Analytical Laboratory Quality Audits are designed to improve laboratory performance. The success of the audit, as for many activities, is based on adequate preparation, precise performance, well documented and insightful reporting, and productive follow-up. Adequate preparation starts with definition of the purpose, scope, and authority for the audit and the primary standards against which the laboratory quality program will be tested. The scope and technical processes involved lead to determining the needed audit team resources. Contact is made with the auditee and a formal audit plan is developed, approved and sent to the auditee laboratory management. Review of the auditee's quality manual, key procedures and historical information during preparation leads to better checklist development and more efficient and effective use of the limited time for data gathering during the audit itself. The audit begins with the opening meeting that sets the stage for the interactions between the audit team and the laboratory staff. Arrangements are worked out for the necessary interviews and examination of processes and records. The information developed during the audit is recorded on the checklists. Laboratory management is kept informed of issues during the audit so there are no surprises at the closing meeting. The audit report …

In life the importance of setting goals is stressed. The desired end result must be envisioned to chart a path and determine indicators to provide feedback on the process. Quality does not happen by accident but is achieved through a constant process of setting goals, process development, monitoring process indicators, fine tuning the process, and achieving results. These goals are to be focused and clearly measurable. In industry and life the setting of goals with clear process indicators is often difficult because of the variable end result and scarcity of measurements. Laboratories are fortunate in that they have a plethora of measurements with known or desired end results (controls) to monitor the process and give instantaneous feedback on quality. A key quality tool used by the laboratory to monitor and evaluate the lab processes is control charting. When properly utilized Quality Control (QC) Charts allow labs to be proactive in addressing problems rather than reactive. Several methods are available for control charting and some are listed in the references/information sources. The content for this paper is based on the control-charting program utilized at the Department of Energy's Fernald site. This control-charting program has specific areas of emphasis, simple charts, trend …

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In recent years, Congress has provided the military with additional funding to address the shortage of spare parts. This report provides information on how the funding was used and how the Department of Defense (DOD) plans to improve its financial information on spare parts funding. GAO found that the $1.1 billion earmarked for spare parts in the 1999 appropriations act was placed in military services' operation and maintenance accounts. However, DOD did not separately track the use of these funds, which could have been used for other purposes. As a result, DOD plans to annually develop detailed financial management information on spare parts funding uses. Implementation of DOD's plan should increase visibility and accountability for the use of spare parts funds. The plan should also help to determine the extent to which progress is being made in addressing spare parts shortages. Such information, when developed through a reliable and consistent methodology, would also be useful for congressional decision making and oversight. However, DOD does not plan to provide this information to Congress."

In order to set up a powerful proton source for a future Neutrino Factory, increasing at the same time the flux of protons available for new and existing facilities, CERN is studying a 2.2 GeV superconducting H- linac for 4 MW beam power, called SPL. The superconducting part of this linac covers the energy range from 120 MeV to 2.2 GeV. Three sections made of 352 MHz cavities with nominal beta of 0.52, 0.7 and 0.8 bring the beam energy up to 1 GeV. From this energy, superconducting cavities from LEP or beta 0.8 cavities can be used up to the final energy of 2.2 GeV. This paper covers the optimization for the superconducting part, the beam dynamics design principles, the matching between sections, and the results of multiparticle simulations with up to 50 million particles. To demonstrate the stability of the design, matched and mismatched input beams are used.

In the past decade, the bunch lengths of electrons in accelerators have decreased dramatically and are in the range off a few millimeters. Measurement of the length as well as the longitudinal profile of these short bunches have been a topic of research in a number of institutions. One of the techniques uses the electric field induced by the passage of electrons in the vicinity of a birefringent crystal to change its optical characteristics. Well-established electro-optic techniques can then be used to measure the temporal characteristics of the electron bunch. The inherent fast response of the crystal facilitates the measurement to femtosecond time resolution. However, the resolution in experiments so far has been limited to 70 ps, by the bandwidth of the detection equipment. Use of a streak camera can improve this resolution to a few picoseconds. In this paper we present a novel, non-invasive, single-shot approach to improve the resolution to tens of femtoseconds so that sub mm bunch length can be measured.

