The goal of the data intensive LDRD was to investigate the fundamental research issues underlying the application of High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to the challenges of data intensive computing. We explored these issues through four targeted case studies derived from growing LLNL programs: high speed text processing, massive semantic graph analysis, streaming image feature extraction, and processing of streaming sensor data. The ultimate goal of this analysis was to provide scalable data management algorithms to support the development of a predictive knowledge capability consistent with the direction of Aurora.

The objective of this project is to synthesize and characterize new O{sub 2} reduction catalysts with enhanced activity and ultra low Pt loading, and to test them in membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) to determine their performance under fuel cell cathode operating conditions.

This report is the result of a study of networks and how they may need to evolve to support petascale leadership computing and science. As Dr. Ray Orbach, director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science, says in the spring 2006 issue of SciDAC Review, 'One remarkable example of growth in unexpected directions has been in high-end computation'. In the same article Dr. Michael Strayer states, 'Moore's law suggests that before the end of the next cycle of SciDAC, we shall see petaflop computers'. Given the Office of Science's strong leadership and support for petascale computing and facilities, we should expect to see petaflop computers in operation in support of science before the end of the decade, and DOE/SC Advanced Scientific Computing Research programs are focused on making this a reality. This study took its lead from this strong focus on petascale computing and the networks required to support such facilities, but it grew to include almost all aspects of the DOE/SC petascale computational and experimental science facilities, all of which will face daunting challenges in managing and analyzing the voluminous amounts of data expected. In addition, trends indicate the increased coupling of unique experimental facilities with computational facilities, …

One of the major limitations to the commercialization of solid oxide fuel cells is the expense of fabricating the required (anode/electrolyte/cathode) cells (currently planar or tubular). The current technology being employed by most of the producers of solid oxide fuel cells is essentially all the same in that it involves standard ceramic processing to make composite structures (either electrolyte or electrode supported). Each investigator/program has their own individual processing steps to produce the cells, but in the end, they all make these cells in a very similar manner. As a result only limited progress has been made towards cost reductions over the last 2-3 decades. It is our contention that major changes in the processing of cells need to be made before SOFCs can become economically feasible.

We have undertaken a study of the feasibility of an innovative method for the determination of thermal properties of materials at extreme conditions. Our approach is essentiality an extension of the flash method to the geometry of the diamond-anvil cell and our ultimate goal is to greatly enlarge the pressure and temperature range over which thermal properties can be investigated. More specifically, we have performed test experiments to establish a technique for probing thermal diffusivity on samples of dimensions compatible with the physical constraints of the diamond anvil cell.

The overall goal of this project was to develop reactive membrane barriers--a new and flexible technique to contain and stabilize subsurface contaminants. Polymer membranes will leak once a contaminant is able to diffuse through the membrane. By incorporating a reactive material in the polymer, however, the contaminant is degraded or immobilized within the membrane. These processes increase the time for contaminants to breakthrough the barrier (i.e. the lag time) and can dramatically extend barrier lifetimes. In this work, reactive barrier membranes containing zero-valent iron (Fe{sup 0}) or crystalline silicotitanate (CST) were developed to prevent the migration of chlorinated solvents and cesium-137, respectively. These studies were complemented by the development of models quantifying the leakage/kill time of reactive membranes and describing the behavior of products produced via the reactions within the membranes. First, poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) membranes containing Fe{sup 0} and CST were prepared and tested. Although PVA is not useful in practical applications, it allows experiments to be performed rapidly and the results to be compared to theory. For copper ions (Cu{sup 2+}) and carbon tetrachloride, the barrier was effective, increasing the time to breakthrough over 300 times. Even better performance was expected, and the percentage of the iron used …

Three decadal surveys recommend a large-aperture synoptic survey telescope (LSST) to allow time-domain and cosmological studies of distant objects. LLNL designed the optical system and also is expected to play a significant role in the engineering associated with the camera. Precision cosmology from ground-based instruments is in a sense terra incognita. Numerous systematic effects occur that would be minimal or absent in their space-based counterparts. We proposed developing some basic tools and techniques for investigating ''dark sector'' cosmological science with such next-generation, large-aperture, real-time telescopes. The critical research involved determining whether systematic effects might dominate the extremely small distortions (''shears'') in images of faint background galaxies. To address these issues we carried out a comprehensive data campaign and developed detailed computer simulations.

