the ability to copy the inputs to wherever they need to be - whether that's the other side of the PCI bus or the other side of the network - do work on that input using local memory, and then copy the outputs back (as needed). This design pattern is popular among new distributed threading environment designs. Such designs include the Barcelona STARS system, distributed OpenMP systems, the Habanero-C and Habanero-Java systems from Vivek Sarkar at Rice University, the HPX/ParalleX model from …

The goal of this project was to investigate the feasibility of using sorghum to produce ethanol. The work performed included a detailed examination of the agronomics and composition of a large number of sorghum varieties, laboratory experiments to convert sorghum to ethanol, and economic and life-cycle analyses of the sorghum-to-ethanol process. This work showed that sorghum has a very wide range of composition, which depended on the specific sorghum cultivar as well as the growing conditions. The results of laboratory- and pilot-scale experiments indicated that a typical high-biomass sorghum variety performed very similarly to corn stover during the multi-step process required to convert biomass feedstocks to ethanol; yields of ethanol for sorghum were very similar to the corn stover used as a control in these experiments. Based on multi-year agronomic data and theoretical ethanol production, sorghum can achieve more than 1,300 gallons of ethanol per acre given the correct genetics and environment. In summary, sorghum may be a compelling dedicated bioenergy crop that could help provide a portion of the feedstocks required to produce renewable domestic transportation fuels.

Neutral Current Elastic (NCE) interactions in MiniBooNE are discussed. In the neutrino mode MiniBooNE reported: the flux averaged NCE differential cross section as a function of four-momentum transferred squared, an axial mass (M{sub A}) measurement, and a measurement of the strange quark spin content of the nucleon, {Delta}s. In the antineutrino mode we present the background-subtracted data which is compared with the Monte Carlo predictions.

The Systems Integration (SI) subprogram works closely with industry, universities, and the national laboratories to overcome technical barriers to the large-scale deployment of solar technologies. To support these goals, the subprogram invests primarily in four areas: grid integration, technology validation, solar resource assessment, and balance of system development.

Quadrupole ion traps can be transformed into nonlinear traps with integrable motion by adding special electrostatic potentials. This can be done with both stationary potentials (electrostatic plus a uniform magnetic field) and with time-dependent electric potentials. These potentials are chosen such that the single particle Hamilton-Jacobi equations of motion are separable in some coordinate systems. The electrostatic potentials have several free adjustable parameters allowing for a quadrupole trap to be transformed into, for example, a double-well or a toroidal-well system. The particle motion remains regular, non-chaotic, integrable in quadratures, and stable for a wide range of parameters. We present two examples of how to realize such a system in case of a time-independent (the Penning trap) as well as a time-dependent (the Paul trap) configuration.

This report outlines findings resulting from a U.S. Department of Energy Building America expert meeting to determine how HVAC companies can transition from a traditional contractor status to a service provider for whole house energy upgrade contracting. IBACOS has embarked upon a research effort under the Building America Program to understand business impacts and change management strategies for HVAC companies. HVAC companies can implement these strategies in order to quickly transition from a 'traditional' heating and cooling contractor to a service provider for whole house energy upgrade contracting. Due to HVAC service contracts, which allow repeat interaction with homeowners, HVAC companies are ideally positioned in the marketplace to resolve homeowner comfort issues through whole house energy upgrades. There are essentially two primary ways to define the routes of transition for an HVAC contractor taking on whole house performance contracting: (1) Sub-contracting out the shell repair/upgrade work; and (2) Integrating the shell repair/upgrade work into their existing business. IBACOS held an Expert Meeting on the topic of Transitioning Traditional HVAC Contractors to Whole House Performance Contractors on March 29, 2011 in San Francisco, CA. The major objectives of the meeting were to: Review and validate the general business models for traditional …

This report describes the 2010 research conducted under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) project EST-P-09-1, titled Evaluation of Life History Diversity, Habitat Connectivity, and Survival Benefits Associated with Habitat Restoration Actions in the Lower Columbia River and Estuary, and known as the 'Salmon Benefits' study. The primary goal of the study is to establish scientific methods to quantify habitat restoration benefits to listed salmon and trout in the lower Columbia River and estuary (LCRE) in three required areas: habitat connectivity, early life history diversity, and survival (Figure ES.1). The general study approach was to first evaluate the state of the science regarding the ability to quantify benefits to listed salmon and trout from habitat restoration actions in the LCRE in the 2009 project year, and then, if feasible, in subsequent project years to develop quantitative indices of habitat connectivity, early life history diversity, and survival. Based on the 2009 literature review, the following definitions are used in this study. Habitat connectivity is defined as a landscape descriptor concerning the ability of organisms to move among habitat patches, including the spatial arrangement of habitats (structural connectivity) and how the perception and behavior of salmon affect the potential for movement …