Systems Engineering for International Nuclear Safeguards
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Environmental Modelling and Software
Applying extreme temperature events for future conditions is not straightforward for infrastructure resilience analyses. This work introduces a stochastic model that fills this gap. The model uses at least 50 years of daily extreme temperature records, climate normals with 10%–90% confidence intervals, and shifts/offsets for increased frequency and intensity of heat wave events. Intensity and frequency are shifted based on surface temperature anomaly from 1850–1900 for 32 models from CMIP6. A case study for Worcester, Massachusetts passed 85% of cases using the two-sided Kolmogorov–Smirnov p-value test with 95% confidence for both temperature and duration. Future shifts for several climate scenarios to 2020, 2040, 2060, and 2080 had acceptable errors between the shifted model and 10- and 50-year extreme temperature event thresholds with the largest error being 2.67°C. The model is likely to be flexible enough for other patterns of extreme weather such as extreme precipitation and hurricanes.
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Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) has developed a novel reduced order modeling approach. Prioritization of inputs is accomplished using Sobo' indices obtained through a more efficient variance-based global sensitivity analysis. To determine the Sobo' functions, simulated input values are aligned to collocation points to permit the use of Gauss-Lobatto integration, thereby reducing the number of simulation trials needed by more than an order of magnitude compared to standard Monte Carlo approaches. Furthermore, by leveraging the orthogonality of Legendre polynomials in conjunction with those same simulations at the collocation nodes, an efficient fitting method is developed to represent the Sobo' functions from which a reduced order model (ROM) is constructed. The developed method is both more efficient computationally, and the resulting ROM is more accurate. The efficacy of this technique is demonstrated on a nonlinear polynomial test function as well as the nonlinear Ishigami and Sobo' g functions.
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Seismological Research Letters
The Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories is a pulsed power facility for high-energy density physics experiments that can shock materials to extreme temperatures and pressures through a focused energy release of up to ∼ 25 MJ in < 100 nanoseconds. It has been in operation for more than two decades and conducts up to ∼ 100 experiments, or “shots,” per year. Based on a set of 74 known shot times from 2018, we determined that Z Machine shots produce detectable ∼ 3–17 Hz ground motion 12 km away at the Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory, New Mexico (ANMO), borehole seismograph, with peak signal at ∼ 7 Hz. The known shot waveforms were used to create a three-component template, leading to the detection of 2339 Z Machine shots since 1998 through single-station cross-correlation. Local seismic magnitude estimates range from local magnitude (ML) -2 to -1.3 and indicate that only a small fraction of the shot energy is transmitted by seismic phases observable at 12 km distance. The most recent major facility renovation, which was intended to decrease mechanical dissipation, is associated with an abrupt decrease in observed seismic amplitudes at ANMO despite stable maximum shot energy. The highly repetitive impulsive sources are well suited to coda-wave interferometry to investigate time-dependent velocity structures. Relative velocity variations (dv/v) show an annual cycle with amplitude of ∼ 0.2%. Local minima are observed in the late spring, and dv/v increases through the summer monsoon rainfall, possibly reflecting patchy saturation as rainfall infiltrates near the eastern edge of the Albuquerque basin. The cumulative results demonstrate that forensic seismology can provide insight into long-term operation of facilities such as pulsed-power laboratories, and that their recurring signals may be valuable for studies of time-dependent structure.
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AIAA Journal
Fluid–structure interactions were measured between a representative control surface and the hypersonic flow deflected by it. The control surface is simplified as a spanwise finite ramp placed on a longitudinal slice of a cone. The front surface of the ramp contains a thin panel designed to respond to the unsteady fluid loading arising from the shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions. Experiments were conducted at Mach 5 and Mach 8 with ramps of different angles. High-speed schlieren captured the unsteady flow dynamics and accelerometers behind the thin panel measured its structural response. Panel vibrations were dominated by natural modes that were excited by the broadband aerodynamic fluctuations arising in the flowfield. However, increased structural response was observed in two distinct flow regimes: 1) attached or small separation interactions, where the transitional regime induced the strongest panel fluctuations. This was in agreement with the observation of increased convective undulations or bulges in the separation shock generated by the passage of turbulent spots, and 2) large separated interactions, where shear layer flapping in the laminar regime produced strong panel response at the flapping frequency. In addition, panel heating during the experiment caused a downward shift in its natural mode frequencies.
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Physics of Plasmas
In magneto-inertial fusion, the ratio of the characteristic fuel length perpendicular to the applied magnetic field R to the α-particle Larmor radius Q α is a critical parameter setting the scale of electron thermal-conduction loss and charged burn-product confinement. Using a previously developed deep-learning-based Bayesian inference tool, we obtain the magnetic-field fuel-radius product B R ∝ R / Q α from an ensemble of 16 magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF) experiments. Observations of the trends in BR are consistent with relative trade-offs between compression and flux loss as well as the impact of mix from 1D resistive radiation magneto-hydrodynamics simulations in all but two experiments, for which 3D effects are hypothesized to play a significant role. Finally, we explain the relationship between BR and the generalized Lawson parameter χ. Our results indicate the ability to improve performance in MagLIF through careful tuning of experimental inputs, while also highlighting key risks from mix and 3D effects that must be mitigated in scaling MagLIF to higher currents with a next-generation driver.
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The Sandia National Laboratories, in California (Sandia/CA) is a research and development facility, owned by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration agency (DOE/NNSA). The laboratory is located in the City of Livermore (the City) and is comprised of approximately 410 acres. The Sandia/CA facility is operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC (NTESS) under a contract with the DOE/NNSA. The DOE/ NNSA’s Sandia Field Office (SFO) oversees the operations of the site. North of the Sandia/CA facility is the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in which Sandia/CA’s sewer system combines with before discharging to the City’s Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTW) for final treatment and processing. The City’s POTW authorizes the wastewater discharge from Sandia/CA via the assigned Wastewater Discharge Permit #1251 (the Permit), which is issued to the DOE/NNSA’s main office for Sandia National Laboratories, located in New Mexico (Sandia/NM). The Permit requires the submittal of this Monthly Sewer Monitoring Report to the City by the twenty-fifth day of each month.
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IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Protecting against multi-step attacks of uncertain start times and duration forces the defenders into indefinite, always ongoing, resource-intensive response. To allocate resources effectively, the defender must analyze and respond to an uncertain stream of potentially undetected multiple multi-step attacks and take measures of attack and response intensity over time into account. Such response requires estimation of overall attack success metrics and evaluating effect of defender strategies and actions associated with specific attack steps on overall attack metrics. We present a novel game-theoretic approach GPLADD to attack metrics estimation and demonstrate it on attack data derived from MITRE's ATT&CK Framework and other sources. In GPLADD, the time to complete attack steps is explicit; the attack dynamics emerges from attack graph and attacker-defender capabilities and strategies and therefore reflects 'physics' of attacks. The time the attacker takes to complete an attack step is drawn from a probability distribution determined by attacker and defender strategies and capabilities. This makes time a physical constraint on attack success parameters and enables comparing different defender resource allocation strategies across different attacks. We solve for attack success metrics by approximating attacker-defender games as discrete-time Markov chains and show evaluation of return on detection investments associated with different attack steps. We apply GPLADD to MITRE's APT3 data from ATT&CK Framework and show that there are substantial and un-intuitive differences in estimated real-world vendor performance against a simplified APT3 attack. We focus on metrics that reflect attack difficulty versus attacker ability to remain hidden in the system after gaining control. This enables practical defender optimization and resource allocation against multi-step attacks.
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