We present an adaptive signed distance transform algorithm for curves in the plane. The algorithm provides guaranteed error bounds with a selective refinement approach. The domain over which the signed distance function is desired is adaptive triangulated and piecewise discontinuous linear approximations are constructed within each triangle. The resulting transform performs work only were requested and does not rely on a preset sampling rate or other constraints.

NREL's Center for Basic Sciences performs fundamental research for DOE's Office of Science. Our mission is to provide fundamental knowledge in the basic sciences and engineering that will underpin new and improved renewable energy technologies.

BestPractices Steam tip sheet regarding ways to assess steam system efficiency. To determine the effective cost of steam, use a combined heat and power simulation model that includes all the significant effects.

Near infrared imaging using elastic light scattering and tissue fluorescence under long-wavelength laser excitation are explored for cancer detection. Various types of normal and malignant human tissue samples were utilized in this investigation.

As part of the spent fuel treatment program at Argonne National Laboratory, CWF degradation and radionuclide release modeling is being carried out to support the qualification of the CWF for disposal in the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain. Transition-state theory applied to the dissolution of aluminosilicate minerals provides a mechanistic basis for the dissolution model, while model parameters are obtained by experimental measurements. Performance assessment calculations carried out using the current model indicate that the CWF will perform in a similar manner to defense high-level waste glass, suggesting the CWF could be characterized by the HLW glass model in the Site Recommendation or License Application for Yucca Mountain.

In this study, a lithium-ion battery was designed for a hybrid electric vehicle, and the design was tested by a computer program that simulates driving of a vehicle on test cycles. The results showed that the performance goals that have been set for such batteries by the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles are appropriate. The study also indicated, however, that the heat generation rate in the battery is high, and that the compact lithium-ion battery would probably require cooling by a dielectric liquid for operation under conditions of vigorous vehicle driving.

This report compares the two methods of determining the performance of PV modules. The methods translate module performance characterized in a laboratory to actual or reference conditions using slightly different approaches. The accuracy of both methods is compared for both hourly and daily energy production over a year of data recorded at NREL in Golden, CO. The comparison of the two methods will be presented for five different PV module technologies: multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si), dual-junction amorphous silicon (a-Si/a-Si:Ge), triple-junction amorphous silicon (a-Si/a-Si/a-Si:Ge), cadmium telluride (CdTe), and copper indium diselenide (CIGSS).

Boiling of the coolant in an engine, by design or by circumstance, is limited by the critical heat flux phenomenon. As a first step in providing relevant engine design information, this study experimentally addressed both rate of boiling heat transfer and conditions at the critical point of water in a horizontal tube of 2.98 mm inside diameter and 0.9144 m heated length. Experiments were performed at system pressure of 203 kPa, mass fluxes in range of 50 to 200 kg/m{sup z}s, and inlet temperatures in range of ambient to 80 C. Experimental results and comparisons with predictive correlations are presented.

BestPractices Steam tip sheet regarding the use of deaerators in industrial steam systems.

BestPractices Program tip sheet discussing a method for determining the cost of compressed air at industrial plants.

This report summarizes the Hanford Site-Wide Groundwater Model and its application to the Immobilized Low-Activity Waste (ILAW) Disposal Facility Performance Assessment (PA). The site-wide model and supporting local-scale models are used to evaluate impacts from the transport of contaminants at a hypothetical well 100 m downgradient of the disposal facilities and to evaluate regional flow conditions and transport from the ILAW disposal facilities to the Columbia River. These models were used to well-intercept factors (WIFs) or dilution factors from a given areal flux of a hypothetical contaminant released to the unconfined aquifer from the ILAW disposal facilities for two waste-disposal options: 1) a remote-handled trench concept and 2) a concrete-vault concept. The WIF is defined as the ratio of the concentration at a well location in the aquifer to the concentration of infiltrating water entering the aquifer. These WIFs are being used in conjunction with calculations of released contaminant fluxes through the vadose zone to estimate potential impacts from radiological and hazardous chemical contaminants within the ILAW disposal facility at compliance points.

This report summarizes the Hanford Site-Wide Groundwater Model and its application to the Immobilized Low-Activity Waste (ILAW) Disposal Facility Performance Assessment (PA). The site-wide model and supporting local-scale models are used to evaluate impacts from the transport of contaminants at a hypothetical well 100 m downgradient of the disposal facilities and to evaluate regional flow conditions and transport from the ILAW disposal facilities to the Columbia River. These models were used to well-intercept factors (WIFs) or dilution factors from a given areal flux of a hypothetical contaminant released to the unconfined aquifer from the ILAW disposal facilities for two waste-disposal options: (1) a remote-handled trench concept and (2) a concrete-vault concept. These WIFs are being used in conjunction with calculations of released contaminant fluxes through the vadose zone to estimate potential impacts from radiological and hazardous chemical contaminants within the ILAW disposal facility at compliance points.

The purpose of this Computer Software Document (CSWD) is to provide configuration control of the Honeywell Modular Automation System (MAS) in use at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP). This CSWD describes hardware and PFP developed software for control of stabilization furnaces. The Honeywell software can generate configuration reports for the developed control software. These reports are described in the following section and are attached as addendum's. This plan applies to PFP Engineering Manager, Thermal Stabilization Cognizant Engineers, and the Shift Technical Advisors responsible for the Honeywell MAS software/hardware and administration of the Honeywell System.

