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In this paper, we present a simple annealing procedure (which we refer to as ''flash-annealing'' because of short duration) that results in the formation of an ultralow friction surface film on vanadium diboride (VB{sub 2}) surfaces. This annealing is done in a box furnace at 800 C for a period of 5 min. During annealing, the exposed surface of the VB{sub 2} undergoes oxidation and forms a layer of boron oxide (B{sub 2}O{sub 3}). In open air, the B{sub 2}O{sub 3} layer reacts spontaneously with moisture and forms a boric acid (H{sub 3}BO{sub 3}) film. The friction coefficient of a 440C steel pin against this H{sub 3}BO{sub 3} film is {approx}0.05, compared to 0.8 against the as-received VB{sub 2}. Based on Raman spectroscopy and electron microscopy studies, we elucidate the ultralow friction mechanism of the flash-annealed VB{sub 2} surfaces.

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Work continued on the study of copolymers for the enhanced recovery of petroleum. This report describes dilute polymer solution extensional flow in porous media.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) established the Tank Waste Remediation System (TWRS) Program to manage and immobilize for disposal the waste contained in underground storage tanks at the Hanford Site. The TWRS program was established as a DOE major system acquisition under an approved Justification of Mission Need (JMN) dated January 19, 1993. The JMN states that the purpose of the TWRS Program is to: Resolve the tank waste safety issues; Integrate the waste disposal mission with the ongoing waste management mission; Assess the technical bases for tank waste management and disposal; Determine the technology available and develop any needed technologies; and Establish a dedicated organization and provide the resources to meet the technical challenge. The principal objectives of management of existing and future tank wastes is to cost-effectively minimize the environmental, safety, and health risks associated with stored wastes, with reduction of safety risks given the highest priority. The potentials must be minimized for release of tank wastes to the air and to the ground (and subsequently to the groundwater) and for exposure of the operating personnel to tank wastes.

Progress has clearly been made on all of the goals set forth in the original proposal. Although the monoclonal antibodies raised against FNR turned out no to be useful for mapping the FNR/ferredoxin or FNR/NADP+ interaction domains, good progress has been made on mapping the FNR/ferredoxin interaction domains by an alternative technique, differential chemical modification. Furthermore, the techniques developed for differential chemical modifications of these two proteins - taurine modification of aspartate and glutamate residues and biotin modification of lysine residues - should be useful for mapping the interaction domains of many proteins that associate through electrostatic interactions. Finally, progress has also been made with respect to another ferredoxin-dependent enzyme involved in the earliest steps of plant nitrogen metabolism - nitrite reductase. Questions concerning the subunit composition and heme content of the enzyme have been resolved and evidence demonstrating the involvement of lysine and arginine residues in binding ferredoxin has been obtained for the first time.

Structural dynamic testing is concerned with the estimation of system properties, including frequency response functions and modal characteristics. These properties are derived from tests on the structure of interest, during which excitations and responses are measured and Fourier techniques are used to reduce the data. The inputs used in a test are frequently random, and they excite random responses in the structure of interest When these random inputs and responses are analyzed they yield estimates of system properties that are random variable and random process realizations. Of course, such estimates of system properties vary randomly from one test to another, but even when deterministic inputs are used to excite a structure, the estimated properties vary from test to test. When test excitations and responses are normally distributed, classical techniques permit us to statistically analyze inputs, responses, and some system parameters. However, when the input excitations are non-normal, the system is nonlinear, and/or the property of interest is anything but the simplest, the classical analyses break down. The bootstrap is a technique for the statistical analysis of data that are not necessarily normally distributed. It can be used to statistically analyze any measure of input excitation or response, or any system …

The research described in this final report focused on the influence of stress agents on protein synthesis in crop plants (primarily soybean). Investigations into the `heat shock` (HS) stress mediated changes in transcriptional and translocational regulation of protein synthesis coupled with studies on anaerobic water deficit and other stress mediated alterations in protein synthesis in plants provided the basis of the research. Understanding of the HS gene expression and function(s) of the HSPs may clarify regulatory mechanisms operative in development. Since the reproductive systems of plants if often very temperature sensitive, it may be that the system could be manipulated to provide greater thermotolerance.

This safety assessment addresses each of the elements required for the proposed action to remove a slurry distributor and to install, operate, and remove a mixing pump in Tank 241-SY-101,which is located within the Hanford Site, Richland, Washington.The proposed action is required as part of an ongoing evaluation of various mitigation concepts developed to eliminate episodic gas releases that result in hydrogen concentrations in the tank dome space that exceed the lower flammability limit.

