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Enhanced Training for Cyber Situational Awareness in Red versus Blue Team Exercises

Forsythe, James C.; Carbajal, Armida J.; Adams, Susan S.; Silva, Austin R.; Nauer, Kevin; Anderson, Benjamin

This report summarizes research conducted through the Sandia National Laboratories Enhanced Training for Cyber Situational Awareness in Red Versus Blue Team Exercises Laboratory Directed Research and Development project. The objective of this project was to advance scientific understanding concerning how to best structure training for cyber defenders. Two modes of training were considered. The baseline training condition (Tool-Based training) was based on current practices where classroom instruction focuses on the functions of a software tool with various exercises in which students apply those functions. In the second training condition (Narrative-Based training), classroom instruction addressed software functions, but in the context of adversary tactics and techniques. It was hypothesized that students receiving narrative-based training would gain a deeper conceptual understanding of the software tools and this would be reflected in better performance within a red versus blue team exercise.

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Structures of uranyl peroxide hydrates: A first-principles study of studtite and metastudtite

Dalton Transactions

Weck, Philippe F.; Kim, Eunja; Jove-Colon, Carlos F.; Sassani, David C.

The structures of the only known minerals containing peroxide, namely studtite [(UO 2)O 2(H 2O) 4] and metastudtite [(UO 2)O 2(H 2O) 2], have been investigated using density functional theory. The structure of metastudtite crystallizing in the orthorhombic space group Pnma (Z = 4) is reported for the first time at the atomic level and the computed lattice parameters, a = 8.45, b = 8.72, c = 6.75 Å, demonstrate that the unit cell of metastudtite is larger than previously reported dimensions (Z = 2) derived from experimental X-ray powder diffraction data. © 2012 The Royal Society of Chemistry.

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Thermally-activated pentanol delivery from precursor poly(p- phenylenevinylene)s for MEMS lubrication

Macromolecular Rapid Communications

Johnson, Ross S.; Washburn, Cody; Staton, Alan W.; Moorman, Matthew W.; Manginell, Ronald; Dugger, Michael T.; Dirk, Shawn M.

The synthesis of two new polyphenylene vinylene (PPV) precursor polymers which can be thermally induced to eliminate pentanol is presented. Pentanol has recently been discovered to be a very useful lubricant in MicroElectroMechanical Systems. The utilization of the elimination reaction of precursor polymers to PPV as a small molecule delivery platform has, to the best of our knowledge, not been previously reported. The elimination reactions were examined using thermal gravimetric analysis, gas chromatography, and UV-Vis spectroscopy. Using PPV precursors allows for (1) a high loading of lubricant (one molecule per monomeric unit), (2) a platform that requires relatively high temperatures (>145 °C) to eliminate the lubricant, and (3) a non-volatile, mechanically and chemically stable by-product of the elimination reaction (PPV). The "on-demand" delivery of a vapor-phase lubricant to MicroElectoMechanical Systems (MEMS) will allow for scheduled or as-needed lubrication of the moving components, improving the performance, reliability, and lifespan of the devices. A delivery system utilizing a newly designed microhotplate along with two new precursor poly(p-phenylene vinylene) polymers that thermally eliminate a pentanol lubricant is described. Copyright © 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

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Electronic neutron sources for compensated porosity well logging

Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment

Chen, A.X.; Antolak, Arlyn J.; Leung, K.N.

The viability of replacing Americium-Beryllium (Am-Be) radiological neutron sources in compensated porosity nuclear well logging tools with D-T or D-D accelerator-driven neutron sources is explored. The analysis consisted of developing a model for a typical well-logging borehole configuration and computing the helium-3 detector response to varying formation porosities using three different neutron sources (Am-Be, D-D, and D-T). The results indicate that, when normalized to the same source intensity, the use of a D-D neutron source has greater sensitivity for measuring the formation porosity than either an Am-Be or D-T source. The results of the study provide operational requirements that enable compensated porosity well logging with a compact, low power D-D neutron generator, which the current state-of-the-art indicates is technically achievable. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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Hydration structures of U(III) and U(IV) ions from ab initio molecular dynamics simulations

Journal of Chemical Physics

Leung, Kevin; Nenoff, Tina M.

