This report documents the operations plan for developing the National Security Technology Incubator (NSTI) program for southern New Mexico. The NSTI program will focus on serving businesses with national security technology applications by nurturing them through critical stages of early development. The NSTI program is being developed as part of the National Security Preparedness Project (NSPP), funded by Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The operation plan includes detailed descriptions of the structure and organization, policies and procedures, scope, tactics, and logistics involved in sustainable functioning of the NSTI program. Additionally, the operations plan will provide detailed descriptions of continuous quality assurance measures based on recommended best practices in incubator development by the National Business Incubation Association (NBIA). Forms that assist in operations of NSTI have been drafted and can be found as an attachment to the document.

In this project, one of our goals is to develop atmospheric models, in which innovative ideas on improving the quality of moisture predictions can be tested. Our other goal is to develop an explicit time integration scheme based on the multi-point differencing that does the same job as an implicit trapezoidal scheme but uses information only from limited number of grid points.

Carbon dioxide is the major “greenhouse” gas responsible for global warming. Southeastern pine forests appear to be among the largest terrestrial sinks of carbon dioxide in the US. This collaborative study specifically addressed the isotopic signatures of the large fluxes of carbon taken up by photosynthesis and given off by respiration in this ecosystem. By measuring these isotopic signatures at the ecosystem level, we have provided data that will help to more accurately quantify the magnitude of carbon fluxes on the regional scale and how these fluxes vary in response to climatic parameters such as rainfall and air temperature. The focus of the MBL subcontract was to evaluate how processes operating at the physiological and ecosystem scales affects the resultant isotopic signature of plant waxes that are emitted as aerosols into the convective boundary layer. These wax aerosols provide a large-spatial scale integrative signal of isotopic discrimination of atmospheric carbon dioxide by terrestrial photosynthesis (Conte and Weber 2002). The ecosystem studies have greatly expanded of knowledge of wax biosynthetic controls on their isootpic signature The wax aerosol data products produced under this grant are directly applicable as input for global carbon modeling studies that use variations in the concentration and …

This report documents the formalization of relationships with external service providers in the development of the National Security Technology Incubator (NSTI). The technology incubator is being developed as part of the National Security Preparedness Project (NSPP), funded by a Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) grant. This report summarizes the process in developing and formalizing relationships with those service providers and includes a sample letter of cooperation executed with each provider.

Wind energy provides many benefits, including economic and environmental. This two-sided fact sheet succinctly outlines the top ten wind energy benefits and is especially well suited for general audiences.

Articles focus on subjects of interest to Federal agency fleets covered under EPAct and Executive Order 13149.

This newsletter provides a brief overview of the Field Verification Project for Small Wind Turbines conducted at the NWTC and a description of current activities. The newsletter also contains case studies of current projects.

Fact sheet describes the origin and requirements of the EPAct State & Alternative Fuel Provider Rule.

DOE's State Energy Program published this case study in conjunction with the New Mexico Division of Energy Conservation and Management. It describes an emerging corridor of service stations selling a specific alternative fuel-E85 ethanol-along highways in New Mexico.

This 4-page Clean Cities fact sheet describes the use of biodiesel fuel in 6 school districts throughout Kentucky. It contains usage information for each school district, as well as contact information for local Clean Cities Coordinators and Biodiesel suppliers.

A detailed description of the history of EPAct's State & Alternative Fuel Provider Program and what fleets need to do to comply to its regulations.

In 2003, Raytheon Company upgraded the efficiency of the compressed air system at its Integrated Air Defense Center in Andover, Massachusetts, to save energy and reduce costs. Worn compressors and dryers were replaced, a more sophisticated control strategy was installed, and an aggressive leak detection and repair effort was carried out. The total cost of these improvements was $342,000; however, National Grid, a utility service provider, contributed a $174,000 incentive payment. Total annual energy and maintenance cost savings are estimated at $141,500, and energy savings are nearly 1.6 million kWh. This case study was prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy's Industrial Technologies Program.

These tip sheets provide steam system optimization information that can be implemented immediately in manufacturing facilities to achieve more energy-efficient processes.

In-depth articles on several NREL technologies and advances, including: production of hydrogen using renewable resources and technologies; use of carbon nanotubes for storing hydrogen; enzymatic reduction of cellulose to simple sugars as a platform for making fuel, chemicals, and materials; and the potential of electricity from wind energy to offset carbon dioxide emissions. Also covered are NREL news, awards and honors received by the Laboratory, and patents granted to NREL researchers.