This report describes the progress made during the first Quarter of a two year project to demonstrate that the air pollution from a traveling grate stoker being used to heat water at a central heating plant in Krakow Poland can be reduced significantly by replacing the unwashed, unsized coal now being used with a mechanically cleaned, double sized stoker fuel and by optimizing the operating parameters of the stoker. It is anticipated that these improvements will prove to be cost effective and hence be adopted in the other central heating plants in Krakow and indeed throughout Eastern European cities where coal is the primary source of heating fuel. EFH Coal Company has formed a partnership with two Polish institutions -- MPEC a central heating company in Krakow and Naftokrak-Naftobudowa, preparation plant designers and fabricators, for this effort. An evaluation of the washability characteristics of five samples of two coals (Piast and Janina) showed that {open_quotes}compliance-quality{close_quotes} stoker coals could be produced which contained less than 640 g of SO{sub 2}/KJ (1.5 lbs SO{sub 2}/MMBtu) at acceptable plant yields by washing in heavy media cyclones. A search for long-term sources of raw coal to feed the proposed new 300 tph stoker coal …

Fifty nanosecond pulses of visible light have been used to produce hard, hydrogen-free diamond-like-carbon (DLC) films at irradiances between 5 x 10{sup 8} and 5 x 10{sup 10} W/cm{sup 2} The films were characterized by a number of techniques including: Raman spectroscopy, Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EELS), atomic force microscopy, and spectroscopic ellipsometry. The cost for manufacturing DLC with high average power, high-pulse repetition frequency, visible light is low enough to compete with other diamond thin film production methods.

The numerical simulation of chemically reacting flows is a topic that has attracted a great deal of current research. At the heart of numerical reactive flow simulations are large sets of coupled, nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). Due to the stiffness that is usually present, explicit time differencing schemes are not used despite their inherent simplicity and efficiency on parallel and vector machines, since these schemes require prohibitively small numerical stepsizes. Implicit time differencing schemes, although possessing good stability characteristics, introduce a great deal of computational overhead necessary to solve the simultaneous algebraic system at each timestep. This paper proposes an algorithm based on a preconditioned time differencing scheme. The algorithm is explicit and permits a large stable time step. A study of the algorithm's performance on a parallel architecture is presented.

Development of the computer models for slurry carbonization have begun and were based upon the collected data (mass balances, yield, temperatures, and pressures) from the previous pilot plant campaigns. All computer models are being developed with Aspen`s SpeedUp{trademark} software. The primary flow sheet with major alternatives has been developed and the majority of equipment descriptions and models, cost algorithms, and baseline parameters have been input to SpeedUp. The remaining modeling parameters will be input in the next reporting period and the initial flow sheet skeleton and model will be completed. The computer models will focus on optimizing capital and operating costs, and evaluating alternative waste water recycling technologies. The weaknesses of the previous pilot plant data and the data required for design of the commercial demonstration facility were identified. The identified weaknesses of the existing data included mass balance precision and accuracy, reactor residence time control (i.e. reactor level control), reactor temperature variations, and air entrainment in the feed RDF slurry. To improve mass balance precision and accuracy, an alternative carbonization gas flow meter will be designed and installed on the pilot plant. EnerTech`s carbonization gas flow meter design has been submitted to the EERC for final approval. In addition, …

The objective of this project is to develop environmentally sound and cost-effective remediation techniques for crude oil contaminated soils. By providing a guidance manual to oil and gas operators, the Ohio Division of Oil and Gas regulatory authority hopes to reduce remediation costs while improving voluntary compliance with soil clean-up requirements. This shall be accomplished by conducting a series of field tests to define the optimum range for nutrient and organic enhancement to biologically remediate soils contaminated with brines and crude oil having a wide rage of viscosity.

Salary information was collected for July 1996 for personnel working as nuclear engineers and health physicists. The salary information includes personnel at the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. levels with zero, one, three, four to seven, and eight to ten years of professional work experience. Information is provided for utilities and non-utilities. Non-utilities include private sector organizations and U.S. Department of Energy contractor-operated facilities. Government agencies, the military, academic organizations, and medical facilities are excluded. In previous years the salary data have been collected for October. In 1996, the data were collected for July; thus, some caution must be exercised in making annual salary trend comparisons.

