A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Multiemployer-defined benefit pension plans, which are created by collective bargaining agreements covering more than one employer and generally operated under the joint trusteeship of labor and management, provide coverage to over 9.7 million of the 44 million participants insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). The recent termination of several large single-employer plans--plans sponsored by individual firms--has led to millions of dollars in benefit losses for thousands of workers and left PBGC, their public insurer, an $11.2 billion deficit as of September 30, 2003. The serious difficulties experienced by these single-employer plans have prompted questions about the health of multiemployer plans. This report provides the following information on multiemployer pension plans: (1) trends in funding and worker participation, (2) PBGC's role regarding the plans' financial solvency, and (3) potential challenges to the plans' long-term prospects."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Social Security Administration's (SSA) AeDib initiative is designed to provide SSA with a more efficient, paperless system that will enable its disability components to electronically view and share claims data and process claims electronically. Yet previous GAO reviews found that SSA's accelerated strategy to develop AeDib involved risks that could threaten a complete and successful transition to this capability. At the Subcommittee's request, GAO reviewed AeDib to assess (1) SSA's progress and strategy, (2) the adequacy of measures taken to avoid software development problems similar to those encountered in SSA's previous efforts, (3) the adequacy of cost/benefit analyses, and (4) SSA's consultation with stakeholders."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To assist low-income beneficiaries with their share of premiums and other out-of-pocket costs associated with Medicare, Congress has created four Medicare savings programs. Historic low enrollment in these programs has been attributed to several factors, including lack of awareness about the programs, and cumbersome eligibility determination and enrollment processes through state Medicaid programs. Concerned about this low enrollment, Congress passed legislation as part of the Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP Benefits Improvement and Protection Act of 2000 (BIPA) requiring the Social Security Administration (SSA) to notify low-income Medicare beneficiaries of their potential eligibility for Medicare savings programs. The statute also required GAO to study the impact of SSA's outreach effort. GAO examined what outreach SSA undertook to increase enrollment, how enrollment changed following SSA's 2002 outreach, and how enrollment changed in selected states following SSA's outreach and what additional outreach efforts these states undertook. GAO reviewed information obtained from SSA and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), analyzed enrollment data provided by SSA and CMS, and interviewed officials in and obtained data from six selected states (Alabama, California, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington)."

The objective of this project is forewarning of machine failures in critical equipment at next-generation nuclear power plants (NPP). Test data were provided by two collaborating institutions: Duke Engineering and Services (first project year), and the Pennsylvania State University (Applied Research Laboratory) during the second and third project years. New nonlinear methods were developed and applied successfully to extract forewarning trends from process-indicative, time-serial data for timely, condition-based maintenance. Anticipation of failures in critical equipment at next-generation NPP will improve the scheduling of maintenance activities to minimize safety concerns, unscheduled non-productive downtime, and collateral damage due to unexpected failures. This approach provides significant economic benefit, and is expected to improve public acceptance of nuclear power. The approach is a multi-tiered, model-independent, and data-driven analysis that uses ORNL's novel nonlinear method to extract forewarning of machine failures from appropriate data. The first tier of the analysis provides a robust choice for the process-indicative data. The second tier rejects data of inadequate quality. The third tier removes signal artifacts that would otherwise confound the analysis, while retaining the relevant nonlinear dynamics. The fourth tier converts the artifact-filtered time-serial data into a geometric representation, that is then transformed to a discrete distribution function …

As Kraft pulp mills move toward minimum impact manufacturing, one of the most difficult challenges is the development of strategies for dealing effectively with buildup, carryover, and recovery of cationic and anionic non-process elements (NPEs). Even at low concentrations, NPEs present a serious concern due to scaling and other reactions caused by Ca, Mg, Mn, Fe, Cu, phosphates, silicates, and aluminates. The drivers behind NPE removal include environmental regulatory issues (e.g., Mn), scale formation, reduced bleaching efficiency, and corrosion. Before closure can be achieved in the bleach cycle, methods must be developed for efficient and cost-effective removal of NPEs from bleach filtrate streams. To be commercially viable, a highly selective, high-capacity, and regenerable media must be developed. In addition, limited prefiltration and high resistance to attrition of exchange material will significantly reduce costs, which is key to widespread commercial application. This project accurately determined the chemical composition of a Weyerhauser bleach plant effluent in the Eop, D0, and D1 stages. Due to environmental regulatory concerns, Mn was the principal target of this study. Mn was found to be present in these samples in the range of 0.16 to 3.97 ppm. The Mn was found to be in the divalent oxidation …