We apply DFTU-based ab initio molecular dynamics simulations to study the hydration structures of U(III) and U(IV) ions, pertinent to redox reactions associated with uranium salts in aqueous media. U(III) is predicted to be coordinated to 8 water molecules, while U(IV) has a hydration number between 7 and 8. At least one of the innershell water molecules of the hydrated U(IV) complex becomes spontaneously deprotonated. As a result, the U(IV)-O pair correlation function exhibits a satellite peak at 2.15 Å associated with the shorter U(IV)-(OH -) bond. This feature is not accounted for in analysis of extended x-ray absorption fine structure and x-ray adsorption near edge structure measurements, which yield higher estimates of U(IV) hydration numbers. This suggests that it may be useful to include the effect of possible hydrolysis in future interpretation of experiments, especially when the experimental pH is close to the reported hydrolysis equilibrium constant value. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.

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Deformation and fracture of oxides fabricated on 304L stainless steel via pulsed laser irradiation

Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings

Lawrence, Samantha K.; Stauffer, Douglas D.; Major, Ryan C.; Adams, David P.; Gerberich, William W.; Bahr, David F.; Moody, Neville R.

Localized heating of metals and alloys using a focused laser beam in ambient atmosphere produces dielectric oxide layers that have characteristic optical appearances including different colors. Nanoindentation probed the deformation and fracture of laser-fabricated oxides on 304L stainless steel. Conductive nanoindentation measured electrical contact resistance (ECR) of the same colored oxides indicating a correlation between laser exposure, conductance during loading, current-voltage (I-V) behavior at constant load, and indentation response. Microscopy and X-ray diffraction examined the microstructure and chemical composition of the oxides. Combining techniques provides a unique approach for correlating mechanical behavior and the resulting performance of the films in conditions that cause wear. © 2012 Materials Research Society.

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Security games with limited surveillance: An initial report

AAAI Spring Symposium - Technical Report

An, Bo; Kempe, David; Kiekintveld, Christopher; Shieh, Eric; Singh, Satinder; Tambe, Milind; Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy

Stackelberg games have been used in several deployed applications of game theory to make recommendations for allocating limited resources for protecting critical infrastructure. The resource allocation strategies are randomized to prevent a strategic attacker from using surveillance to learn and exploit patterns in the allocation. An important limitation of previous work on security games is that it typically assumes that attackers have perfect surveillance capabilities, and can learn the exact strategy of the defender. We introduce a new model that explicitly models the process of an attacker observing a sequence of resource allocation decisions and updating his beliefs about the defender's strategy. For this model we present computational techniques for updating the attacker's beliefs and computing optimal strategies for both the attacker and defender, given a specific number of observations. We provide multiple formulations for computing the defender's optimal strategy, including non-convex programming and a convex approximation. We also present an approximate method for computing the optimal length of time for the attacker to observe the defender's strategy before attacking. Finally, we present experimental results comparing the efficiency and runtime of our methods. Copyright © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.

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Adversarial patrolling games

AAAI Spring Symposium - Technical Report

Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy; An, Bo; Tambe, Milind

Defender-Attacker Stackelberg games are the foundations of tools deployed for computing optimal patrolling strategies in adversarial domains such as the United states Federal Air Marshals Service and the United States Coast Guard, among others. In Stackelberg game models of these systems the attacker knows only the probability that each target is covered by the defender, but is oblivious to the detailed timing of the coverage schedule. In many real-world situations, however, the attacker can observe the current location of the defender and can exploit this knowledge to reason about the defender's future moves. We study Stackelberg security games in which the defender sequentially moves between targets, with moves constrained by an exogenously specified graph, while the attacker can observe the defender's current location and his (stochastic) policy concerning future moves. We offer five contributions: (1) We model this adversarial patrolling game (APG) as a stochastic game with special structure and present several alternative formulations that leverage the general nonlinear programming (NLP) approach for computing equilibria in zero-sum stochastic games. We show that our formulations yield significantly better solutions than previous approaches. (2) We extend the NLP formulation for APG allow for attacks that may take multiple time steps to unfold. (3) We provide an approximate MILP formulation that uses discrete defender move probabilities. (4) We experimentally demonstrate the efficacy of an NLP-based approach, and systematically study the impact of network topology on the results. (5) We extend our model to allow the defender to construct the graph constraining his moves, at some cost, and offer novel algorithms for this setting, finding that a MILP approximation is much more effective than the exact NLP in this setting. Copyright © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.

