Insulated pressure vessels are cryogenic-capable pressure vessels that can be fueled with liquid hydrogen (LH{sub 2}) or ambient-temperature compressed hydrogen (CH{sub 2}). Insulated pressure vessels offer the advantages of liquid hydrogen tanks (low weight and volume), with reduced disadvantages (fuel flexibility, lower energy requirement for hydrogen liquefaction and reduced evaporative losses). The work described here is directed at verifying that commercially available pressure vessels can be safely used to store liquid hydrogen. The use of commercially available pressure vessels significantly reduces the cost and complexity of the insulated pressure vessel development effort. This paper describes a series of tests that have been done with aluminum-lined, fiber-wrapped vessels to evaluate the damage caused by low temperature operation. All analysis and experiments to date indicate that no significant damage has resulted. Required future tests are described that will prove that no technical barriers exist to the safe use of aluminum-fiber vessels at cryogenic temperatures. Future activities also include a demonstration project in which the insulated pressure vessels will be installed and tested on two vehicles. A draft standard will also be generated for obtaining certification for insulated pressure vessels.

The PEPC Spreader Bar Assembly consists of a spreader bar that will be attached to the PEPC Cell Housing or the Midplane Transportation Fixture during operation. While in use in the OAB (Optics Assembly Building), the Spreader Bar Assembly will be manipulated by the NOID (New Optics Insertion Device). The other critical components of the assembly are the three angular contact bearing swivels that attach the spreader bar to the lifting mechanism and the corner clamps which are used to capture the Cell Housing.

A spare NASA/GSFC Astro-E microcalorimeter has been installed, tested, and run successfully on EBIT-II at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A brief overview of results including measurements by the microcalorimeter of absolute excitation cross sections, time dependent spectra, and spectra as a function of Maxwellian temperature are discussed.

The effect of multiple and delayed jet impact and penetration on the borehole diameter in concrete targets is discussed in this paper. A first-order principle of shaped-charge jet penetration is that target hole volume is proportional to the energy deposited in the target by the jet. This principle is the basis for the relation that target borehole diameter at any depth along the penetration path is proportional to the jet energy deposited in the target at that location. Our current research shows that the 'jet energy per unit hole volume constant' for concrete can be substantially altered by the use of multiple and delayed jet impacts. It has been shown that enhanced entrance crater formation results from the simultaneous impact and penetration of three shaped-charge jets. We now demonstrate that enhanced borehole diameter is also observed by the simultaneous impact and penetration of multiple shaped-charge jets followed by the delayed impact and penetration of a single shaped-charge jet.

Recent work in classification indicates that significant improvements in accuracy can be obtained by growing an ensemble of classifiers and having them vote for the most popular class. This paper focuses on ensembles of decision trees that are created with a randomized procedure based on sampling. Randomization can be introduced by using random samples of the training data (as in bagging or boosting) and running a conventional tree-building algorithm, or by randomizing the induction algorithm itself. The objective of this paper is to describe the first experiences with a novel randomized tree induction method that uses a sub-sample of instances at a node to determine the split. The empirical results show that ensembles generated using this approach yield results that are competitive in accuracy and superior in computational cost to boosting and bagging.

We have begun building the ''Mercury'' laser system as the first in a series of new generation diode-pumped solid-state lasers for target physics research. Mercury will integrate three key technologies: diodes, crystals, and gas cooling, within a unique laser architecture that is scalable to kilojoule and megajoule energy levels for fusion energy applications. The primary near-term performance goals include 10% electrical efficiencies at 10 Hz and 100 J with a 2-10 ns pulse length at 1.047 {micro}m wavelength. Currently, this review concentrates on the critical development and production of Yb:S-FAP crystals. After solving many defect issues that can be present in the crystals, reproducibility is the final issue that needs to be resolved. We have enlisted the help of national experts and have strongly integrated two capable commercial crystal growth companies (Litton-Airton/Synoptics and Scientific Materials) into the effort, and have solicited the advice of Robert Morris (retired from Allied Signal), a recognized international expert in high temperature oxide growth.