This work develops and demonstrates a laboratory-scale high temperature natural gas furnace that can operate with/without oxygen enrichment to significantly improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions. The laboratory-scale is 5ft in diameter & 8ft tall. This furnace was constructed and tested. This report demonstrates the efficiency and pollutant prevention capabilities of this test furnace. The project also developed optical detection technology to control the furnace output.

This research program has explored the stability of alloys under pulsed laser irradiation. Two primary directions were investigated: (i) phase transitions during a single laser pulse, and (ii) phase stability under repeated laser irradiation. The first theme was primarily concerned with both the crystalline to amorphous phase transition and the transition of liquids and glasses to crystalline matter. The second project examined the phase evolution during laser pulsing in situations where plastic deformation was prevalent (high-energy laser pulses). Both computer simulation and experimental programs were undertaken. Our work using computer simulations had several notable successes. For the work connected with multiple pulsing, we used molecular dynamics (MD) to simulate the behavior of alloys under severe plastic deformation. We found that during high strain-rate deformation atomic mixing of chemical species is random, independent of the detailed thermochemical properties of the system. This result contrasts with recent reports. In this work, we also developed two new methods of analyzing atomic mixing, one is based on relative mean square displacements (RMSD) of atoms and the other, Burgers vector analysis (BVA), on nearest neighbor displacements. The RMSD analysis is valuable in that it specifies the length scales over which deformation processes take place, and …

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Each year, Indian summer monsoon season begins in June and ends in September. Surface winds blow from the southwest during this season. The Indian summer monsoon typically covers large areas of India with western and central India receiving more than 90% of their total annual precipitation during this period, and southern and northwestern India receiving 50%-75% of their total annual rainfall. Overall, monthly totals average 200-300 mm over the country as a whole, with the largest values observed during the heart of the monsoon season in July and August. In all total, India receives about 870 mm of rainfall in a normal summer monsoon season. This summary discusses the effects of climate change on the frequency, mean rainfall, duration and the variability of the Indian Monsoon. East Asian Monsoon in the southeastern part of Asia is not discussed in this summary. Changes in monsoon characteristics are mainly inferred from climate model simulations submitted to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). It should be cautioned that there is a large range in the results from these models. For instance, the range of mean monsoon precipitation as simulated by the AR4 models over India is from 500 …

The objective of this work is to develop dense ceramic membranes for separating hydrogen from other gaseous components in a nongalvanic mode, i.e., without using an external power supply or electrical circuitry. This goal of this project is to develop two types of dense ceramic membrane for producing hydrogen nongalvanically, i.e., without electrodes or external power supply, at commercially significant fluxes under industrially relevant operating conditions. The first type of membrane, hydrogen transport membranes (HTMs), will be used to separate hydrogen from gas mixtures such as the product streams from coal gasification, methane partial oxidation, and water-gas shift reactions. Potential ancillary uses of HTMs include dehydrogenation and olefin production, as well as hydrogen recovery in petroleum refineries and ammonia synthesis plants, the largest current users of deliberately produced hydrogen. The second type of membrane, oxygen transport membranes (OTMs), will produce hydrogen by nongalvanically removing oxygen that is generated when water dissociates at elevated temperatures. This report describes progress that was made during FY 2006 on the development of OTM and HTM materials.

In 2006, DOE-ORP initiated the Seismic Boreholes Project (SBP) to emplace boreholes at the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) site in order to obtain direct Vs measurements and other physical property measurements in Columbia River basalt and interbedded sediments of the Ellensburg Formation. The goal was to reduce the uncertainty in the response spectra and seismic design basis, and potentially recover design margin for the WTP. The characterization effort within the deep boreholes included 1) downhole measurements of the velocity properties of the suprabasalt, basalt, and sedimentary interbed sequences, 2) downhole measurements of the density of the subsurface basalt and sediments, and 3) confirmation of the geometry of the contact between the various basalt and interbedded sediments through examination of retrieved core from the corehole and data collected through geophysical logging of each borehole. This report describes the results of the geologic studies from three mud-rotary boreholes and one cored borehole at the WTP. All four boreholes penetrated the entire Saddle Mountains Basalt and the upper part of the Wanapum Basalt where thick sedimentary interbeds occur between the lava flows. The basalt flows penetrated in Saddle Mountains Basalt included the Umatilla Member, Esquatzel Member, Pomona Member and the Elephant Mountain Member. …

High concentration caustic solutions are known to cause stress corrosion cracking in carbon steel at elevated temperature. This calculation establishes the conditions where heat of dilution will not cause the solution temperature--concentration to exceed the boundary for stress corrosion cracking as established by NACE International.

