Data coming from complex simulation models reach easily dimensions much greater than available computational resources. Visualization of such data still represents the most intuitive and effective tool for scientific inspection of simulated phenomena. To ease this process several techniques have been adopted mainly concerning the use of hierarchical multi-resolution representations. In this paper we present the implementation of a hierarchical indexing schema for multiresolution data tailored to overwork the computational power of distributed environments.

I performed contact ultrasonic time-of-flight measurements on three binary U-6 wt-% Nb alloy (U-6Nb) cubes. Using the time-of-flight measurement results, thickness, and density, the Acoustic Velocity, Poisson's Ratio, Shear Modulus, and Modulus of Elasticity are calculated. A detailed data is summarized in the spreadsheets 1-6. The calculated data compares the material properties of each cube before and after a heat treatment (HT). The time-of-flight measurements were performed using the pulse/echo signal overlap technique discussed in the Review of Ultrasonic Pulse/Echo Signal Overlap Technique section of this report. The measurements were made using both the longitudinal and shear ultrasonic modes and acquired in the X, Y, and Z axes of each cube, as represented in Figure 1. Thickness and density measurements on the three cubes were performed by the Manufacturing and Materials Engineering Division, Dimensional Inspection Group. The HT was performed on all three cubes in the Manufacturing and Materials Engineering Division, Heat Treat Shop. The process consisted of 200 C for 2 hours in a vacuum furnace, followed by an argon purge to 25 C.

K{alpha} X-ray emission spectra from highly charged Fe ions have been theoretically predicted using a detailed and systematic spectral model. Account has been taken of the fundamental atomic radiative-emission processes associated with inner-shell electron collisional excitation and ionization, as well as dielectronic recombination. Particular emphasis has been directed at extreme non-equilibrium or transient-ionization conditions, which can occur in astrophysical and tokamak plasmas. Good agreement has been found in comparisons with spectral observations on the EBIT-II electron beam ion trap at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We have identified spectral features that can serve as diagnostics of the electron density, the line-formation mechanism, and the charge-state distribution.

This paper introduces two efficient algorithms that compute the Contour Tree of a 3D scalar field F and its augmented version with the Betti numbers of each isosurface. The Contour Tree is a fundamental data structure in scientific visualization that is used to preprocess the domain mesh to allow optimal computation of isosurfaces with minimal overhead storage. The Contour Tree can also be used to build user interfaces reporting the complete topological characterization of a scalar field, as shown in Figure 1. Data exploration time is reduced since the user understands the evolution of level set components with changing isovalue. The Augmented Contour Tree provides even more accurate information segmenting the range space of the scalar field in portion of invariant topology. The exploration time for a single isosurface is also improved since its genus is known in advance. Our first new algorithm augments any given Contour Tree with the Betti numbers of all possible corresponding isocontours in linear time with the size of the tree. Moreover we show how to extend the scheme introduced in [3] with the Betti number computation without increasing its complexity. Thus, we improve on the time complexity from our previous approach [10] from O(m …

Sorption of cesium and strontium on kaolinite powders was investigated as a means to minimize the emissions of these metals during certain high temperature processes currently being developed to isolate and dispose of radiological and mixed wastes. In this work, non-radioactive aqueous cesium acetate or strontium acetate was atomized down the center of a natural gas flame supported on a variable-swirl burner in a refractory-lined laboratory-scale combustion facility. Kaolinite powder was injected at a post-flame location in the combustor. Cesium readily vaporizes in the high temperature regions of the combustor, but was reactively scavenged onto dispersed kaolinite. Global sorption mechanisms of cesium vapor on kaolinite were quantified, and are related to those available in the literature for sodium and lead. Both metal adsorption and substrate deactivation steps are important, and so there is an optimum temperature, between 1400 and 1500 K, at which maximum sorption occurs. The presence of chlorine inhibits cesium sorption. In contrast to cesium, and in the absence of chlorine, strontium was only partially vaporized and was, therefore, only partially scavengeable. The strontium data did not allow quantification of global kinetic mechanisms of interaction, although equilibrium arguments provided insight into the effects of chlorine on strontium sorption. …