Remote detection of chemicals using LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) utilizing DIAL (Differential Absorption LIDAR) is now a standard detection technique for both military and civilian activities. We have developed a novel nonlinear optical phase conjugation system that can reduce the effects of speckle noise and atmospheric turbulence on DIAL remote detection systems. We have shown numerically and experimentally that it is possible to increase the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio for LIDAR systems under certain conditions using optical phase conjugation. This increase in S/N can result in more accurate detection of chemical effluents while simultaneously reducing the time necessary to acquire this information.

A workshop entitled ''Radionuclide Contamination in Water Resources'' was held in Almaty, Kazakhstan from Tuesday 29 May through Friday 1 June. This workshop was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and three organizations from the Republic of Kazakhstan: the Institute of Nonproliferation, the Institute of Hydrogeology and Hydrophysics, and KazAtomProm. Representatives from the U.S. Department of Energy, three national laboratories, and 13 different organizations from the Republic of Kazakhstan attended the workshop. A complete list of attendees, the workshop program, and information on the background and motivation for this workshop are provided in this report. The objective of the workshop was to identify critical problems, discover what is known about the problems related to radionuclide contamination of groundwater resources, form collaborative teams, and produce a small number proposals that both address further characterization and assess risk via contaminant fate and transport modeling. We plan to present these proposals to U.S. government agencies and international sponsors for funding.

The corrosion resistance of Alloy 22 (UNS No.: N06022) was studied in simulated ground water of different pH values and ionic contents at various temperatures. Potentiodynamic polarization techniques were used to study the electrochemical behavior and measure the critical potentials in the various systems. Alloy 22 was found to be resistant to localized corrosion in the simulated ground waters tested.

This document details procedures to be used when constructing a conceptual terrestrial trophic model for natural gas and oil exploration and production sites. A site conceptual trophic model is intended for use in evaluating ecological impacts of oil and brine releases at E&P sites from a landscape or ecosystem perspective. The terrestrial trophic model protocol was developed using an example site, the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve (TPP) in Oklahoma. The procedure focuses on developing a terrestrial trophic model using information found in the primary literature, and augmented using site-specific research where available. Although the TPP has been the subject of considerable research and public interest since the high-profile reintroduction of bison (Bison bison) in 1993, little formal work has been done to develop a food web for the plant and animal communities found at the preserve. We describe how to divide species into guilds using explicit criteria on the basis of resource use and spatial distribution. For the TPP, sixteen guilds were developed for use in the trophic model, and the relationships among these guilds were analyzed. A brief discussion of the results of this model is provided, along with considerations for its use and areas for further study.

This paper presents a description and analysis of a high-efficiency hydrogen production system. The main component of the system is a novel steam electrolyzer. In conventional electrolyzers, oxygen produced from electrolysis is usually released into the environment. In this design, natural gas is used to react with the oxygen produced in the electrolysis, reducing reduce the chemical potential difference across the electrolyzer, thus minimizing electricity consumption. The oxygen produced from the electrolysis is consumed in either a total oxidation or a partial oxidation reaction with natural gas. Experiments performed on single cells shown a voltage reduction as much as 1 V when compared to conventional electrolyzers. A heat recovery system (heat exchangers and catalytic converter) has been incorporated to the electrolyzer to obtain a high efficiency hydrogen production system. Results from a thermodynamic analysis show up to 70% efficiency with respect to primary energy source.

The 1.5 Tesla superconducting solenoid is part of the BABAR Detector located in the PEP-II B-Factory machine at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The solenoid has a 2.8 m bore and is 3.7 m long. The two layer solenoid is wound with an aluminum stabilized conductor which is graded axially to produce a {+-} 3% field uniformity in the tracking region. The 24 month fabrication, 3 month installation and 1 month commissioning of the solenoid were completed on time and budget. This paper summarizes the culmination of a 3 year design, fabrication and testing program of the BABAR superconducting solenoid. The work was completed by an international collaboration between Ansaldo, INFN, LLNL, and SLAC. Critical current measurements of the superconducting strand, cable and conductor, cool-down, operation with the thermo-siphon cooling, fast and slow discharges, and magnetic forces are discussed in detail.