The usual approach to deal with noise present in many real-world optimization problems is to take an arbitrary number of samples of the objective function and use the sample average as an estimate of the true objective value. The number of samples is typically chosen arbitrarily and remains constant for the entire optimization process. This paper studies an adaptive sampling technique that varies the number of samples based on the uncertainty of deciding between two individuals. Experiments demonstrate the effect of adaptive sampling on the final solution quality reached by a genetic algorithm and the computational cost required to find the solution. The results suggest that the adaptive technique can effectively eliminate the need to set the sample size a priori, but in many cases it requires high computational costs.

QR and LU factorizations for dense matrices are important linear algebra computations that are widely used in scientific applications. To efficiently perform these computations on modern computers, the factorization algorithms need to be blocked when operating on large matrices to effectively exploit the deep cache hierarchy prevalent in today's computer memory systems. Because both QR (based on Householder transformations) and LU factorization algorithms contain complex loop structures, few compilers can fully automate the blocking of these algorithms. Though linear algebra libraries such as LAPACK provides manually blocked implementations of these algorithms, by automatically generating blocked versions of the computations, more benefit can be gained such as automatic adaptation of different blocking strategies. This paper demonstrates how to apply an aggressive loop transformation technique, dependence hoisting, to produce efficient blockings for both QR and LU with partial pivoting. We present different blocking strategies that can be generated by our optimizer and compare the performance of auto-blocked versions with manually tuned versions in LAPACK, both using reference BLAS, ATLAS BLAS and native BLAS specially tuned for the underlying machine architectures.

The purpose of this memo is to lay the groundwork for non-destructively determining the position and ultimately the concentration of Cu gradient steps in sputtered Be capsules (or Ge steps in CH capsules) by ''simple'' radiography. A second personal objective was for me to learn something about radiography, and for that reason this memo may be more detailed than necessary. Steve Haan has suggested a design for Be capsules that makes use of a gradient of Cu-doping in a sputtered Be shell. The capsule for a 300 eV design is shown in Figure 1. The question that this memo wants to address is whether the copper concentration boundaries (and ultimately the concentration itself) can be seen and measured with our radiography system. I will focus only on the relative opacities, and not get into the practicalities of film reading, lateral resolution and the like. I will assume a monochromatic 8 keV source; clearly there are other sources and filters that can be used, as well as the fact that the source is not monochromatic. So given all these approximations lets proceed.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Weekly student newspaper from San Antonio College in San Antonio, Texas that includes campus news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The Wabash River Integrated Methanol and Power Production from Clean Coal Technologies (IMPPCCT) project is evaluating integrated electrical power generation and methanol production through clean coal technologies. The project is under the leadership of ConocoPhillips Company (COP), after it acquired Gasification Engineering Corporation (GEC) and the E-Gas gasification technology from Global Energy in July 2003. The project has completed Phase I, and is currently in Phase II of development. The two project phases include: (1) Feasibility study and conceptual design for an integrated demonstration facility at Global Energy's existing Wabash River Energy Limited (WREL) plant in West Terre Haute, Indiana, and for a fence-line commercial embodiment plants (CEP) operated at Dow Chemical or Dow Corning chemical plant locations; and (2) Research, development, and testing (RD&T) to define any technology gaps or critical design and integration issues. The Phase I of this project was supported by a multi-industry team consisting of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Dow Chemical Company, Dow Corning Corporation, Methanex Corporation, and Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation, while Phase II is supported by Gas Technology Institute, TDA Research Inc., and Nucon International, Inc. The WREL integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) facility was designed, constructed, and operated under a project …