A design requirement probability of 0.01 or less in a 4-hour period ensures that the nuclear heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system in the primary confinement areas of the Dry Transfer Facilities (DTFs) and Fuel Handling Facility (FHF) is working during a Category 1 drop event involving commercial spent nuclear fuel (CSNF) assemblies (BSC 2004a , Section 5.1.1.48). This corresponds to an hourly HVAC failure rate of 2.5E-3 per hour or less, which is contributed to by two dominant causes: equipment failure and loss of electrical power. Meeting this minimum threshold ensures that a Category 1 initiating event followed by the failure of HVAC is a Category 2 event sequence. The two causes for the loss of electrical power include the loss of offsite power and the loss of onsite power distribution. Thus, in order to meet the threshold requirement aforementioned, the failure rate of mechanical equipment, loss of offsite power, and loss of onsite power distribution must be less than or equal to 2.5E-3 per hour for the nuclear HVAC system in the primary confinement areas of the DTFs and FHF. The loss of offsite power occurs at a frequency of 1.1E-5 per hour (BSC 2004a, Section 5.1.1.48). The …

The diffusivity in alloys at low temperatures is modeled for composition-modulated structures using Khachaturyan's microscopic theory of diffusion. The theory is now applied to assess a two-phase multilayer system.

The Contour Tree of a scalar field is the graph obtained by contracting all the connected components of the level sets of the field into points. This is a powerful abstraction for representing the structure of the field with explicit description of the topological changes of its level sets. It has proven effective as a data-structure for fast extraction of isosurfaces and its application has been advocated as a user interface component guiding interactive data exploration sessions. We propose a new metaphor for visualizing the Contour Tree borrowed from the classical design of a mechanical orrery reproducing a hierarchy of orbits of the planets around the sun or moons around a planet. In the toporrery the hierarchy of stars, planets and moons is replaced with a hierarchy of maxima, minima and saddles that can be interactively filtered, both uniformly and adaptively, by importance with respect to a given metric.

In recent years subdivision methods have been successfully applied to the multi-resolution representation and compression of surface meshes. Unfortunately their use in the volumetric case has remained impractical because of the use of tensor-product generalizations that induce an excessive growth of the mesh size before sufficient number is preformed. This technical sketch presents a new subdivision technique that refines volumetric (and higher-dimensional) meshes at the same rate of surface meshes. The scheme builds adaptive refinements of a mesh without using special decompositions of the cells connecting different levels of resolution. Lower dimensional ''sharp'' features are also handled directly in a natural way. The averaging rules allow to reproduce the same smoothness of the two best known previous tensor product refinement methods.

Molecular surface computations are often necessary in order to perform synthetic drug design. A critical step in this process is the computation and update of an exact boundary representation for the molecular surface (e.g. the Lee-Richards surface). In this paper they introduce efficient techniques for computing a molecular surface boundary representation as a set of NURBS (non-uniform rational B-splines) patches. This representation introduces for molecules the same geometric data structure used in the solid modeling community and enables immediate access to a wide range of modeling operations and techniques. Furthermore, this allows the use of any general solid modeling or visualization system as a molecular modeling interface. However, using such a representation in a molecular modeling environment raises several efficiency and update constraints, especially in a dynamic setting. For example, changes in the probe radius result in both geometric and topological changes to the set of patches. The techniques provide the option of trading accuracy of the representation for the efficiency of the computation, while still tracking the changes in the set of patches. In particular, they discuss two main classes of dynamic updates: one that keeps the topology of the molecular configuration fixed, and a more complicated case where …

The diffusivity (D) in alloy systems at low temperatures is determined using composition-modulated structures. An artificial concentration wave is produced by alternating a deposition of the alloy elements. A quantification of the interdiffusivity coefficient is determined by analyzing the decay of the composition fluctuation, that is, the static concentration wave using Khachaturyan's microscopic theory of diffusion. As it's customary to assume that there is a linear relationship between ln D and T over a wide range of temperature (T), the bulk diffusion coefficient represents the long wavelength approximation of the interdiffusivity. The dependency of interdiffusivity on structure is found in general expressions that account for the specific periodicity and growth orientation of the multilayer structure. The kinetics are quantified by analysis of changes in the composition fluctuation with time at temperature through x-ray scattering measurements. In addition to the examination of single-phase crystalline systems as Cu-Ni and Cr-Ti, the theory is now developed to assess diffusion in two-phase layered systems. Specifically, as in Ni-(Cr,Mo) where a face-centered cubic/body centered cubic combination form a pseudo-epitaxial multilayer.

