The Pennsylvania State University is conducting a coal-water slurry fuel (CWSF) program for the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with the objective of determining the viability of firing CWSF in an industrial boiler designed for heavy fuel oil. Penn State and DOE have entered into a cooperative agreement with the purpose of determining if CWSF prepared from a cleaned coal (containing approximately 3.5 wt % ash and 0.9 wt % sulfur) can be effectively burned in a heavy fuel oil-designed industrial boiler without adverse impact on boiler rating, maintainability, reliability, and availability. The project will also generate information to help in the design of new systems specifically configured to fire these clean coal-based fuels. The approach being used in the program is as follows: 1. Install a natural gas/fuel oil-designed package boiler and generate baseline data firing natural gas; 2. Shake down the system with CWSF and begin the first 1,000 hours of testing using the burner/atomizer system provided with the boiler. The first 1,000-hour demonstration was to consist of boiler operation testing and combustion performance evaluation using CWSF preheat, a range of atomizing air pressures (up to 200 psig as compared to the …

The US Department of Defense (DOD), through an Interagency Agreement with the US Department of Energy (DOE), has initiated a three-phase program with the Consortium for Coal-Water Slurry Fuel Technology, with the aim of decreasing DOD`s reliance on imported oil by increasing its use of coal. The program is being conducted as a cooperative agreement between the Consortium and DOE and the first phase of the program is underway. Phase I activities are focused on developing clean, coal-based combustion technologies for the utilization of both micronized coal-water slurry fuels (MCWSFs) and dry, micronized coal (DMC) in fuel oil-designed industrial boilers. Phase II research and development activities will continue to focus on industrial boiler retrofit technologies by addressing emissions control and precombustion (i.e., slagging combustion and/or gasification) strategies for the utilization of high ash, high sulfur coals. Phase III activities will examine coal-based fuel combustion systems that cofire wastes. Each phase includes an engineering cost analysis and technology assessment. The activities and status of Phase I are described below. The objective in Phase I is to deliver fully engineered retrofit options for a fuel oil-designed watertube boiler located on a DOD installation to fire either MCWSF or DMC. This will be …

A GPIB device support module is used to provide access to the operating parameters of a GPIB device. GPIB devices may be accessed via National Instruments 1014 cards or via Bitbus Universal Gateways. GPIB devices typically have many parameters, each of which may be thought of in terms of the standard types of database records available in EPICS. It is the job of the device support module designer to decide how the mapping of these parameters will be made to the available record types. Once this mapping is complete, the device support module may be written. The writing of the device support module consists primarily of the construction of a parameter table. This table is used to associate the database record types with the operating parameters of the GPIB instrument. Other aspects of module design include the handling of SRQ events and errors. SRQ events are made available to the device support module if so desired. The processing of an SRQ event is completely up to the designer of the module. They may be ignored, tied to event based record processing, or anything else the designer wishes. Error conditions may be handled in a similar fashion.

On Oct. 7, 1992, Hong Kong's new Governor, Christopher F. Patten, unveiled a set of proposals to expand the voting franchise in Hong Kong and broaden the scope of other democratic initiatives. The People's Republic of China, which resumes sovereignty over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, has objected strenuously to the proposals, claiming they are a violation of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong. British and Hong Kong officials deny this, stating that the proposals deal with matters not mentioned in the Joint Declaration.

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A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

During 1992, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) conducted a user-needs study for the 1993 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS). Every 3 years, the RECS collects information on energy consumption and expenditures for various classes of households and residential buildings. The RECS is the only source of such information within EIA, and one of only a few sources of such information anywhere. EIA sent letters to more than 750 persons, received responses from 56, and held 15 meetings with users. Written responses were also solicited by notices published in the April 14, 1992 Federal Register and in several energy-related publications. To ensure that the 1993 RECS meets current information needs, EIA made a specific effort to get input from policy makers and persons needing data for forecasting efforts. These particular needs relate mainly to development of the National Energy Modeling System and new energy legislation being considered at the time of the user needs survey.