Report on technical progress in the various research and assessment activities of Argonne National Laboratory.

Pre and postprocessors have been written for an established hydraulic program (COMMIX-IHX) which enables prediction of the internal crossflow field for each tube of Argonne's Test Heat Exchanger and identification of those tubes most likely to experience fluid-elastic instability, together with the instability vibration mode. While the direct use of the HXVA method is limited to single pass, single-segmentally baffled tube bundle configurations, its algorithms and methods can be applied to any type of heat exchanger which can be analyzed by COMMIX-IHX. The processors are explained and an example problem is given along with comparisons of experimental results.

This report documents the operation of a 28 in. long sodium heat pipe in the Heat Pipe Test Facility (HPTF) installed at Argonne National Laboratory. Experimental data were collected to simulate conditions prototypic of both a fluidized bed coal combustor application and a space environment application. Both sets of experiment data show good agreement with the heat pipe analytical model. The heat transfer performance of the heat pipe proved reliable over a substantial period of operation and over much thermal cycling. Additional testing of longer heat pipes under controlled laboratory conditions will be necessary to determine performance limitations and to complete the design code validation.

The term modeling in the Workship title refers to the mathematical analysis of the consequences of many collision processes for characterizing the physical stage of radiation actions. It requires as input some knowledge of collision cross sections. Traditionally, work on cross sections and work on the modeling are conducted by separate groups of scientists. It was the purpose of the Workshop to bring these two groups together in a forum that would promote effective communication. Cross-section workers described the status of their work and told what data were available or trustworthy. Modeling workers told what kind of data were needed or were most important. Twenty-two items from the workshop were prepared separately for the data base.

A state-of-the-art review is presented on the corrosion and mechanical behavior of materials at elevated temperatures in coal-gasification environments. The gas atmosphere in coal-conversion processes are, in general, complex mixtures which contain sulfur-bearing components (hydrogen sulfide, SO2, and COS) as well as oxidants (carbon dioxide/carbon monoxide and water/hydrogen). The information developed over the last five years clearly shows sulfidation to be the major mode of material degradation in these environments. The corrosion behavior of structural materials in complex gas environments is examined to evaluate the interrelationships between gas chemistry, alloy chemistry, temperature, and pressure. Thermodynamic aspects of high-temperature corrosion processes that pertain to coal conversion are discussed, and kinetic data are used to compare the behavior of different commercial materials of interest. The influence of complex gas environments on the mechanical properties such as tensile, stress-rupture, and impact on selected alloys is presented. The data have been analyzed, wherever possible, to examine the role of environment on the property variation. The results from ongoing programs on char effects on corrosion and on alloy protection via coatings, cladding, and weld overlay are presented. Areas of additional research with particular emphasis on the development of a better understanding of corrosion processes in …

Annual report of the Argonne National Laboratory Radiological and Environmental Research Division regarding activities related to the Center for Human Radiobiology. This report discusses an inquiry into the mechanisms and dosimetry for induction of malignancies by radium, and studies of individuals exposed to radium and thorium, as well as to other radionuclides,.

Quarterly report of the Argonne National Laboratory Chemical Engineering Division regarding activities related to properties and handling of radioactive materials, operation of nuclear reactors, and other relevant research.

Quarterly report of the Argonne National Laboratory Chemical Engineering Division regarding activities related to properties and handling of radioactive materials, operation of nuclear reactors, and other relevant research.

The primary-coolant flow paths of a reactor system are usually subject to close scrutiny in a design review to identify potential flow-induced vibration sources. However, secondary-flow paths through narrow gaps in component supports, which parallel the primary-flow path, occasionally are the excitation source for significant vibrations even though the secondary-flow rates are orders of magnitude smaller than the primary-flow rate. These so-called leakage flow problems are reviewed here to identify design features and excitation sources that should be avoided. Also, design rules of thumb are formulated that can be employed to guide a design, but quantitative prediction of component response is found to require scale-model testing.