Reliable quantitative prediction of contaminant transport in subsurface environments is critical to evaluating the risks associated with radionuclide migration. As part of the Underground Test Area (UGTA) program, radionuclide transport away from selected underground nuclear tests conducted in the saturated zone at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) is being examined. In the near-field environment, reactive transport simulations must account for changes in water chemistry and mineralogy as a function of time and their effect on radionuclide migration. Unlike the Kd approach, surface complexation reactions, in conjunction with ion exchange and precipitation, can be used to describe radionuclide reactive transport as a function of changing environmental conditions. They provide a more robust basis for describing radionuclide retardation in geochemically dynamic environments. In a companion report (Zavarin and Bruton, 2004), a database of radionuclide surface complexation reactions for calcite and iron oxide minerals was developed. In this report, a second set of reactions is developed: surface complexation (SC) and ion exchange (IE) to aluminosilicate minerals. The most simplified surface complexation model, the one-site non-electrostatic model (NEM), and the Vanselow IE model were used to fit a large number of published sorption data and a reaction constant database was developed. Surface complexation of …

Multiresolution methods are a common technique used for dealing with large-scale data and representing it at multiple levels of detail. The authors present a multiresolution hierarchy construction based on n{radical}2 subdivision, which has all the advantages of a regular data organization scheme while reducing the drawback of coarse granularity. The n{radical}2-subdivision scheme only doubles the number of vertices in each subdivision step regardless of dimension n. They describe the construction of 2D, 3D, and 4D hierarchies representing surfaces, volume data, and time-varying volume data, respectively. The 4D approach supports spatial and temporal scalability. For high-quality data approximation on each level of detail, they use downsampling filters based on n-variate B-spline wavelets. They present a B-spline wavelet lifting scheme for n{radical}2-subdivision steps to obtain small or narrow filters. Narrow filters support adaptive refinement and out-of-core data exploration techniques.

For many decades optical interferometers have been used to measure the electron density of plasmas. During the last ten years X-ray lasers in the wavelength range 14 to 47 nm have enabled researchers to use interferometers to probe even higher density plasmas. The data analysis assumes that the index of refraction is due only to the free electrons, which makes the index of refraction less than one and the electron density proportional to the number of fringe shifts. Recent experiments in Al plasmas observed plasmas with an index of refraction greater than one and made us question the validity of the usual formula for calculating the index of refraction. Recent calculations showed how the anomalous dispersion from the bound electrons can dominate the index of refraction in many types of plasma and make the index greater than one or enhance the index such that one would greatly overestimate the electron density of the plasma using interferometers. In this work we calculate the index of refraction of C, Al, Ti, and Pd plasmas for photon energies from 0 to 100 eV (12.4 nm) using a new average-atom code. The results show large variations from the free electron approximation under many different …

In this first year of the program we have focused on the selection of rare-earth dopants for luminescent sensing in thermal barrier coating materials, the effect of dopant concentration on several of the luminescence characteristics and initial fabrication of one type of embedded sensor, the ''red-line'' sensor. We have initially focused on erbium as the lanthanide dopant for luminescence doping of yttria-stabilized zirconia and europium as the lanthanide for luminescence doping of gadolinium zirconate. The latter exhibits a temperature-dependent luminescence lifetime up to at least 1100 C. A buried layer, ''red-line'' sensor in an electron-beam deposited yttria-stabilized zirconia coating with erbium has been demonstrated and exhibits a temperature-dependent luminescence lifetime up to at least 400 C.

Given a Morse function f over a 2-manifold with or without boundary, the Reeb graph is obtained by contracting the connected components of the level sets to points. We prove tight upper and lower bounds on the number of loops in the Reeb graph that depend on the genus, the number of boundary components, and whether or not the 2-manifold is orientable. We also give an algorithm that constructs the Reeb graph in time O(n log n), where n is the number of edges in the triangulation used to represent the 2-manifold and the Morse function.

We introduce local and global comparison measures for a collection of k {<=} d real-valued smooth functions on a common d-dimensional Riemannian manifold. For k = d = 2 we relate the measures to the set of critical points of one function restricted to the level sets of the other. The definition of the measures extends to piecewise linear functions for which they are easy to compute. The computation of the measures forms the centerpiece of a software tool which we use to study scientific datasets.