Studies are described which were performed for the Near Term Hybrid Vehicle program to determine passenger car usage patterns and to correlate these trip mission characteristics with vehicle design and performance specifications. (LCL)

Arylmethyl phenyl ethers undergo competing reactions when treated with Lewis acids in benzene solvent. Apparently, benzene is insufficiently reactive to compete with intramolecular (intrapolymer) nucleophiles and, consequently, no increase in solubility accompanies the cleavages of ether links upon addition of benzene. When better nucleophiles, naphthalene and phenanthene, are provided, carbonium ions generated from ether cleavages are capped and the product is lower in molecular weight and more soluble. It is worth noting that the naphthalene (k/sub rel/ = 300) is nearly as good a trap as the phenol (k/sub rel/ = 450). Since hydroxylic solvents will level the acid strength of BF/sub 3/ to that of ROBF/sub 3//sup -/H/sup +/ and hydrocarbons would not, the acid-catalyzed bond cleavages necessary for unlinking coal may in fact be faster in BF/sub 3/-arene than in BF/sub 3/-phenol. While we have not yet extended these results to coals, we believe that the combination of a relatively mild Lewis acid catalyst, BF/sub 3/, with a good carbonium ion trap, naphthalene, will allow selective cleavage and capping of aryl alkyl ether bonds. 3 references, 2 figures, 3 tables.

This work originates from the proposal MHD Compressor-Expander Conversion System Integrated with a GCR Inside a Deployable Reflector''. The proposal concerned an innovative concept of nuclear, closed-cycle MHD converter for power generation on space-based systems in the multi-megawatt range. The basic element of this converter is the Power Conversion Unit (PCU) consisting of a gas core reactor directly coupled to an MHD expansion channel. Integrated with the PCU, a deployable reflector provides reactivity control. The working fluid could be either uranium hexafluoride or a mixture of uranium hexafluoride and helium, added to enhance the heat transfer properties. The original Statement of Work, which concerned the whole conversion system, was subsequently redirected and focused on the basic mechanisms of neutronics, reactivity control, ionization and electrical conductivity in the PCU. Furthermore, the study was required to be inherently generic such that the study was required to be inherently generic such that the analysis an results can be applied to various nuclear reactor and/or MHD channel designs''.

The mean heat capacity of a sample of powdered beryllium carbide, a possible moderator material for a nuclear reactor, was determined as a function of temperature. A thin-walled stainless steel capsule containing the material was heated in an electric furnace and dropped into a water calorimeter. The following linear equation for mean heat capacity over the temperature range 50 f C-T f C as a function of temperature, T, was derived from the data by the method of least squares: C/sub p/ = 0.299 + 2.16 x 10/sup -4/ T f C el temperatures 0.005 cal gm/sup -1/( f C)/sup -1/. The numerical value of C/sub p/ expressed by this equation is also equal to the mean heat capacity in Btu lb/sup -1/( f F)/sup -1/. (auth)

The fusion breeder is a fusion reactor designed with special blankets to maximize the transmutation by 14 MeV neutrons of uranium-238 to plutonium or thorium to uranium-233 for use as a fuel for fission reactors. Breeding fissile fuels has not been a goal of the US fusion energy program. This paper suggests it is time for a policy change to make the fusion breeder a goal of the US fusion program and the US nuclear energy program. The purpose of this paper is to suggest this policy change be made and tell why it should be made, and to outline specific research and development goals so that the fusion breeder will be developed in time to meet fissile fuel needs.

Several general approaches to remote servicing are briefly described for the LLL Field Reversed Mirror and Tandem Mirror Fusion reactors. Remote servicing system design considerations for the blanket module are briefly discussed. (RME)

Research progress is reported on the development of passive components, resistors, capacitors, metallization, and passivation, that will withstand well logging temperatures to 500/sup 0/C and have extremely low temperature coefficients. The lower the temperature coefficients, the more exacting the instrumentation designs can be without elaborate compensation techniques. The method of fabricating the thin film components is that of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) which is a major deviation from the standard approach. The films are grown in a CVD reactor by passing various reactant gases over a heated substrate. The reactor was modified in order to accommodate the gases needed in the deposition of metals. The reactor can be operated over a temperature range of 400/sup 0/C to greater than 1200/sup 0/C, and at any pressure between atmospheric and 1 x 10/sup -3/ torr. Tungsten, tungsten-silicon, and silicon nitride were successfully deposited on oxidized silicon wafers. The tungsten is used for interconnects and capacitor plates, tungsten-silicon is used as a high resistivity material for resistors, and silicon nitride is used as a dielectric for the capacitors and as a passivation layer. The materials are currently being studied in terms of their deposition parameters and electrical characteristics.