Many turbulent premixed flames of practical interest are statistically stationary. They occur in combustors that have anchoring mechanisms to prevent blow-off and flashback. The stabilization devices often introduce a level of geometric complexity that is prohibitive for detailed computational studies of turbulent flame dynamics. As a result, typical detailed simulations are performed in simplified model configurations such as decaying isotropic turbulence or inflowing turbulence. In these configurations, the turbulence seen by the flame either decays or, in the latter case, increases as the flame accelerates toward the turbulent inflow. This limits the duration of the eddy evolutions experienced by the flame at a given level of turbulent intensity, so that statistically valid observations cannot be made. In this paper, we apply a feedback control to computationally stabilize an otherwise unstable turbulent premixed flame in two dimensions. For the simulations, we specify turbulent in flow conditions and dynamically adjust the integrated fueling rate to control the mean location of the flame in the domain. We outline the numerical procedure, and illustrate the behavior of the control algorithm. We use the simulations to study the propagation and the local chemical variability of turbulent flame chemistry.

OAK-B135 Flow-induced vibration in heat exchangers has been a major cause of concern in the nuclear industry for several decades. Many incidents of failure of heat exchangers due to apparent flow-induced vibration have been reported through the USNRC incident reporting system. Almost all heat exchangers have to deal with this problem during their operation. The phenomenon has been studied since the 1970s and the database of experimental studies on flow-induced vibration is constantly updated with new findings and improved design criteria for heat exchangers. In the nuclear industry, steam generators are often affected by this problem. However, flow-induced vibration is not limited to nuclear power plants, but to any type of heat exchanger used in many industrial applications such as chemical processing, refrigeration and air conditioning. Specifically, shell and tube type heat exchangers experience flow-induced vibration due to the high velocity flow over the tube banks. Flow-induced vibration in these heat exchangers leads to equipment breakdown and hence expensive repair and process shutdown. The goal of this research is to provide accurate measurements that can help modelers to validate their models using the measured experimental parameters and thereby develop better design criteria for avoiding fluid-elastic instability in heat exchangers. The …

This work investigates the potential roles played by the scrape-off-layer current (SOLC) in MHD activity of tokamak plasmas, including effects on stability. SOLCs are found during MHD activity that are: (1) slowly growing after a mode-locking-like event, (2) oscillating in the several kHz range and phase-locked with magnetic and electron temperature oscillations, (3) rapidly growing with a sub-ms time scale during a thermal collapse and a current quench, and (4) spiky in temporal behavior and correlated with spiky features in Da signals commonly identified with the edge localized mode (ELM). These SOLCs are found to be an integral part of the MHD activity, with a propensity to flow in a toroidally non-axisymmetric pattern and with magnitude potentially large enough to play a role in the MHD stability. Candidate mechanisms that can drive these SOLCs are identified: (a) toroidally non-axisymmetric thermoelectric potential, (b) electromotive force (EMF) from MHD activity, and (c) flux swing, both toroidal and poloidal, of the plasma column. An effect is found, stemming from the shear in the field line pitch angle, that mitigates the efficacy of a toroidally non-axisymmetric SOLC to generate a toroidally non-axisymmetric error field. Other potential magnetic consequences of the SOLC are identified: (i) …

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is currently one of the most active electric utility companies in deploying fuel cell technology. Fuel cells offer many benefits and are now used as an alternative to traditional internal combustion engines in power generation. In continuing it's role as the leader in fuel cell deploying, LADWP installed a Phosphoric Acid Fuel Cell (PAFC) in February 2002 at its Main Street service center. The goal of this project is to evaluate the PAFC's performance and cost benefits. This will provide LADWP an insight for future deployment of fuel cell technology. The fuel cell ran smoothly through the first year of operation with very high efficiency and availability, and only with some minor setbacks. The Main street fuel cell project is funded by LADWP with partial grant funding from the Department of Defense's Climate Change Fuel Cell Buydown Program. The technical evaluation and the benefit-cost evaluation of the Main Street fuel cell are both examined in this report.