The cost/performance ratio of networks of workstations has been constantly improving. This trend is expected to continue in the near future. The aggregate peak rate of such systems often matches or exceeds the peak rate offered by the fastest parallel computers. This has motivated research towards using a network of computers, interconnected via a fast network (cluster system) or a simple Local Area Network (LAN) (distributed system), for high performance concurrent computations. Some of the important research issues arise such as (1) Optimal problem partitioning and virtual interconnection topology mapping; (2) Optimal execution scheduling and load balancing. CFD codes have been efficiently implemented on homogeneous parallel systems in the past. In particular, the helicopter aerodynamics CFD code TURNS has been implemented with MPI on the IBM SP with parallel relaxation and Krylov iterative methods used in place of more traditional recursive algorithms to enhance performance. In this implementation the space domain is divided into equal subdomain which are mapped to the processors. We consider the implementation of TURNS on a LAN of heterogeneous workstations. In order to deal with the problem of load balancing due to the different processor speeds we propose a suboptimal algorithm of dividing the space domain …

The Southern Hemisphere is an important and unique region of the world's oceans for water-mass formation and mixing, upwelling, nutrient utilization, and carbon export. In fact, one of the primary interests of the oceanographic community is to decipher the climatic record of these processes in the source or sink terms for Southern Ocean surface waters in the CO{sub 2} balance of the atmosphere. Current coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling efforts to trace the input of CO{sub 2} into the ocean imply a strong sink of anthropogenic CO{sub 2} in the southern ocean. However, because of its relative inaccessibility and the difficulty in directly measuring CO{sub 2} fluxes in the Southern Ocean, these results are controversial at best. An accepted diagnostic of the exchange of CO{sub 2} between the atmosphere and ocean is the prebomb distribution of radiocarbon in the ocean and its time-history since atmospheric nuclear testing. Such histories of {sup 14}C in the surface waters of the Southern Ocean do not currently exist, primarily because there are few continuous biological archives (e.g., in corals) such as those that have been used to monitor the {sup 14}C history of the tropics and subtropics. One of the possible long-term archives is the scallop …

A new technology for ultrahigh-spatial resolution mapping of the isotopic, molecular, and chemical compositions of complex, multi-dimensional objects, in semiconductor, archaeological, paleontological, biological and materials R&D.

When the field of modern publishing was on a collision course with telecommunications, publishing organizations had to come up to speed in fields that were, heretofore, completely foreign and technologically forbidding to them. For generations, the technology of publishing centered on offset lithography, typesetting, and photography--fields that saw evolutionary and incremental change from the time of Guttenberg. But publishing now includes making information available over the World Wide Web--Internet publishing--with its ever-accelerating rate of technological change and dependence on computers and networks. Clearly, we need a methodology to help anyone in the field of Internet publishing plan for the future, and there is a well-known, well-tested technique for just this purpose--Scenario Planning. Scenario Planning is an excellent tool to help organizations make better decisions in the present based on what they identify as possible and plausible scenarios of the future. Never was decision making more difficult or more crucial than during the years of this study, 1996-1999. This thesis takes the position that, by applying Scenario Planning, the Technical Information Department at LLNL, a large government laboratory (and organizations similar to it), could be confident that moving into the telecommunications business of Internet publishing stood a very good chance of …

This manuscript is meant to give a short summary of the advantages of high order schemes and suitable test problems which can properly illustrate these advantages.

Detailed chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms are developed for all nine chemical isomers of heptane (C{sub 7}H{sub 16}), following techniques and models developed previously for other smaller alkane hydrocarbon species. These reaction mechanisms are tested at high temperatures by computing shock tube ignition delay times and at lower temperatures by simulating ignition in a rapid compression machine. Although the corresponding experiments have not been reported in the literature for most of these isomers of heptane, intercomparisons between the computed results for these isomers and comparisons with available experimental results for other alkane fuels are used to validate the reaction mechanisms as much as possible. Differences in the overall reaction rates of these fuels are discussed in terms of differences in their molecular structure and the resulting variations in rates of important elementary reactions. Reaction mechanisms in this study are works in progress and the results reported here are subject to change, based on model improvements and corrections of errors not yet discovered.

Numerical simulations are used to visualize the mixing and combustion induced by explosions of spherical and cylindrical TNT charges. Evolution of the exothermic energy is controlled by mixing (vorticity), which is strongly influenced by wave reflections from confining walls.

