A THERMAL MODEL OF THE IMMOBILIZATION OF LOW-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE AS GROUT IN CONCRETE VAULTS (open access)

A THERMAL MODEL OF THE IMMOBILIZATION OF LOW-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE AS GROUT IN CONCRETE VAULTS

Salt solution will be mixed with cement and flyash/slag to form a grout which will be immobilized in above ground concrete vaults. The curing process is exothermic, and a transient thermal model of the pouring and curing process is herein described. A peak temperature limit of 85 C for the curing grout restricts the rate at which it can be poured into a vault. The model is used to optimize the pouring.
Date: October 27, 2008
Creator: Shadday, M
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
nu-TRLan User Guide Version 1.0: A High-Performance Software Package for Large-Scale Harmitian Eigenvalue Problems (open access)

nu-TRLan User Guide Version 1.0: A High-Performance Software Package for Large-Scale Harmitian Eigenvalue Problems

The original software package TRLan, [TRLan User Guide], page 24, implements the thick restart Lanczos method, [Wu and Simon 2001], page 24, for computing eigenvalues {lambda} and their corresponding eigenvectors v of a symmetric matrix A: Av = {lambda}v. Its effectiveness in computing the exterior eigenvalues of a large matrix has been demonstrated, [LBNL-42982], page 24. However, its performance strongly depends on the user-specified dimension of a projection subspace. If the dimension is too small, TRLan suffers from slow convergence. If it is too large, the computational and memory costs become expensive. Therefore, to balance the solution convergence and costs, users must select an appropriate subspace dimension for each eigenvalue problem at hand. To free users from this difficult task, nu-TRLan, [LNBL-1059E], page 23, adjusts the subspace dimension at every restart such that optimal performance in solving the eigenvalue problem is automatically obtained. This document provides a user guide to the nu-TRLan software package. The original TRLan software package was implemented in Fortran 90 to solve symmetric eigenvalue problems using static projection subspace dimensions. nu-TRLan was developed in C and extended to solve Hermitian eigenvalue problems. It can be invoked using either a static or an adaptive subspace dimension. In …
Date: October 27, 2008
Creator: Yamazaki, Ichitaro; Wu, Kesheng & Simon, Horst
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Dampers for Natural Draft Heaters: Technical Report (open access)

Dampers for Natural Draft Heaters: Technical Report

Energy required for water heating accounts for approximately 40percent of national residential natural gas consumption in California. With water heating contributing such a substantial portion of natural gas consumption, it is important to pay attention to water heater efficiencies. This paper reports on an investigation of a patented, buoyancy-operated flue damper. It is an add-on design to a standard atmospherically vented natural-draft gas-fired storage water heater. The flue damper was expected to reduce off-cycle standby losses, which would lead to improvements in the efficiency of the water heater. The test results showed that the Energy Factor of the baseline water heater was 0.576. The recovery efficiency was 0.768. The standby heat loss coefficient was 10.619 (BTU/hr-oF). After the damper was installed, the test results show an Energy Factor for the baseline water heater of 0.605. The recovery efficiency was 0.786. The standby heat loss coefficient was 9.135 (BTU/hr-oF). The recovery efficiency increased 2.3percent and the standby heat loss coefficient decreased 14percent. When the burner was on, the baseline water heater caused 28.0 CFM of air to flow from the room. During standby, the flow was 12.4 CFM. The addition of the damper reduced the flow when the burner was on …
Date: October 27, 2008
Creator: Lutz, James D.; Biermayer, Peter & King, Derek
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Expression profiling of hypothetical genes in Desulfovibrio vulgaris leads to improved functional annotation (open access)

Expression profiling of hypothetical genes in Desulfovibrio vulgaris leads to improved functional annotation

Hypothetical and conserved hypothetical genes account for>30percent of sequenced bacterial genomes. For the sulfate-reducing bacterium Desulfovibrio vulgaris Hildenborough, 347 of the 3634 genes were annotated as conserved hypothetical (9.5percent) along with 887 hypothetical genes (24.4percent). Given the large fraction of the genome, it is plausible that some of these genes serve critical cellular roles. The study goals were to determine which genes were expressed and provide a more functionally based annotation. To accomplish this, expression profiles of 1234 hypothetical and conserved genes were used from transcriptomic datasets of 11 environmental stresses, complemented with shotgun LC-MS/MS and AMT tag proteomic data. Genes were divided into putatively polycistronic operons and those predicted to be monocistronic, then classified by basal expression levels and grouped according to changes in expression for one or multiple stresses. 1212 of these genes were transcribed with 786 producing detectable proteins. There was no evidence for expression of 17 predicted genes. Except for the latter, monocistronic gene annotation was expanded using the above criteria along with matching Clusters of Orthologous Groups. Polycistronic genes were annotated in the same manner with inferences from their proximity to more confidently annotated genes. Two targeted deletion mutants were used as test cases to …
Date: October 27, 2008
Creator: Elias, Dwayne A.; Mukhopadhyay, Aindrila; Joachimiak, Marcin P.; Drury, Elliott C.; Redding, Alyssa M.; Yen, Huei-Che B. et al.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Long Baseline Neutrino Beams and Large Detectors (open access)

Long Baseline Neutrino Beams and Large Detectors

It is amazing to acknowledge that in roughly 70 years from when the existence of the neutrino was postulated, we are now contemplating investigating the mysteries of this particle (or particles) requiring and utilizing detectors of 300 ktons , distances of 1,000-2,000 kilometers, beam intensities of megawatts and underground depth of 5,000 feet. This evolution has evolved slowly, from the experimental discovery of the neutrino in 1956, to the demonstration that there were two neutrinos in 1962 and three and only three by 1991. The great excitement occurred in the 2000's coming from the study of solar and atmospheric neutrinos in which neutrinos were observed to oscillate and therefore have mass. Although the absolute mass of any of the neutrinos has yet to be determined (the upper limit is less than I electron volt) the difference in this square of these masses has been measured, yielding a value of (2.3 {+-} .2) 10{sup -3} ev{sup 2} for atmospheric neutrinos and (7.6 {+-} .2) 10{sup -5} ev{sup 2} for solar neutrinos. In addition their mixing angles were found to be 45{sup o} for atmospheric neutrinos and 34{sup o} for solar neutrinos. This present state of knowledge on neutrinos is pictorially displayed …
Date: October 27, 2008
Creator: Samios, N. P.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library