The long range strategic goal of the Department of Energy's Building Technologies (DOE/BT) Program is to create, by 2020, technologies and design approaches that enable the construction of net-zero energy homes at low incremental cost (DOE/BT 2005). A net zero energy home (NZEH) is a residential building with greatly reduced needs for energy through efficiency gains, with the balance of energy needs supplied by renewable technologies. While initially focused on new construction, these technologies and design approaches are intended to have application to buildings constructed before 2020 as well resulting in substantial reduction in energy use for all building types and ages. DOE/BT's Emerging Technologies (ET) team is working to support this strategic goal by identifying and developing advanced heating, ventilating, air-conditioning, and water heating (HVAC/WH) technology options applicable to NZEHs. In FY05 ORNL conducted an initial Stage 1 (Applied Research) scoping assessment of HVAC/WH systems options for future NZEHs to help DOE/BT identify and prioritize alternative approaches for further development. Eleven system concepts with central air distribution ducting and nine multi-zone systems were selected and their annual and peak demand performance estimated for five locations: Atlanta (mixed-humid), Houston (hot-humid), Phoenix (hot-dry), San Francisco (marine), and Chicago (cold). Performance was …

The molecular mechanisms that result in the elevated risk for lung cancer associated with exposure to radiation have not been well characterized. Workers from the MAYAK nuclear enterprise are an ideal cohort in which to study the molecular epidemiology of cancer associated with radiation exposure and to identify the genes targeted for inactivation that in turn affect individual risk for radiation-induced lung cancer. Epidemiology studies of the MAYAK cohort indicate a significantly higher frequency for adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) in workers than in a control population and a strong correlation between these tumor types and plutonium exposure. Two hypotheses will be evaluated through the proposed studies. First, radiation exposure targets specific genes for inactivation by promoter methylation. This hypothesis is supported by our recent studies with the MAYAK population that demonstrated the targeting of the p16 gene for inactivation by promoter methylation in adenocarcinomas from workers (1). Second, genes inactivated in tumors can serve as biomarkers for lung cancer risk in a cancer-free population of workers exposed to plutonium. Support for this hypothesis is based on exciting preliminary results of our nested, case-control study of persons from the Colorado cohort. In that study, a panel of methylation markers …

This project was inspired and motivated by the need to provide better platforms for persistent surveillance. In the years since the inception of this work, the need for persistence of surveillance platforms has become even more widely appreciated, both within the defense community and the intelligence community. One of the most demanding technical requirements for such a platform involves the power plant and energy storage system, and this project concentrated almost exclusively on the technology associated with this system for a solar powered, high altitude, unmanned aircraft. An important realization for the feasibility of such solar powered aircraft, made at the outset of this project, was that thermal energy may be stored with higher specific energy density than for any other known practical form of rechargeable energy storage. This approach has proved to be extraordinarily fruitful, and a large number of spin-off applications of this technology were developed in the course of this project.

This project examined the internal architecture of delta front sandstones at two locations within the Turonian-age Wall Creek Member of the Frontier Formation, in Wyoming. The project involved traditional outcrop field work integrated with core-data, and 2D and 3D ground penetrating radar (GPR) imaging from behind the outcrops. The fluid-flow engineering work, handled through a collaborative grant given to PI Chris White at LSU, focused on effects on fluid flow of late-stage calcite cement nodules in 3D. In addition to the extensive field component, the work funded 2 PhD students (Gani and Lee) and resulted in publication of 10 technical papers, 17 abstracts, and 4 internal field guides. PI Bhattacharya also funded an additional 3 PhD students that worked on the Wall Creek sandstone funded separately through an industrial consortium, two of whom graduated in the fall 2006 ((Sadeque and Vakarelov). These additional funds provided significant leverage to expand the work to include a regional stratigraphic synthesis of the Wall Creek Member of the Frontier Formation, in addition to the reservoir-scale studies that DOE directly funded. Awards given to PI Bhattacharya included the prestigious AAPG Distinguished Lecture Award, which involved a tour of about 25 Universities and Geological Societies in …

