High energy particle accelerators are now the primary means of discovering the basic building blocks of matter and understanding the forces between them. In order to minimize the cost of building these machines, superconducting magnets are used in essentially all present day high energy proton and heavy ion colliders. The cost of superconducting magnets is typically in the range of 20--30% of the total cost of building such machines. The circulating particle beam goes through these magnets a large number of times (over hundreds of millions). The luminosity performance and life time of the beam in these machines depends significantly on the field quality in these magnets. Therefore, even a small error in the magnetic field shape may create a large cumulative effect in the beam trajectory to throw the particles of the magnet aperture. The superconducting accelerator magnets must, therefore, be designed and constructed so that these errors are small. In this thesis the research and development work will be described 3which has resulted in significant improvements in the field quality of the superconducting magnets for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The design and the field quality improvements in the prototype of the main collider dipole magnet for …

The field quality in superconducting magnets has been improved to a level that it does not appear to be a limiting factor on the performance of RHIC. The many methods developed, improved and adopted during the course of this work have contributed significantly to that performance. One can not only design and construct magnets with better field quality than in one made before but can also improve on that quality after construction. The relative field error ({Delta}B/B) can now be made as low as a few parts in 10{sup {minus}5} at 2/3 of the coil radius. This is about an order of magnitude better than what is generally expected for superconducting magnets. This extra high field quality is crucial to the luminosity performance of RHIC. The research work described here covers a number of areas which all must be addressed to build the production magnets with a high field quality. The work has been limited to the magnetic design of the cross section which in most cases essentially determines the field quality performance of the whole magnet since these magnets are generally long. Though the conclusions to be presented in this chapter have been discussed at the end of each …

If fusion energy is to achieve its full potential for safety and environmental (S&E) advantages, the S&E characteristics of fusion power plant designs must be quantified and understood, and the resulting insights must be embodied in the ongoing process of development of fusion energy. As part of this task, the present work compares S&E characteristics of five inertial and two magnetic fusion power plant designs. For each design, a set of radiological hazard indices has been calculated with a system of computer codes and data libraries assembled for this purpose. These indices quantify the radiological hazards associated with the operation of fusion power plants with respect to three classes of hazard: accidents, occupational exposure, and waste disposal. The three classes of hazard have been qualitatively integrated to rank the best and worst fusion power plant designs with respect to S&E characteristics. From these rankings, the specific designs, and other S&E trends, design features that result in S&E advantages have been identified. Additionally, key areas for future fusion research have been identified. Specific experiments needed include the investigation of elemental release rates (expanded to include many more materials) and the verification of sequential charged-particle reactions. Improvements to the calculational methodology are …

Many typical chemical engineering operations are multi-fluid systems. They are carried out in distillation columns (vapor/liquid), liquid-liquid contactors (liquid/liquid) and other similar devices. An important parameter is interfacial area concentration, which determines the rate of interfluid heat, mass and momentum transfer and ultimately, the overall performance of the equipment. In many cases, the models for determining interfacial area concentration are empirical and can only describe the cases for which there is experimental data. In an effort to understand multiphase reactors and the mixing process better, a multi-fluid model has been developed as part of a research effort to calculate interfacial area transport in several different types of in-line static mixers. For this work, the ensemble-averaged property conservation equations have been derived for each fluid and for the mixture. These equations were then combined to derive a transport equation for the interfacial area concentration. The final, one-dimensional model was compared to interfacial area concentration data from two sizes of Kenics in-line mixer, two sizes of concurrent jet and a Tee mixer. In all cases, the calculated and experimental data compared well with the highest scatter being with the Tee mixer comparison.

In this thesis we have studied the non-equilibrium phonons in GaAs/AlAs quantum wells via Raman scattering. We have demonstrated experimentally that by taking into account the time-reversal symmetry relation between the Stokes and anti-Stokes Raman cross sections, one can successfully measure the non-equilibrium phonon occupancy in quantum wells. Using this technique, we have studied the subject of resonant intersubband scattering of optical phonons. We find that interface roughness plays an important role in resonant Raman scattering in quantum wells. The lateral size of the smooth regions in such interface is estimated to be of the order of 100 {Angstrom}. Through a study of photoluminescence of GaAs/AlAs quantum wells under high intensity laser excitation, we have found that band nonparabolicity has very little effect on the electron subband energies even for subbands as high as a few hundred meV above the lowest one. This finding may require additional theoretical study to understand its origin. We have also studied phonon confinement and propagation in quantum wells. We show that Raman scattering of non-equilibrium phonons in quantum wells can be a sensitive measure of the spatial extent of the longitudinal optical (LO) phonons. We deduce the coherence length of LO phonons in GaAs/Al{sub …