A central solar-heating plant with seasonal heat storage in a deep underground aquifer is designed by means of a solar-seasonal-storage-system simulation code based on the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) code for Solar Annual Storage Simulation (SASS). This Solar Seasonal Storage Plant is designed to supply close to 100% of the annual heating and domestic-hot-water (DHW) load of a hypothetical new community, the Fox River Valley Project, for a location in Madison, Wisconsin. Some analyses are also carried out for Boston, Massachusetts and Copenhagen, Denmark, as an indication of weather and insolation effects. Analyses are conducted for five different types of solar collectors, and for an alternate system utilizing seasonal storage in a large water tank. Predicted seasonal performance and system and storage costs are calculated. To provide some validation of the SASS results, a simulation of the solar system with seasonal storage in a large water tank is also carried out with a modified version of the Swedish Solar Seasonal Storage Code MINSUN.

Response-surface techniques have been developed for obtaining probability distributions of the consequences of postulated nuclear reactor accidents. In these techniques, probability distributions are assigned to the system and model parameters of the accident analysis. A limited number of parameter values (called knot points) are selected and input to a deterministic accident-analysis code. The results of the deterministic analyses are used to generate analytical functions (called response surfaces) that approximate the accident consequences in terms of selected system and model parameters. The response-surface methodology of this report includes both systematical and random knot-point selection schemes, second- and third-degree response surfaces, functional transformations of both input parameters and consequence variables, smooth synthesis of region-wise response surfaces and the treatment of random conditions for conditional distributions. The computer code PROSA-2 developed for implementing these techniques is independent of the deterministic accident-analysis codes.

A comparative economic analysis was made of four solidification processes for liquid high-level radioactive waste. Two processes produced borosilicate glass monoliths and two others produced metal matrix composites of lead and borosilicate glass beads and lead and super-calcine pellets. Within the uncertainties of the cost (1979 dollars) estimates, the cost of the four processes was about the same, with the major cost component being the cost of the primary building structure. Equipment costs and operating and maintenance costs formed only a small portion of the building structure costs for all processes.

This report presents a diagnostic automation that can be used to investigate classes of systems without feedback loops. This report shows the input needed for the automation, the algorithm used, and the PROLOG program for the simulation.

Rising interest in the nuclear physics community in a GeV C.W. electron accelerator reflects the growing importance of high-resolution short-range nuclear physics to future advances in the field. In this report major current problems are reviewed and the details of prospective measurements which could be made with a GeV C.W. electron facility are discussed, together with their impact on an understanding of nuclear forces and the structure of nuclear matter. The microtron accelerator has been chosen as the technology to generate the electron beams required for the research discussed because of the advantages of superior beam quality, low capital and operating cost and capability of furnishing beams of several energies and intensities simultaneously. A complete technical description of the conceptual design for a 2 GeV double-sided C.W. electron microtron is presented. The accelerator can furnish three beams with independently controlled energy and intensity. The maximum current per beam is 100 mircoamps. Although the precise objective for maximum beam energy is still a subject of debate, the design developed in this study provides the base technology for microtron accelerators at higher energies (2 to 6 GeV) using multi-sided geometries.

An automated accountability system for special nuclear materials (SNM) is under development at Argonne National Laboratory-West. Phase I of the development effort has established the following basic features of the system: a unique file organization allows rapid updating or retrieval of the status of various SNM, based on "batch numbers," storage location, serial number, or other attributes. Access to the program is controlled by an interactive user interface that can be easily understood by operators who have had no prior background in electronic data processing. Extensive use of structured programming techniques make the software package easy to understand and to modify for specific applications. All routines are written in FORTRAN.

This report proposes six extensions to ANS PL/I, which is being revised by the American National Standards Committee X3J1. The new features include environmental enquiry functions, generalization of restricted expressions (compile-time expressions), liberalization of the contexts of restricted expressions, a named-literal declaration type, explicit precision specification for constants, and a pragmatic statement for expressing conditions that an implementation must satisfy for acceptable compilation. Used together, these features will give numerical analysts access to properties of an implementation's floating-point arithmetic in exactly the ways required to ease the burden of tailoring a program's precision specifications to new environments. In many cases it will be possible to write PL/I programs that are completely self-adapting to their host environment. Effective definition of the environmental enquiry functions will require the incorporation of an explicitly parameterized model of floating-point arithmetic. If such a model is integrated into the Standard, numerical analysts will be able to state and prove theorems about their programs' error bounds by appealing directly to the Standard.