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The profound revolutions in particle physics likely to emerge from current and future experiments motivates an improved understanding of the precise predictions of the Standard Model and new physics models. Higher order predictions in quantum field theories inevitably requires the renormalization procedure, which makes sensible predictions out of the naively divergent results of perturbation theory. Thus, a robust understanding of renormalization is crucial for identifying and interpreting the possible discovery of new physics. The results of this thesis represent a broad set of investigations in to the nature of renormalization. The author begins by motivating a more physical approach to renormalization based on gauge-invariant Green's functions. The resulting effective charges are first applied to gauge coupling unification. This approach provides an elegant formalism for understanding all threshold corrections, and the gauge couplings unify in a more physical manner compared to the usual methods. Next, the gauge-invariant three-gluon vertex is studied in detail, revealing an interesting and rich structure. The effective coupling for the three-gluon vertex, {alpha}(k{sub 1}{sup 2}, k{sub 2}{sup 2}, k{sub 3}{sup 2}), depends on three momentum scales and gives rise to an effective scale Q{sub eff}{sup 2}(k{sub 1}{sup 2}, k{sub 2}{sup 2}, k{sub 3}{sup 2}) which governs the …

This report describes a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District (SRP) and Sandia National Laboratories to jointly develop advanced methods of controlling distributed energy resources (DERs) that may be located within SRP distribution systems. The controls must provide a standardized interface to allow plug-and-play capability and should allow utilities to take advantage of advanced capabilities of DERs to provide a value beyond offsetting load power. To do this, Sandia and SRP field-tested the IEC 61850-7-420 DER object model (OM) in a grid environment, with the goal of validating whether the model is robust enough to be used in common utility applications. The diesel generator OM tested was successfully used to accomplish basic genset control and monitoring. However, as presently constituted it does not enable plug-and-play functionality. Suggestions are made of aspects of the standard that need further development and testing. These problems are far from insurmountable and do not imply anything fundamentally unsound or unworkable in the standard.

We compute the expected value of the cosmological constant in our universe from the Causal Entropic Principle. Since observers must obey the laws of thermodynamics and causality, it asserts that physical parameters are most likely to be found in the range of values for which the total entropy production within a causally connected region is maximized. Despite the absence of more explicit anthropic criteria, the resulting probability distribution turns out to be in excellent agreement with observation. In particular, we find that dust heated by stars dominates the entropy production, demonstrating the remarkable power of this thermodynamic selection criterion. The alternative approach--weighting by the number of ''observers per baryon''--is less well-defined, requires problematic assumptions about the nature of observers, and yet prefers values larger than present experimental bounds.

In this project, we performed experiments and simulations to establish constitutive models for plastic behavior and to determine the deformation mechanism of nanocrystalline materials at different grain sizes (<100 nm) and high strain rates (>10{sup 6}/s). The experiments used both laser-induced shocks and isentropic compression to investigate, for the first time, the high-strain-rate deformation of nanocrystalline Ni. Samples were characterized using transmission electron microscopy, nanoindentation, profilometry, and x-ray diffraction before and after loading. We validated constitutive models using both atomistic molecular dynamics and continuum simulations performed at the boundary of their current computational possibilities to match experimental scales.

A geologic/geochemical investigation in the vicinity of UPR-200-E-82 was performed using pairs of cone-penetrometer probe holes. A total of 41 direct-push cone-penetrometer borings (19 pairs to investigate different high moisture zones in the same sampling location and 3 individual) were advanced to characterize vadose zone moisture and the distribution of contaminants. A total of twenty sample sets, containing up to two split-spoon liners and one grab sample, were delivered to the laboratory for characterization and analysis. The samples were collected around the documented location of the C-152 pipeline leak, and created an approximately 120-ft diameter circle around the waste site. UPR-200-E-82 was a loss of approximately 2,600 gallons of Cs-137 Recovery Process feed solution containing an estimated 11,300 Ci of cesium-137 and 5 Ci of technetium-99. Several key parameters that are used to identify subsurface contamination were measured, including: water extract pH, electrical conductivity, nitrate, technetium-99, sodium, and uranium concentrations and technetium-99 and uranium concentrations in acid extracts. All of the parameters, with the exception of electrical conductivity, were elevated in at least some of the samples analyzed as part of this study. Specifically, soil pH was elevated (from 8.69 to 9.99) in five samples collected northeast and southwest of …