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Sandia National Laboratories California Pollution Prevention Program Annual Report

Farren, Laurie J.

The annual program report provides detailed information about all aspects of the SNL/CA Pollution Prevention Program for a given calendar year. It functions as supporting documentation to the SNL/CA Environmental Management System Program Manual. The program report describes the activities undertaken during the past year, and activities planned in future years to implement the Pollution Prevention Program, one of six programs that supports environmental management at SNL/CA.

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Macro- to nanoscale wear prevention via molecular adsorption

Proposed for publication in Science.

Dugger, Michael T.; Ohlhausen, J.A.

As the size of mechanical systems shrinks from macro- to nanoscales, surface phenomena such as adhesion, friction, and wear become increasingly significant. This paper demonstrates the use of alcohol adsorption as a means of continuously replenishing the lubricating layer on the working device surfaces and elucidates the tribochemical reaction products formed in the sliding contact region. Friction and wear of native silicon oxide were studied over a wide range of length scales from macro- to nanoscales using a ball-on-flat tribometer (millimeter scale), sidewall microelectromechanical system (MEMS) tribometer (micrometer scale), and atomic force microscopy (nanometer scale). In all cases, the alcohol vapor adsorption successfully lubricated and prevented wear. Imaging time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry analysis of the sliding contact region revealed that high molecular weight oligomeric species were formed via tribochemical reactions of the adsorbed linear alcohol molecules. These tribochemical products seemed to enhance the lubrication and wear prevention. In the case of sidewall MEMS tests, the lifetime of the MEMS device was radically increased via vapor-phase lubrication with alcohol.

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Estimating Z-Pinch computing resources

Brunner, Thomas A.

The Z facility at Sandia National Laboratories produces high energy density environments. Computer simulations of the experiments provide key insights and help make the most efficient use of the facility. This document estimates the computer resources needed in order to support the experimental program. The resource estimate is what we would like to have in about five years and assumes that we will have a robust, scalable simulation capability as well as enough physicists to run the simulations.

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Model for resonant plasma probe

Johnson, William Arthur.; Coats, Rebecca S.; Jorgenson, Roy E.; Hebner, Gregory A.

This report constructs simple circuit models for a hairpin shaped resonant plasma probe. Effects of the plasma sheath region surrounding the wires making up the probe are determined. Electromagnetic simulations of the probe are compared to the circuit model results. The perturbing effects of the disc cavity in which the probe operates are also found.

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Asynchronous parallel generating set search for linearly-constrained optimization

Kolda, Tamara G.; Griffin, Joshua G.

We describe an asynchronous parallel derivative-free algorithm for linearly-constrained optimization. Generating set search (GSS) is the basis of ourmethod. At each iteration, a GSS algorithm computes a set of search directionsand corresponding trial points and then evaluates the objective function valueat each trial point. Asynchronous versions of the algorithm have been developedin the unconstrained and bound-constrained cases which allow the iterations tocontinue (and new trial points to be generated and evaluated) as soon as anyother trial point completes. This enables better utilization of parallel resourcesand a reduction in overall runtime, especially for problems where the objec-tive function takes minutes or hours to compute. For linearly-constrained GSS,the convergence theory requires that the set of search directions conform to the3 nearby boundary. The complexity of developing the asynchronous algorithm forthe linearly-constrained case has to do with maintaining a suitable set of searchdirections as the search progresses and is the focus of this research. We describeour implementation in detail, including how to avoid function evaluations bycaching function values and using approximate look-ups. We test our imple-mentation on every CUTEr test problem with general linear constraints and upto 1000 variables. Without tuning to individual problems, our implementationwas able to solve 95% of the test problems with 10 or fewer variables, 75%of the problems with 11-100 variables, and nearly half of the problems with100-1000 variables. To the best of our knowledge, these are the best resultsthat have ever been achieved with a derivative-free method. Our asynchronousparallel implementation is freely available as part of the APPSPACK software.4

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Results 80401–80500 of 96,771
Results 80401–80500 of 96,771