The objective of this project is to provide DOE with improved methods to assess risks from contaminants to wildlife populations. The current approach for wildlife risk assessment consists of comparison of contaminant exposure estimates for individual animals to literature-derived toxicity test endpoints. These test endpoints are assumed to estimate thresholds for population-level effects. Moreover, species sensitivities to contaminants is one of several criteria to be considered when selecting assessment endpoints (EPA 1997 and 1998), yet data on the sensitivities of many birds and mammals are lacking. The uncertainties associated with this approach are considerable. First, because toxicity data are not available for most potential wildlife endpoint species, extrapolation of toxicity data from test species to the species of interest is required. There is no consensus on the most appropriate extrapolation method. Second, toxicity data are represented as statistical measures (e.g., NOAEL s or LOAELs) that provide no information on the nature or magnitude of effects. The level of effect is an artifact of the replication and dosing regime employed, and does not indicate how effects might increase with increasing exposure. Consequently, slight exceedance of a LOAEL is not distinguished from greatly exceeding it. Third, the relationship of toxic effects on …

The year 2000 was a year of evolutionary change for the Fermilab computer farms. Additional compute capacity was acquired by the addition of PCs for the CDF, D0 and CMS farms. This was done in preparation for Run 2 production and for CMS Monte Carlo production. Additional I/O capacity was added for all the farms. This continues the trend to standardize the I/O systems on the SGI O2x00 architecture. Strong authentication was installed on the CDF and D0 farms. The farms continue to provide large CPU resources for experiments and those users whose calculations benefit from large CPU/low IO resources. The user community will change in 2001 now that the 1999 fixed-target experiments have almost finished processing and Run 2, SDSS, miniBooNE, MINOS, BTeV, and other future experiments and projects will be the major users in the future.

In the recent development of high voltage solid state pulsed power systems, the ability to monitor low voltage signals in a high voltage environment has been a problem. The amplitude of any ground bounce from the high voltage pulse can make the interpretation of low voltage diagnostic signals difficult with industry standard probes. The paper explains the development of a fiber optic voltage probe for the oscilloscope. Included are explanations of the probe's design, fabrication, limitations, and performance when compared with standard probes in a high voltage pulsed power environment.

A novel approach called Forward-Inverse Adaptive Techniques (FIAT) for reservoir characterization is developed and applied to three representative exploration cases. Inverse modeling refers to the determination of the entire reservoir permeability under steady state single-phase flow regime, given only field permeability, pressure and production well measurements. FIAT solves the forward and inverse partial differential equations (PDEs) simultaneously by adding a regularization term and filtering pressure gradients. An implicit adaptive-grid, Galerkin, numerical scheme is used to numerically solve the set of PDEs subject to pressure and permeability boundary conditions. Three examples are presented. Results from all three cases demonstrate attainable and reasonably accurate solutions and, more importantly, provide insights into the consequences of data undersampling.

The mixture of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, halogenated solvents and radionuclides in many DOE waste materials presents a challenging problem for separating the different species and disposing of individual contaminants. One approach for dealing with mixed wastes is to genetically engineer the radiation-resistant bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans to survive in and detoxify DOE's mixed waste streams, and to develop process parameters for treating mixed wastes with such constructed strains. The goal for this project is to develop a suite of genetic tools for Deinococcus radiodurans and to use these tools to construct and test stable strains for detoxification of haloorganics in mixed wastes.

The standard model (SM) of fundamental interactions, has been the successful theory over the last 25 years. The overall success of the SM in describing the elementary interactions, the discovery of gauge bosons at CERN in the eighties as well as the top discovery at Fermilab in 1995, strengthened the expectation that the Higgs mechanism is the one that gives mass to all particles. At the moment the Higgs particle is the only missing pieces of the puzzle. The sensitivity of parameters of the electroweak theory to the mass of the top quark and of the W boson has been exploited to provide limits on the mass of the Higgs particle (M{sub H}). Due to the logarithmic dependence of M{sub H} to the ratio of M{sub W}/M{sub top}, a small change in the central values translates into a large change in the limit on M{sub H}. At present (Spring 2001), the current 95% CL lower bound is 212 GeV/c{sup 2} while the upper limit from LEP experiments is 113.5 GeV/c{sup 2} with the additional hint of a possible signal at 115 GeV/c{sup 2}[1]. Due to its coupling Higgs decays into the heaviest possible pair of particles, therefore for M{sub H} …