Elemental sulfur recovery from SO{sub 2}-containing gas stream is highly attractive as it produces a salable product and no waste to dispose of. However, commercially available schemes are complex and involve multi-stage reactors, such as, most notably in the Resox (reduction of SO{sub 2} with coke) and Claus plant (reaction of SO{sub 2} with H{sub 2}S over catalyst). This project will investigate a cerium oxide catalyst for the single stage selective reduction of SO{sub 2} to elemental sulfur by a reductant, such as carbon monoxide. Cerium oxide has been identified in recent work at MIT as a superior catalyst for SO{sub 2} reduction by CO to elemental sulfur because its high activity and high selectivity to sulfur over COS over a wide temperature range(400-650 {degrees}C). The detailed kinetic and parametric studies of SO{sub 2} reduction planned in this work over various CeO{sub 2}-formulations will provide the necessary basis for development of a very simplified process, namely that of a single-stage elemental sulfur recovery scheme from variable concentration gas streams. The potential cost- and energy-efficiency benefits from this approach can not be overstated. A first apparent application is treatment of a regenerator off-gases in power plants using regenerative flue gas desulfurization. …

The carbonate fuel cell promises highly efficient, cost-effective, environmentally superior power generation from pipeline natural gas, coal gas, biogas, and other gaseous and liquid fuels. ERC has been engaged in the development of this unique technology since the late 1970s, primarily focusing on the development of the Direct Fuel Cell (DFC) technology [1-6] pioneered by ERC. The DFC design incorporates the unique internal reforming feature which allows utilization of a hydrocarbon fuel directly in the fuel cell without requiring any external reforming reactor and associated heat exchange equipment. This approach provides upgrading of waste heat to chemical energy; thereby, it contributing to higher overall efficiency for conversion of fuel energy to electricity with low levels of environmental emissions. Among the internal reforming options, ERC has selected the Indirect Internal Reforming (IIR) - Direct Internal Reforming (DIR) combination as its baseline design. ERC plans to offer commercial DFC power plants in various sizes, initially focusing on the MW-scale units. The plan is to offer standardized, packaged MW-scale DFC power plants operating on natural gas or other hydrocarbon-containing fuels for commercial sale by the end of the decade. These power plants, which can be shop-fabricated and sited near the user, are ideally …

For years, contamination has been known to degrade the performance of optics and to sometimes initiate laser-induced damage to initiate. This study has W to quantify these effects for fused silica windows used at 355 mm Contamination particles (Al, Cu, TiO{sub 2} and ZrO{sub 2}) were artificially deposited onto the surface and damage tests were conducted with a 3 ns NdYAG laser. The damage morphology was characterized by Nomarski optical microscopy. The results showed that the damage morphology for input and output surface contamination is different. For input surface contamination, both input and output surfaces can damage. In particular, the particle can induce pitting or drilling of the surface where the beam exits. Such damage usually grows catastrophically. Output surface contamination is usually ablated away on the shot but can also induce catastrophic damage. Plasmas are observed during illumination and seem to play an important role in the damage mechanism. The relationship between fluence and contamination size for which catastrophic damage occurred was plotted for different contamination materials. The results show that particles even as small as 10 {micro}m can substantially decrease the damage threshold of the window and that metallic particles on the input surface have a more negative …

This paper describes a fiber-optic pH sensor based upon sol-gel encapsulation of a self-referencing dye, seminaphthorhodamine-1 carboxylate (SNARF-1C). The simple sol-gel fabrication procedure and low coating leachability are ideal for encapsulation and immobilization of dye molecules onto the end of an optical fiber. A miniature bench-top fluorimeter system was developed for use with the optical fiber to obtain pH measurements. Linear and reproducible responses were obtained in human blood in the pH range 6.8 to 8.0, which encompasses the clinically-relevant range. Therefore, this sensor can be considered for in vivo use.

The following note investigates scaling the 11.4-GHz TBNLC design of a relativistic klystron two-beam accelerator for a 30-GHz, 50-bunch accelerator design. We will refer to this point design as the RK-CLIC. We do not expect that the design will be optimal, but offer it as a starting point for discussions. In this memo, we begin with a general description of the RK-CLIC and drive beam dynamics, discuss required changes to major components, estimate the efficiency of wall plug to microwave power, and estimate costs. To be of interest the design must be such that it: (1) Can be installed at modest cost, (2) Operate with high wall plug to reconversion efficiency, and (3) Have acceptable drive beam dynamics.

This document summarizes the final results of push mode core samples 131, 133, and 136 for tank 241-U-105.

We have presented a fast linear time algorithm for recognizing tandem repeats. Our algorithm is a one pass algorithm. No information about the periodicity of tandem repeats is needed. The use of the indices calculated from non-continuous and overlapping {kappa}-tuples allow tandem repeats with insertions and deletions to be recognized.