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Cationic cure kinetics of a polyoxometalate loaded epoxy nanocomposite

Journal of Polymer Science Part A: Polymer Chemistry

Anderson, Benjamin J.

The reaction cure kinetics of a novel polyoxometalate (POM) loaded epoxy nanocomposite is described. The POM is dispersed in the epoxy resin up to volume fractions of 0.1. Differential scanning calorimetry measurements show the cure of the epoxy resin to be sensitive to the POM loading. A kinetics study of the cure exotherm confirms that POM acts as a catalyst promoting cationic homopolymerization of the epoxy resin. The cure reaction is shown to propagate through two cure regimes. A fast cure at short time is shown to be propagation by the activated chain end (ACE) mechanism. A slow cure at long time is shown to be propagation by the activated monomer (AM) mechanism. The activation energies for the fast and slow cure regimes agree well with other epoxy based systems that have been confirmed to propagate by the ACE and AM mechanisms.

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Effects of preferential transport in turbulent bluff-body-stabilized lean premixed CH 4/air flames

Combustion and Flame

Barlow, Robert S.; Dunn, Matthew J.; Sweeney, Mark S.; Hochgreb, Simone

Preferential species diffusion is known to have important effects on local flame structure in turbulent premixed flames, and differential diffusion of heat and mass can have significant effects on both local flame structure and global flame parameters, such as turbulent flame speed. However, models for turbulent premixed combustion normally assume that atomic mass fractions are conserved from reactants to fully burnt products. Experiments reported here indicate that this basic assumption may be incorrect for an important class of turbulent flames. Measurements of major species and temperature in the near field of turbulent, bluff-body stabilized, lean premixed methane-air flames (Le=0.98) reveal significant departures from expected conditional mean compositional structure in the combustion products as well as within the flame. Net increases exceeding 10% in the equivalence ratio and the carbon-to-hydrogen atom ratio are observed across the turbulent flame brush. Corresponding measurements across an unstrained laminar flame at similar equivalence ratio are in close agreement with calculations performed using Chemkin with the GRI 3.0 mechanism and multi-component transport, confirming accuracy of experimental techniques. Results suggest that the large effects observed in the turbulent bluff-body burner are cause by preferential transport of H 2 and H 2O through the preheat zone ahead of CO 2 and CO, followed by convective transport downstream and away from the local flame brush. This preferential transport effect increases with increasing velocity of reactants past the bluff body and is apparently amplified by the presence of a strong recirculation zone where excess CO 2 is accumulated. © 2011 The Combustion Institute.

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Advancements in hybrid dynamic models combining experimental and finite element substructures

Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing

Mayes, Randall L.; Ross, M.R.

This paper presents very practical enhancements to the transmission simulator method (TSM); also known as the Modal Constraints for Fixtures and Subsystems (MCFS). The enhancements allow this method to be implemented directly in finite element software, instead of having to extract the reduced finite element model from its software and implement the substructure coupling in another code. The transmission simulator method is useful for coupling substructures where one substructure is derived experimentally and the other is generated from a finite element model. This approach uses a flexible fixture in the experimental substructure to improve the modal basis of the substructure; thus, providing a higher quality substructure. The flexible fixture substructure needs to be removed (decoupled) from the experimental substructure to obtain the true system characteristics. A modified method for this removal and coupling of the experimental and analytical substructures is provided. An additional improvement guarantees that the experimental substructure matrices are positive definite, a requirement for many finite element codes. Guidelines for designing robust transmission simulator hardware are provided. The concepts are applied to two sample cases. The first case consists of a cylinder connected by eight bolts to a plate with a beam. The second example is an outer shell structure that is connected through a bolted flange to a complex internal payload structure. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Design and fabrication of a high-temperature helium regenerator

Fusion Engineering and Design

Youchison, D.L.; Garde, J.