Microorganisms are tiny, but together, they make up more than 60 percent of the earth's living matter. Often people think only of bacteria when they talk about microbes, but viruses, fungi, protozoa, and microalgae are also microbes. Scientists estimate that there are 2 to 3 billion species of microorganisms. By learning what genes microbes contain and how they are arranged, what they do, and how they are expressed, researchers get a better grasp on how microbes have evolved, new possibilities for diagnosing and treating diseases, and ideas for ways to clean up the environment and produce energy. You can be a part of this exciting work in many ways. Figuring out the genes in microbes, or microbial genomics, is a field that gets a lot of help from computer science and mathematics. You could go into bioinformatics, which uses computers to collect and sort information about living matter. Or you could try computational modeling and help develop simple models of what an organism would look like and how it would function. Researchers want to understand microbes genetics well enough to build useful ones. As we move toward that possibility, we need to think about how that ability can be used …

High performance computational science and engineering simulations have become an increasingly important part of the scientist's problem solving toolset. A key reason is the development of widely used codes and libraries that support these applications, for example, Netlib, a collection of numerical libraries [33]. The term community codes refers to those libraries or applications that have achieved some critical level of acceptance by a user community. Many of these applications are on the high-end in terms of required resources: computation, storage, and communication. Recently, there has been considerable interest in putting such applications on-line and packaging them as network services to make them available to a wider user base. Applications such as data mining [22], theorem proving and logic [14], parallel numerical computation [8][32] are example services that are all going on-line. Transforming applications into services has been made possible by advances in packaging and interface technologies including component systems [2][6][13][28][37], proposed communication standards [34], and newer Web technologies such as Web Services [38]. Network services allow the user to focus on their application and obtain remote service when needed by simply invoking the service across the network. The user can be assured that the most recent version of the …

The goal of this project has been to develop a lossless compression algorithm for message-passing libraries that can accelerate HPC systems by reducing the communication time. Because both compression and decompression have to be performed in software in real time, the algorithm has to be extremely fast while still delivering a good compression ratio. During the first half of this project, they designed a new compression algorithm called FPC for scientific double-precision data, made the source code available on the web, and published two papers describing its operation, the first in the proceedings of the Data Compression Conference and the second in the IEEE Transactions on Computers. At comparable average compression ratios, this algorithm compresses and decompresses 10 to 100 times faster than BZIP2, DFCM, FSD, GZIP, and PLMI on the three architectures tested. With prediction tables that fit into the CPU's L1 data acache, FPC delivers a guaranteed throughput of six gigabits per second on a 1.6 GHz Itanium 2 system. The C source code and documentation of FPC are posted on-line and have already been downloaded hundreds of times. To evaluate FPC, they gathered 13 real-world scientific datasets from around the globe, including satellite data, crash-simulation data, and …

This report documents implementation strategies to leverage public and private resources for the development of an adequate national security workforce as part of the National Security Preparedness Project (NSPP), being performed under a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) grant. There are numerous efforts across the United States to develop a properly skilled and trained national security workforce. Some of these efforts are the result of the leveraging of public and private dollars. As budget dollars decrease and the demand for a properly skilled and trained national security workforce increases, it will become even more important to leverage every education and training dollar. This report details some of the efforts that have been implemented to leverage public and private resources, as well as implementation strategies to further leverage public and private resources.

Abstract -The majority of studies investigating the importance of coarse woody debris (CWD) to forest- floor vertebrates have taken place in the Pacific Northwest and southern Appalachian Mountains, while comparative studies in the southeastern Coastal Plain are lacking. My study was a continuation of a long-term project investigating the importance of CWD as a habitat component for shrew and herpetofaunal communities within managed pine stands in the southeastern Coastal Plain. Results suggest that addition of CWD can increase abundance of southeastern and southern short-tailed shrews. However, downed wood does not appear to be a critical habitat component for amphibians and reptiles. Rising petroleum costs and advances in wood utilization technology have resulted in an emerging biofuels market with potential to decrease CWD volumes left in forests following timber harvests. Therefore, forest managers must understand the value of CWD as an ecosystem component to maintain economically productive forests while conserving biological diversity.

This report discusses Test Campaign TC15 of the Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc. (KBR) Transport Gasifier train with a Siemens Power Generation, Inc. (SPG) particle filter system at the Power Systems Development Facility (PSDF) located in Wilsonville, Alabama. The Transport Gasifier is an advanced circulating fluidized-bed reactor designed to operate as either a combustor or gasifier using a particulate control device (PCD). While operating as a gasifier, either air or oxygen can be used as the oxidant. Test run TC15 began on April 19, 2004, with the startup of the main air compressor and the lighting of the gasifier startup burner. The Transport Gasifier was shutdown on April 29, 2004, accumulating 200 hours of operation using Powder River Basin (PRB) subbituminous coal. About 91 hours of the test run occurred during oxygen-blown operations. Another 6 hours of the test run was in enriched-air mode. The remainder of the test run, approximately 103 hours, took place during air-blown operations. The highest operating temperature in the gasifier mixing zone mostly varied from 1,800 to 1,850 F. The gasifier exit pressure ran between 200 and 230 psig during air-blown operations and between 110 and 150 psig in oxygen-enhanced air operations.