This report contains a description of the initial ETA propagation experiments in air at a beam current of 4.5 kA. The beam was observed to propagate at the pressures anticipated on the basis of previous theory and experiment. A comparison of measured net current waveforms with predictions of the PHOENIX code showed good agreement over the pressure range 0.1 to 200 torr. However, the beam was observed to expand with Z at a faster rate than theory predicts. Excessive transverse beam modulation at injection complicated the experiments and limited their comparison with theory.

Searching for neutrinoless double beta decay is the only known practical method for trying to determine whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles. The theoretical motivation for supposing that they may indeed be their own antiparticles is described. The reason that it is so difficult to ascertain experimentally whether they are or are not is explained, as is the special sensitivity of neutrinoless double beta decay. The potential implications of the observation of this reaction for neutrino mass and for the physics of neutrinos is discussed.

The progress of four bills relating to geothermal energy is reported. The current regulatory activities of the California Energy Commission, the Lake County Planning Commission/Lake County Air Pollution Control District, the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, the State Lands' Commission, and the California Public Utilities Commission are reviewed. (MHR)

A study was made of the methods available to transfer heat from the collector to the water storage tank in water heating systems. In counterflow heat exchangers used in double loop water heating systems, it was found to be more important to use a high water flowrate than a high heat transfer fluid flowrate. It was earlier thought to be best to have matched WC/sub p/ (mass flowrate-specific heat) products in the loops. It was shown in this study that the water WC/sub p/ product should be about twice as large as that of the heat transfer fluid. It was found that neither the heat exchanger type nor the size was very critical, so that very simple criteria were adequate in determining optimum heat exchanger size. It was found that there is a definite system size below which one should use a traced tank or a coil in a tank. Equations and optimization criteria were developed for traced tanks or tanks with coils. At present, there is no quantitative understanding of liquid to liquid (direct contact) heat exchangers, though they are clearly quite effective. Draindown systems are discussed, and several appendices are included on heat transfer and other characteristics of …

Fast neutrons hitting a sample of suprasil will produce light. This light is Cerenkov light produced by high energy (> .2 MeV) electrons traversing the transparent medium. Neutrons produce these electrons in a two step process. First, the neutrons inelastically scatter with either the silicon (Si) or the oxygen (O) atoms producing inelastic gamma rays. Some of these gammas, in turn, will also react producing, primarily, Compton electrons with some pair production electrons possible. The majority of these Compton electrons will have enough energy to induce Cerenkov light production. For intermediate energy neutrons (2 to 20 MeV), this process is efficient enough to produce a relatively simple neutron detector with some desirable properties. Estimations of the Cherenkov/neutron sensitivities of suprasil and lucite are presented. (WHK)

The emission of synchrotron radiation damps the incoherent betatron oscillations of a pinched beam, causing its radius to shrink. However, the rate of shrinkage is small compared with the rate of expansion caused by scattering for typical propagation parameters.

The technical progress achieved during the period 30 September 1911 through 29 March 1992 on Contract DE-AC03-91SF18852.000 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators and Ancillary Activities is described in this document. This report is organized by the program task structure as follows: spacecraft integration and liaison, engineering support, safety, qualified unicouple production, ETG fabrication, assembly and test, ground support equipment (GSE), RTG shipping and launch support, designs, reviews, and mission applications, project management, quality assurance, reliability, contract changes, and non-capital CAGO, and CAGO acquisition (Capital Funds).

Observations on the effects of the solar cycle and solar activity on the earth's climate are reviewed. (GHT)

Various relations for the detonation energy and velocity as they relate to the inverse radius of the cylinder are explored. The detonation rate-inverse slope relation seen in reactive flow models can be used to derive the familiar Eyring equation. Generalized inverse radii can be shown to fit large quantities of cylinder and sphere results. A rough relation between detonation energy and detonation velocity is found from collected JWL values. Cylinder test data for ammonium nitrate mixes down to 6.35 mm radii are presented, and a size energy effect is shown to exist in the Cylinder test data. The relation that detonation energy is roughly proportional to the square of the detonation velocity is shown by data and calculation.

The Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) and the LLNL Climate and Carbon Science Group of Energy and Environment (E&E) are working together to improve predictions of future climate by applying the best available computational methods and computer resources to this problem. Over the last decade, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed a number of climate models that provide state-of-the-art simulations on a wide variety of massively parallel computers. We are now developing and applying a second generation of high-performance climate models.

The Fort Bidwell Indian Reservation (FBIR) is rich in renewable energy resources. Development of its geothermal resources has the potential to profoundly affect the energy and economic future of the FBIC. Geothermal energy can contribute to making the reservation energy self-sufficient and, potentially, an energy exporter. The feasibility study assessed the feasibility of installing a geothermal district heating system to provide low-cost, efficient heating of existing and planned residences, community buildings and water, using an existing geothermal well, FB-3.