This report contains a series of terpolymers containing acrylic acid, methacrylamide and a twin-tailed hydrophobic monomer that were synthesized using micellar polymerization methods. These polymer systems were characterized using light scattering, viscometry, and fluorescence methods. Viscosity studies indicate that increasing the nonpolar character of the hydrophobic monomer (longer chain length or twin tailed vs. single tailed) results in enhanced viscosity in aqueous solutions. The interactions of these polymers with surfactants were investigated. These surfactants include sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB), Triton X-100. Viscosity measurements of DiC{sub 6}AM and DiC{sub 8}AM mixtures indicate little interaction with SDS, gelation with CTAB, and hemimicelle formation followed by polymer hydrophobe solubilization with Triton X-100. The DiC{sub 10}Am terpolymer shows similar interaction behavior with CTAB and Triton X-100. However, the enhanced hydrophobic nature of the DiC{sub 10} polymer allows complex formation with SDS as confirmed by surface tensiometry. Fluorescence measurements performed on a dansyl labeled DiC{sub 10}Am terpolymer in the presence of increasing amounts of each of the surfactant indicate relative interaction strengths to be CTAB>Triton X-100>SDS. A modified model based on Yamakawa-Fujii and Odjik-Skolnick-Fixman theories was found to describe the contribution of electrostatic forces to the excluded volume of a …

Weekly newspaper from Dell City, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Funeral program for Mr. Albert "Scratch" Phillips, born September 25, 1918. The funeral was held Friday, March 26, 2004 at F. E. Lewis Memorial Chapel, officiated by Howard Mims. Funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and he was buried in Meadowlawn Memorial Park in San Antonio, Texas.

A solid state electrochemical sensor has been developed for hydrogen leak detection in ambient air. The sensor uses an yttria-stabilized electrolyte with a tin-doped indium oxide sensing electrode and a Pt reference electrode. Excellent sensitivity, and response time of one second or less, are reported for hydrogen gas over the concentration range of 0.03 to 5.5% in air. Cross-sensitivity to relative humidity and to CO{sub 2} are shown to be low. The response to methane, a potentially significant source of interference for such a sensor, is significantly less than that for hydrogen. The sensor shows good reproducibility and was unaffected by thermal cycling over the course of this investigation. The effects of sensing electrode thickness and thermal aging are also reported, and the sensing mechanism is discussed. The sensor is intended for use in vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen internal combustion engines. Those vehicles will use and/or store significant quantities of hydrogen, and will require safety sensor for monitoring potential hydrogen leakage in order to ensure passenger safety.

The study described in this report1 models the FXR injector from the cathode to the exit of the injector. The calculations are compared to actual experimental measurements, table 1. In these measurements the anode voltage was varied by changing the Marks-Bank charging voltage. The anode-cathode spacing was varied by adjusting the location of the cathode in hopes of finding an island of minimum emittance (none found). The bucking coil current was set for zero field on the cathode. In these measurements, a pepper-pot mask was inserted into FXR at beam bug 135 and viewed downstream via a wiggle probe diagnostic at cell gap J21, figure 1. The observed expansion of the beamlets passing through the mask of known geometric layout and hole size allow a calculation of the phase space beam properties.

Perturbations on an interface driven by a strong blast wave grow in time due to a combination of Rayleigh-Taylor, Richtmyer-Meshkov, and decompression effects. In this paper, we present the first results from a computational study of such a system under drive conditions to be attainable on the National Ignition Facility. Using the multiphysics, AMR, higher order Godunov Eulerian hydrocode, Raptor, we consider the late nonlinear instability evolution for multiple amplitude and phase realizations of a variety of multimode spectral types. We show that compressibility effects preclude the emergence of a regime of self-similar instability growth independent of the initial conditions by allowing for memory of the initial conditions to be retained in the mix width at all times. The loss of transverse spectral information is demonstrated, however, along with the existence of a quasi-self-similar regime over short time intervals. Certain aspects of the initial conditions, including the rms amplitude, are shown to have a strong effect on the time to transition to the quasi-self-similar regime.