High-Harmonic Fast-Wave (HHFW), a radio-frequency technique scenario applicable to high-beta plasmas, has been selected as one of the main auxiliary heating systems on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX). The HHFW antenna assembly comprises 12 toroidally adjacent current elements, extending poloidally and centered on the equatorial plane. This paper reviews experimental results obtained with a symmetrical (vacuum) launching spectrum with k|| = 14 m(superscript ''-1'') at a frequency of 30 MHz. We describe results obtained when HHFW power is applied to helium and deuterium plasmas, during the plasma-current flattop period of the discharge. Application of 1.8-MW HHFW pulse to MHD quiescent plasmas resulted in strong electron heating, during which the central electron temperature T(subscript ''eo'') more than doubled from approximately 0.5 keV to 1.15 keV. In deuterium plasmas, HHFW heating was found less efficient, with a central electron temperature increase of the order of 40% during a 1.8-MW HHFW pulse, from approximately 400 eV to approximately 550 eV. (At HHFW power of 2.4 MW, central electron temperature increased by 60%, reaching 0.625 keV.) HHFW heating in presence of MHD activity is also discussed. A short neutral-beam pulse was applied to permit charge-exchange recombination spectroscopy (CHERS) measurement of the impurity ion …

Provides the plan for integrating research, development, and deployment of new technologies to improve future commercial buildings in the U.S.

Provides a summary of plans for integrating research, development, and deployment for future commercial buildings in the U.S.

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Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Core Financial System Requirements document is intended to assist agencies when reviewing new core financial systems and when improving or evaluating existing core financial systems. It provides the baseline functionality in order to support agency missions and comply with laws and regulations. The final issuance of this document will augment existing federal financial management system functional requirements used in assessing compliance with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act."

Research providing guidance on management of aging reinforced concrete structures is summarized. Topics covered include a materials property database, an aging assessment methodology to identify critical structures and degradation factors that can potentially impact performance, guidelines and evaluation criteria for use in condition assessments, and a reliability-based methodology for current condition assessments and estimations of future performance. Applicability of nondestructive evaluation and repair-related technologies is addressed.

The measurements of the mass of the W boson (M{sub W}) and of the top quark (M{sub t}) are important for three reasons: (i) these masses represent fundamental parameters of the Standard Model; (ii) they determine the coupling between the top quark and the Higgs boson, the coupling being proportional to M{sub t}{sup 2}/M{sub W}{sup 2}; and (iii) radiative corrections relate the masses of the W, top quark and the Higgs boson: an accurate measurement of M{sub W} and M{sub t} would provide a constraint on the Higgs mass (M{sub H}). We present here the measurements obtained by the CDF and D0 collaborations corresponding to the so-called Run I of data-taking (1992-95, {approx} 100 pb{sup -1} each) at the Tevatron (p{bar p} collisions, {radical}s = 1.8 TeV). In addition we report on the improvements expected for these measurements in the current run (so-called Run IIa) which, having just started (March 2001), is expected to collect about 2 fb{sup -1} by the year 2004.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is presently designing and building the 2.5 MeV front end for the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). The front end includes a medium-energy beam transport (MEBT) that carries the 2.5 MeV, 38 mA peak current, H{sup -} beam from the radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ) to the drift tube linac (DTL) through a series of 14 electromagnetic quadrupoles, four rebuncher cavities, and a fast traveling wave chopping system. The beamline contains numerous diagnostic devices, including stripline beam position and phase monitors (BPM), toroid beam current monitors (BCM), and beam profile monitors. Components are mounted on three rafts that are separately supported and aligned. The large number of beam transport and diagnostic components in the 3.6 meter-long beamline necessitates an unusually compact mechanical design.

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The DARHT-II beam line utilizes a fast stripline kicker to temporally chop a high current electron beam from a single induction LINAC and deliver multiple temporal electron beam pulses to an x-ray converter target. High beam quality needs to be maintained throughout the transport line from the end of the accelerator through the final focus lens to the x-ray converter target to produce a high quality radiographic image. Issues that will affect beam quality such as spot size and emittance at the converter target include dynamic effects associated with the stripline kicker as well as emittance growth due to the nonlinear forces associated with the kicker and various focusing elements in the transport line. In addition, dynamic effects associated with transverse resistive wall instability as well as gas focusing will affect the beam transport. A particle-in-cell code is utilized to evaluate beam transport in the downstream transport line in DARHT-II. External focusing forces are included utilizing either analytic expressions or field maps. Models for wakefields from the beam kicker, transverse resistive wall instability, and gas focusing are included in the simulation to provide a more complete picture of beam transport in DARHT-II. From these simulations, for various initial beam loads …