Refractory metallic foams can increase heat transfer efficiency in gas-to-gas and liquid metal-to-gas heat exchangers by providing an extended surface area for better convection, i.e. conduction into the foam ligaments providing a "fin-effect," and by disruption of the thermal boundary layer near the hot wall and ligaments by turbulence promotion. In this article, we describe the design of a high-temperature refractory regenerator (closed-loop recuperator) using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of actual foam geometries obtained through computerized micro-tomography. The article outlines the design procedure from geometry import through meshing and thermo-mechanical analysis and discusses the challenges of fabrication using pure molybdenum and TZM. The foam core regenerator is more easily fabricated, less expensive and performs better than refractory flat plate-type heat exchangers. The regenerator can operate with a maximum hot leg inlet temperature of 900 °C and transfer 180 kW to the cold leg using 100 g/s helium at 4 MPa. Future high heat flux experiments on helium-cooled plasma facing components will utilize the high temperature and high pressure capabilities of this unique regenerator. Similar components will be required to adapt fusion power reactors to high-efficiency Brayton power conversion systems and enable operation of advanced divertor and blanket systems. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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Preprocessing strategies to improve MCR analyses of hyperspectral images

Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems

Jones, Howland D.T.; Sinclair, Michael B.; Melgaard, David K.; Collins, Aaron M.; Timlin, Jerilyn A.

Multivariate curve resolution (MCR) is a useful and important analysis tool for extracting quantitative information from hyperspectral image data. However, in the case of hyperspectral fluorescence microscope images acquired with CCD-type technologies, cosmic spikes and the presence of detector artifacts in the spectral data can make the extraction of the pure-component spectra and their relative concentrations challenging when applying MCR to the images. In this paper, we present new generalized and automated approaches for preprocessing spectral image data to improve the robustness of the MCR analysis of spectral images. These novel preprocessing steps remove cosmic spikes, correct for the presence of detector offsets and structured noise as well as select spectral and spatial regions to reduce the detrimental effects of detector noise. These preprocessing and MCR analysis techniques incorporate the use of an optical filter to prevent light from impinging on a small number of spectral pixels in the CCD detector. This dark spectral region can be incorporated into any spectral imaging system to enhance modeling of detector offset and structured noise components as well as the automated selection of spatial regions to restrict the analysis to only those regions containing viable spectral information. The success of these automated preprocessing methods combined with new MCR modeling approaches are demonstrated with realistically simulated data derived from spectral images of macrophage cells with green fluorescence protein (GFP). Further, we demonstrate using spectral images from the green alga, Chlorella, approaches for the analyses when fluorescent species with widely different relative spectral intensities are present in the image. We believe that the preprocessing and MCR approaches introduced in this paper can be generalized to several other hyperspectral image technologies and can improve the success of automated MCR analyses with little or no a priori information required about the spectral components present in the samples. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

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On sintering stress in complex powder compacts

Journal of the American Ceramic Society

Cardona, Cristina G.; Tikare, Veena; Patterson, Burton R.; Olevsky, Eugene

Microstructural evolution during sintering can be simulated using the Potts kinetic Monte Carlo model. This model simulates detailed evolution of the powder particles, pore shapes, neck growth, and other microstructural features with sufficient resolution over a sufficiently large compact so that interfacial energies and curvatures of a statistically representative sample of surfaces in a complex compact can be obtained from the simulations. In this work, we present a technique based on measuring curvature of surfaces to obtain sintering stress of sintering powder compacts with arbitrarily complex geometries of powder size and powder shape distributions. The method is applied to three distinct powder compacts with very different sintering behavior to obtain sintering stress for each of these cases. The sintering stress for the three simulated cases were distinct and dependent on the geometric microstructural details of the powder compacts. © 2012 The American Ceramic Society.