A major goal for microbiologists in the twenty-first century is to develop an understanding of the microbial cell in all its complexity. In addition to understanding the function of individual gene products we need to focus on how the cell regulates gene expression at a global level to respond to different environmental parameters. Development of genomic technologies such as complete genome sequencing, proteomics, and global comparisons of mRNA expression patterns allows us to begin to address this issue. This proposal focuses on a number of phylogenetically related bacteria that are involved in environmentally important processes such as carbon sequestration and bioremediation. Genome sequencing projects of a number of these bacteria have revealed the presence of a small family of regulatory genes found thus far only in the alpha-proteobacteria. These genes encode proteins that are related to the global regulatory protein RosR in Rhizobium etli, which is involved in determining nodulation competitiveness in this bacterium. Our goal is to examine the function of the proteins encoded by this gene family in several of the bacteria containing homologs to RosR. We will construct gene disruption mutations in a number of these bacteria and characterize the resulting mutant strains using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis …

For this Aluminum Industry of the Future (IOF) project, the effect of impurities on the processing of aluminum alloys was systematically investigated. The work was carried out as a collaborative effort between the Pennsylvania State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Industrial support was provided by ALCOA and ThermoCalc, Inc. The achievements described below were made. A method that combines first-principles calculation and calculation of phase diagrams (CALPHAD) was used to develop the multicomponent database Al-Ca-K-Li-Mg-Na. This method was extensively used in this project for the development of a thermodynamic database. The first-principles approach provided some thermodynamic property data that are not available in the open literature. These calculated results were used in the thermodynamic modeling as experimental data. Some of the thermodynamic property data are difficult, if not impossible, to measure. The method developed and used in this project allows the estimation of these data for thermodynamic database development. The multicomponent database Al-Ca-K-Li-Mg-Na was developed. Elements such as Ca, Li, Na, and K are impurities that strongly affect the formability and corrosion behavior of aluminum alloys. However, these impurity elements are not included in the commercial aluminum alloy database. The process of thermodynamic modeling began from Al-Na, Ca-Li, Li-Na, …

Performing sorbent testing for mercury control at a large scale is a very expensive endeavor and requires months of planning and careful execution. Even with good planning, there are plant limitations on what operating/design parameters can be varied/tested and when. For parameters that cannot be feasibly tested at the full scale (lower/higher gas flow, different bag material, cleaning methods, sorbents, etc.), an alternative approach is used to perform tests on a slipstream unit using flue gas from the plant. The advantage that a slipstream unit provides is the flexibility to test multiple operating and design parameters and other possible technology options without risking major disruption to the operation of the power plant. Additionally, the results generated are expected to simulate full-scale conditions closely, since the flue gas used during the tests comes directly from the plant in question. The Energy & Environmental Research Center developed and constructed a mobile baghouse that allows for cost-effective testing of impacts related to variation in operating and design parameters, as well as other possible mercury control options. Multiple sorbents, air-to-cloth ratios, bag materials, and cleaning frequencies were evaluated while flue gas was extracted from Big Brown when it fired a 70% Texas lignite-30% Powder …

Adequate path calibrations are crucial for improving the accuracy of seismic event location and origin time, size, and mechanism, as required for CTBT monitoring. There is considerable information on structure in broadband seismograms that is currently not fully utilized. The limitations have been largely theoretical. the development and application to solid earth problems of powerful numerical techniques, such as the Spectral Element Method (SEM), has opened a new era, and theoretically, it should be possible to compute the complete predicted wavefield accurately without any restrictions on the strength or spatial extent of heterogeneity. This approach requires considerable computational power, which is currently not fully reachable in practice. We propose an approach which relies on a cascade of increasingly accurate theoretical approximations for the computation of the seismic wavefield to develop a model of regional structure for the area of Eurasia located between longitudes of 30 and 150 degrees E, and latitudes of -10 to 60 degrees North. The selected area is particularly suitable for the purpose of this experiment, as it is highly heterogeneous, presenting a challenge for calibration purposes, but it is well surrounded by earthquake sources and, even though they are sparsely distributed, a significant number of high …