A great deal of physics understanding is required for the design and construction of thermonuclear weapons. Since the days of the Manhattan Project, physicists have relied on a combination of theory and experiment for the successful creation of nuclear weapons. One of the great experimental difficulties faced by the designers of nuclear weapons is that nuclear weapons operate in a high energy density regime not found on the earth except during a nuclear weapon detonation. Replicating these conditions is difficult unless a nuclear weapon is actually detonated. One of the reasons for the large number of expensive tests at the Nevada Test Site was that there was no other way to obtain the required data. When the laser was first developed many in the weapons program realized that the ability of a laser to concentrate a large amount of energy in a small volume could create experimental conditions that would be useful for studying the physics of nuclear weapons. The national weapons labs began investigating this possibility and started building ever bigger and better lasers. The vast difference in energy scales between the laboratory and a nuclear weapons explosion meant large and powerful lasers were required. By the early '80s …

The steadily increasing power of supercomputing systems is enabling very high resolution simulations of compressible, turbulent flows in the high Reynolds number limit, which is of interest in astrophysics as well as in several other fluid dynamical applications. This paper discusses two such simulations, using grids of up to 8 billion cells. In each type of flow, convergence in a statistical sense is observed as the mesh is refined. The behavior of the convergent sequences indicates how a subgrid-scale model of turbulence could improve the treatment of these flows by high-resolution Euler schemes like PPM. The best resolved case, a simulation of a Richtmyer-Meshkov mixing layer in a shock tube experiment, also points the way toward such a subgrid-scale model. Analysis of the results of that simulation indicates a proportionality relationship between the energy transfer rate from large to small motions and the determinant of the deviatoric symmetric strain as well as the divergence of the velocity for the large-scale field.

The determination of the three dimensional structures at high resolution of biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids, enables us to understand their function at the molecular level. At the present time, there are only two methods available for determining such structures, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. Compared to well-established X-ray diffraction techniques, NMR methodology is relatively new and has many areas in which improvement can still be attained. In this project, we focused on the development of new NMR probes and pulse sequences that were tailored to tackle specific problems that are not adequately addressed by current technology. Probes are the hardware that contain the radio frequency (RF) circuitry used to both excite and detect the NMR signals. Pulse sequences are composed of a series of RF pulses and delays, which are applied to the sample held within the magnetic field by the probe, so as to manipulate the nuclear spins. Typically, a probe is developed for a specific set of nuclei and types of experiments and the pulse sequences are then written to use the probe in an optimal manner. In addition, the inter-development of instrumentation and methods are determined by the specific biological question …

Large, high-power laser systems are often designed as reimaging multipass cavities to maximize the extraction of energy from the amplifiers. These multipass cavities often have vacuum spatial filters that suppress the growth of beam instability via B-integral effects. These spatial filters also relay images of laser damage, often nearly superimposing these images in common planes. Also, the fluence damage threshold limits the minimum size of the optics. When used as vacuum barriers in the spatial filters, these large optics present a safety hazard from the risk of implosion if the laser damage were sufficiently large. The objective of the project was to develop algorithms and methods for optical detection and characterization of laser-induced damage of optics. The system should detect small defects (about 5% of the critical size), track their growth over multiple laser shots, and characterize the defects accurately so that the optic can be replaced (at 25% of the critical size) and, hence, minimize the risk of implosion. The depth of field must be short enough to isolate the damaged vacuum barrier from other damaged optics in the beamline, and the system should also be capable of inspecting other optics in the beamline, since damage on one optic …

The BABAR Detector, located in the PEP-II B-Factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, includes a large 1.5 Tesla superconducting solenoid, 2.8 m bore and length 3.7 m. The two layer solenoid is wound with an aluminum stabilized conductor which is graded axially to produce a {+-} 3% field uniformity in the tracking region. This paper summarizes the 3 year design, fabrication and testing program of the superconducting solenoid. The work was carried out by an international collaboration between INFN, LLNL and SLAC. The coil was constructed by Ansaldo Energia. Critical current measurements of the superconducting strand, cable and conductor, cool-down, operation with the thermo-siphon cooling, fast and slow discharges, and magnetic forces are discussed in detail.