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Broadband Rayleigh-wave dispersion curve and shear-wave velocity structure for Yucca Flat, Nevada

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America

Schramm, Kimberly A.; Abbott, Robert E.; Asten, Michael; Bilek, Susan; Pancha, Aasha; Patton, Howard J.

The geology near a seismic source has a major effect on seismic waves recorded at distance. This can be especially true in the case of man-made explosions, due to increased geologic heterogeneity at shallow depths and interactions with the free surface. Yucca Flat (YF), a sedimentary basin on the Nevada National Security Site, has hosted hundreds of well-recorded underground nuclear tests. As such, it should be an ideal natural laboratory for the study of shallow explosions. Unfortunately, basin-wide models of such important physical properties as compressiveand shear-wave velocity are not available with sufficient fidelity to maximize the potential of the studies. We attempt to remedy this situation by creating a new shear-wave velocity model of YF. This model was generated by inverting Rayleigh-wave phase-velocity dispersion measurements. Because no single dataset provided a dispersion curve of the necessary frequency bandwidth for shallow, intermediate, and deep basin depths simultaneously, we combined three dispersion curves with complementary bandwidths from three data sources. The datasets, in order of low frequency to high, were (1) underground nuclear tests at YF, recorded on regional seismic networks (0.14-0.4 Hz); (2) a multimode spatially averaged coherency microtremor array located on YF (0.2-20 Hz); and (3) several refraction microtremor (ReMi) linear arrays, also on YF (2.5-50 Hz). Compared to previous work, our model is characterized by slower velocities. The known geologic boundaries such as the depth of the basin and water table are prominent at reasonable locations.

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High-efficiency diffractive optical elements for spectral beam combining

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Kemme, Shanalyn A.; Scrymgeour, David; Peters, David

We present a broadband, all-dielectric, diffractive optical element (DOE) for spectral beam combining with optimized efficiency. We achieve maximal efficiency and polarization insensitivity for the sum of incident wavelengths by varying grating etch depth and duty cycle of a rectangular profile grating realized with the precision of ebeam mask definition. Design and fabrication considerations that maximize efficiency are quantified, including material options, e-beam defined lithographic parameters such as grating periods and aspect ratios, tailored wavelength dispersion, and polarization independence. These results are compared to published efficiency values of >95% diffraction efficiency for a single polarization and single wavelength and polarization-independent efficiency values of >98% also for a single wavelength. © 2012 Copyright Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

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NEAMS VLTS project :

Hansen, Glen; Ostien, Jakob T.; Chen, Qiushi

The objective of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) Very Long Term Storage (VLTS) Project is to develop a simple, benchmark model that describes the performance of Zry4 d-hydrides in cladding, under conditions of long-term storage of used fuel. This model will be used to further explore the requirements of hydride modeling for used fuel storage and transport. It is expected that this model will be further developed as its weaknesses are understood, and as a basis of comparison as the Used Fuel Disposition (UFD) Campaign explores more comprehensive, multiscale approaches. Cladding hydride processes, a thermal model, a hydride model API, and the initial implementation of the J2Fiber hydride model is documented in this report.

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Defect reaction network in C-doped GaAs: Numerical predictions

Schultz, Peter A.

This Report characterizes the defect reaction network in carbon doped, p-type GaAs deduced from first principles density functional theory. The reaction network is deduced by following exothermic defect reactions starting with the initially mobile interstitial defects reacting with common displacement damage defects in C-doped GaAs until culminating in immobile reaction products. The defect reactions and reaction energies are tabulated, along with the properties of all the carbon-related defects in the reaction network. This Report serves to extend the results for intrinsic defects in: P.A. Schultz and O.A. von Lilienfeld, “Simple intrinsic defects in GaAs”, Modelling Simul. Mater. Sci Eng., Vol. 17, 084007 (2009) and its numerical supplement in SAND 2012-2675, and the preliminary carbon defect network results in: P.A. Schultz, “First-principles defect chemistry for modeling irradiated GaAs and III-V semiconductors”, J. Rad. Effects, Res. and Eng. Vol. 30, p257 (2012).

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Results 62201–62400 of 99,299
Results 62201–62400 of 99,299