We attempt to predict the observed morphology, column density and velocity gradient of Pillar II of the Eagle Nebula, using Rayleigh Taylor (RT) models in which growth is seeded by an initial perturbation in density or in shape of the illuminated surface, and cometary models in which structure is arises from a initially spherical cloud with a dense core. Attempting to mitigate suppression of RT growth by recombination, we use a large cylindrical model volume containing the illuminating source and the self-consistently evolving ablated outflow and the photon flux field, and use initial clouds with finite lateral extent. An RT model shows no growth, while a cometary model appears to be more successful at reproducing observations.

This research was conducted to investigate the feasibility of applying microbial biodegradation as a treatment technology for wastes containing radioactive elements and organic solvents (mixed wastes). In this study, we focused our efforts on the treatment of wastes generated by biomedical research as the result of purifying tritium labeled compounds by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). These wastes are typically 80 percent water with 20 percent acetonitrile or methanol or a mixture of both. The objective was to determine the potential of using biodegradation to treat the solvent component of tritiated mixed waste to a concentration below the land disposal restriction standard (1mg/L for acetonitrile). Once the standard is reached, the remaining radioactive waste is no longer classified as a mixed waste and it can then be solidified and placed in a secure landfill. This investigation focused on treating a 10 percent acetonitrile solution, which was used as a non-radioactive surrogate for HPLC waste, in a bioreactor. The results indicated that the biodegradation process could treat this solution down to less than 1 mg/L to meet the land disposal restriction standard.

In the early 1980s, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) developed two transportation routing models: HIGHWAY, which predicts truck transportation routes, and INTERLINE, which predicts rail transportation routes. Both of these models have been used by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) community for a variety of routing needs over the years. One of the primary uses of the models has been to determine population-density information, which is used as input for risk assessment with the RADTRAN model, which is available on the TRANSNET computer system. During the recent years, advances in the development of geographic information systems (GISs) have resulted in increased demands from the user community for a GIS version of the ORNL routing models. In April 1994, the DOE Transportation Management Division (EM-261) held a Baseline Requirements Assessment Session with transportation routing experts and users of the HIGHWAY and INTERLINE models. As a result of the session, the development of a new GIS routing model, Transportation Routing Analysis GIS (TRAGIS), was initiated. TRAGIS is a user-friendly, GIS-based transportation and analysis computer model. The older HIGHWAY and INTERLINE models are useful to calculate routes, but they cannot display a graphic of the calculated route. Consequently, many users have experienced …

A spin-resolving photoelectron spectrometer, the"Spin Spectrometer," has been designed and built. It has been utilized at both the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, CA, and the Advanced Photon Source in Argonne, IL. Technical details and an example of experimental results are presented here.

In this paper we describe our design, implementation, and first results of a prototype connected-phoneme-based speech recognition system on the Cell Broadband Engine{trademark} (Cell/B.E.). Automatic speech recognition decodes speech samples into plain text (other representations are possible) and must process samples at real-time rates. Fortunately, the computational tasks involved in this pipeline are highly data-parallel and can receive significant hardware acceleration from vector-streaming architectures such as the Cell/B.E. Identifying and exploiting these parallelism opportunities is challenging, but also critical to improving system performance. We observed, from our initial performance timings, that a single Cell/B.E. processor can recognize speech from thousands of simultaneous voice channels in real time--a channel density that is orders-of-magnitude greater than the capacity of existing software speech recognizers based on CPUs (central processing units). This result emphasizes the potential for Cell/B.E.-based speech recognition and will likely lead to the future development of production speech systems using Cell/B.E. clusters.

We investigate numerically the hydrodynamic instability of an ionization front (IF) accelerating into a molecular cloud, with imposed initial perturbations of different amplitudes. When the initial amplitude is small, the imposed perturbation is completely stabilized and does not grow. When the initial perturbation amplitude is large enough, roughly the ratio of the initial amplitude to wavelength is greater than 0.02, portions of the IF temporarily separate from the molecular cloud surface, locally decreasing the ablation pressure. This causes the appearance of a large, warm HI region and triggers nonlinear dynamics of the IF. The local difference of the ablation pressure and acceleration enhances the appearance and growth of a multimode perturbation. The stabilization usually seen at the IF in the linear regimes does not work due to the mismatch of the modes of the perturbations at the cloud surface and in density in HII region above the cloud surface. Molecular pillars are observed in the late stages of the large amplitude perturbation case. The velocity gradient in the pillars is in reasonably good agreement with that observed in the Eagle Nebula. The initial perturbation is imposed in three different ways: in density, in incident photon number flux, and in the …