An assessment of safety, design, and cost tradeoff issues for short (ten to fifty years) and longer (fifty to hundreds of years) interim dry storage of spent nuclear fuel in Zircaloy rods shall address potential failures of the Zircaloy cladding caused by the precipitation response of zirconium hydride platelets. If such assessment analyses are to be done rigorously, they will be necessarily complex because the precipitation response of zirconium hydride platelets is a stochastic functional of hydrogen concentration, temperature, stress, fabrication defect/texture structures, and flaw sizes of the cladding. Thus, there are, and probably always will be, zirhydride questions to analytically and experimentally resolve concerning the consistency, the completeness, and the certainty of models, data, the initial and the time-dependent boundary conditions. Some resolution of these questions will be required in order to have a defensible preference and tradeoffs decision analysis for assessing risks and consequences of the potential zirhydride induced cladding failures during dry storage time intervals. In the following brief discussion, one of these questions is posed as a consequence of an anomaly described in data reproducibility that was reported in the results of tests for hydrogen induced delayed cracking. The testing anomaly consisted of observing a significant …

BestPractices Steam tip sheet regarding ways to improve plant steam system efficiency by installing removable insulation on uninsulated valves and fittings.

BestPractices Steam tip sheet regarding ways to minimize short cycling losses in industrial boilers.

BestPractices Program tip sheet discussing ways to minimize compressed air leaks in industrial plants.

Several ANL ongoing experimental programs have measured metal waste form (MWF) corrosion and constituent release. Analysis of this data has initiated development of a consistent and quantitative phenomenology of uniform aqueous MWF corrosion. The effort so far has produced a preliminary fission product and actinide release model based on measured corrosion rates and calibrated by immersion test data for a 90 C J-13 and concentrated J-13 solution environment over 1-2 year exposure times. Ongoing immersion tests of irradiated and unirradiated MWF samples using more aggressive test conditions and improved tracking of actinides will serve to further validate, modify, and expand the application base of the preliminary model-including effects of other corrosion mechanisms. Sample examination using both mechanical and spectrographic techniques will better define both the nature and durability of the protective barrier layer. It is particularly important to assess whether the observations made with J-13 solution at 900 C persist under more aggressive conditions. For example, all the multiplicative factors in Table 1 implicitly assume the presence of protective barriers. Under sufficiently aggressive test conditions, such protective barriers may very well be altered or even eliminated.

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The use of the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has been proposed for text retrieval in several recent works. This technique uses the SVD to project very high dimensional document and query vectors into a low dimensional space. In this new space it is hoped that the underlying structure of the collection is revealed thus enhancing retrieval performance. Theoretical results have provided some evidence for this claim and to some extent experiments have confirmed this. However, these studies have mostly used small test collections and simplified document models. In this work we investigate the use of the SVD on large document collections. We show that, if interpreted as a mechanism for representing the terms of the collection, this technique alone is insufficient for dealing with the variability in term occurrence. Section 2 introduces the text retrieval concepts necessary for our work. A short description of our experimental architecture is presented in Section 3. Section 4 describes how term occurrence variability affects the SVD and then shows how the decomposition influences retrieval performance. A possible way of improving SVD-based techniques is presented in Section 5 and concluded in Section 6.

This work demonstrates a technique for comparing the performance of waste forms in a repository environment when one or more of the waste forms constitute a small part of the total amount of waste planned for the repository. In applying the technique, it is important to identify radionuclides that are highly soluble in the transport fluid since it is only for these that the release is controlled by the dissolution rate of the waste form matrix. The techniques presented here have been applied to an evaluation of the performance of waste forms from the electrometallurgical treatment of spent fuel in the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository Engineered Barrier System (EBS).

We present a conceptual design of a compact positron tomograph for prostate imaging using a pair of external curved detector banks, one placed above and one below the patient. The lower detector bank is fixed below the patient bed, and the top bank adjusts vertically for maximum sensitivity and patient access. Each bank is composed of 40conventional block detectors, forming two arcs (44 cm minor, 60 cm major axis) that are tilted to minimize attenuation and positioned as close as possible to the patient to improve sensitivity. The individual detectors are angled to point towards the prostate to minimize resolution degradation in that region. Inter-plane septa extend 5 cm beyond the scintillator crystals to reduce random and scatter backgrounds. A patient is not fully encircled by detector rings in order to minimize cost,causing incomplete sampling due to the side gaps. Monte Carlo simulation (including random and scatter) demonstrates the feasibility of detecting a spherical tumor of 2.5 cm diameter with a tumor to background ratio of2:1, utilizing the number of events that should be achievable with a6-minute scan after a 10 mCi injection (e.g., carbon-11 choline or fluorine-18 fluorocholine).

The final goal behind any numerical method is give the smallest wall-clock time for a given final time error or, conversely, the smallest run-time error for a given wall clock time, etc. Here a comparison will be given between adaptive mesh refinement schemes and non-adaptive schemes of higher order. It will be shown that in three dimension calculations that in order for AMR schemes to be competitive that the finest scale must be restricted to an extremely, and unrealistic, small percentage of the computational domain.

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