The design, development, and use of the software package called LINPACK, a collection of subroutines to solve various systems of simultaneous linear algebraic equations are described. The package has been designed to be machine-independent and fully portable and to run efficiently in many operating environments.

The goal of this study was to develop an iron-based alloy, similar to Type 316 stainless steel in mechanical and corrosion properties but with a reduced chromium content or, ideally, no chromium. A total of twenty-six 225-g ingots and ten 2.5 to 12 kg ingots of various compositions in the Fe-Si-Mn-Ni-C system were prepared. All ingots contained from 5 to 11 w/o silicon and drew their corrosion resistance primarily from this component. The composition ranges of the remaining major alloying elements were (in w/o) 0-24 Mn, 0-35 Ni, and 0.08 to 0.95 C. Most of the alloys were reduced to sheet, demonstrating the hot fabricability of these high-silicon alloys. The mechanical and corrosion properties of these alloys are attractive. Tensile tests showed yield strengths of 303 to 379 Mpa (44 to 55 ksi), ultimate tensile strengths of 731 to 882 MPa (106 to 128 ksi), and elongations of 34 to 77%. Air oxidation rates were lower than those of 300-series stainless steels at 1000 C. Salt water corrosion rates for these alloys fall between those of stainless steels and plain carbon steels and are 5 to 10 times lower than the rates for plain carbon steels.

Quarterly report discussing fuel cell research and development work at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). This report describes efforts directed toward understanding and improving components of molten carbonate fuel cells and have included operation of 10-cm square cells.

Biaxial creep-fatigue data for Incoloy 800 and Type 316H stainless steel at elevated temperatures are presented. Tubular specimens were subjected to constant internal pressure and strain-controlled axial cycling with and without hold times in tension as well as in compression.

Compilation of abstracts for lectures that were presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on "Nonequilibrium Superconductivity, Phonons and Kapitza Boundaries." The topics primarily discuss work in the area of superconductivity, low-temperature phenomena, and energy-related problems in this field.

Procedures are given for the chemical analysis of a variety of materials of interest in battery development and research. These materials include LiCl-KCl eutectic, Li-Al alloys, lithium sulfide, lithium aluminum chloride, calcium sulfide, titanium sulfide, and various sulfides of iron, nickel, copper, and cobalt.

Computer graphic representation of the antigen-binding sites of two Bence-Jones proteins (antibody light chain diners), Loc (left) and Mcg (right). The spheres represent individual amino acids. Each binding site is composed of two variable domains and each domain consists of framework segments and the hyper-variable segments which confer the specificity to the antibody molecule.

The technology of breeding uranium-233 from thorium-232 in a light water reactor is being developed and evaluated by the Westinghouse Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory (BAPL) through operation and examination of the Shippingport Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR). Bettis is determining the end-of-life (EOL) inventory of fissile uranium in the LWBR core by nondestructive assay of a statistical sample comprising approximately 500 EOL fuel rods. This determination is being made with an irradiated-fuel assay gauge based on neutron interrogation and detection of delayed neutrons from each rod. The EOL fissile inventory will be compared with the beginning-of-life fissile loading of the LWBR to determine the extent of breeding. In support of the BAPL proof-of-breeding (POB) effort, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) carried out destructive physical, chemical, and radiometric analyses on 17 EOL LWBR fuel rods that were previously assayed with the nondestructive gauge. The ANL work included measurements on the intact rods; shearing of the rods into pre-designated contiguous segments; separate dissolution of each of the more than 150 segments; and analysis of the dissolver solutions to determine each segment's uranium content, uranium isotopic composition, and loading of selected fission products. This report describes the facilities in which this work was carried …