Publications

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Based on a phenomenological model of diesel combustion and pollutant-formation processes, a number of fuel additives that could potentially reduce in-cylinder soot formation by altering combustion chemistry have been identified. These fuel additives, or ''combustion modifiers'', included ethanol and ethylene glycol dimethyl ether, polyethylene glycol dinitrate (a cetane improver), succinimide (a dispersant), as well as nitromethane and another nitro-compound mixture. To better understand the chemical and physical mechanisms by which these combustion modifiers may affect soot formation in diesel engines, in-cylinder soot and diffusion flame lift-off were measured, using an optically-accessible, heavy-duty, direct-injection diesel engine. A line-of-sight laser extinction diagnostic was employed to measure the relative soot concentration within the diesel jets (''jetsoot'') as well as the rates of deposition of soot on the piston bowl-rim (''wall-soot''). An OH chemiluminescence imaging technique was utilized to measure the lift-off lengths of the diesel diffusion flames so that fresh oxygen entrainment rates could be compared among the fuels. Measurements were obtained at two operating conditions, using blends of a base commercial diesel fuel with various combinations of the fuel additives. The ethanol additive, at 10% by mass, reduced jet-soot by up to 15%, and reduced wall-soot by 30-40%. The other fuel additives also affected in-cylinder soot, but unlike the ethanol blends, changes in in-cylinder soot could be attributed solely to differences in the ignition delay. No statistically-significant differences in the diesel flame lift-off lengths were observed among any of the fuel additive formulations at the operating conditions examined in this study. Accordingly, the observed differences in in-cylinder soot among the fuel formulations cannot be attributed to differences in fresh oxygen entrainment upstream of the soot-formation zones after ignition.

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3-D finite element analyses were performed to evaluate the structural integrity of caverns located at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve's Big Hill site. State-of-art analyses simulated the current site configuration and considered additional caverns. The addition of 5 caverns to account for a full site and a full dome containing 31 caverns were modeled. Operations including both normal and cavern workover pressures and cavern enlargement due to leaching were modeled to account for as many as 5 future oil drawdowns. Under the modeled conditions, caverns were placed very close to the edge of the salt dome. The web of salt separating the caverns and the web of salt between the caverns and edge of the salt dome were reduced due to leaching. The impacts on cavern stability, underground creep closure, surface subsidence and infrastructure, and well integrity were quantified. The analyses included recently derived damage criterion obtained from testing of Big Hill salt cores. The results show that from a structural view point, many additional caverns can be safely added to Big Hill.

Kill assessment continues to be a major problem for the nation's missile defense program. A potential approach for addressing this issue involves spectral and temporal analysis of the short-time impact flash that occurs when a kill vehicle intercepts and engages a target missile. This can provide identification of the materials involved in the impact event, which will, in turn, yield the data necessary for target identification, engagement analysis, and kill assessment. This report describes the first phases of a project under which we are providing laboratory demonstrations of the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach. We are using two major Sandia facilities, the Z-Pinch accelerator, and the two- and three-stage gas guns at the Shock Thermodynamics and Applied Research (STAR) facility. We have looked at the spectral content of impact flash at velocities up to 25 km/s on the Z-Pinch machine to establish the capability for spectroscopy for these types of events, and are looking at similar experiments at velocities from 6 to 11 km/s on the gas guns to demonstrate a similar capability for a variety of research-oriented and applied materials. The present report describes only the work performed on the Z machine.

As radars move to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with limited-bandwidth data downlinks, the amount of data stored and transmitted with each image becomes more significant. This document gives the results of a study to determine the effect of lossy compression in the image magnitude and phase on Coherent Change Detection (CCD). We examine 44 lossy compression types, plus lossless zlib compression, and test each compression method with over 600 CCD image pairs. We also derive theoretical predictions for the correlation for most of these compression schemes, which compare favorably with the experimental results. We recommend image transmission formats for limited-bandwidth programs having various requirements for CCD, including programs which cannot allow performance degradation and those which have stricter bandwidth requirements at the expense of CCD performance.

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A laser hazard analysis was performed for the SNL Active Polarimeter Optical System based on the ANSI Standard Z136.1-2000, American National Standard for Safe Use of Lasers and the ANSI Standard Z136.6-2000, American National Standard for Safe Use of Lasers Outdoors. The Active Polarimeter Optical System (APOS) uses a pulsed, near-infrared, chromium doped lithium strontium aluminum fluoride (Cr:LiSAF) crystal laser in conjunction with a holographic diffuser and lens to illuminate a scene of interest. The APOS is intended for outdoor operations. The system is mounted on a height adjustable platform (6 feet to 40 feet) and sits atop a tripod that points the beam downward. The beam can be pointed from nadir to as much as 60 degrees off of nadir producing an illuminating spot geometry that can vary from circular (at nadir) to elliptical in shape (off of nadir). The JP Innovations crystal Cr:LiSAF laser parameters are presented in section II. The illuminating laser spot size is variable and can be adjusted by adjusting the separation distance between the lens and the holographic diffuser. The system is adjusted while platform is at the lowest level. The laser spot is adjusted for a particular spot size at a particular distance (elevation) from the laser by adjusting the separation distance (d{sub diffuser}) to predetermined values. The downward pointing angle is also adjusted before the platform is raised to the selected operation elevation.

This document describes the Umbra System representation. Umbra System representation, initially developed in the spring of 2003, is implemented in Incr/Tcl using concepts borrowed from Carnegie Mellon University's Architecture Description Language (ADL) called Acme. In the spring of 2004 through January 2005, System was converted to Umbra 4, extended slightly, and adopted as the underlying software system for a variety of Umbra applications that support Complex Systems Engineering (CSE) and Complex Adaptive Systems Engineering (CASE). System is now a standard part Of Umbra 4. While Umbra 4 also includes an XML parser for System, the XML parser and Schema are not described in this document.

We have improved deformable mirror approach to allow good parabolic deformation for efficient thermal lens compensation. Our design uses an annulus to push onto the back surface of a flat mirror substrate, simply supported at the outer edge, thereby creating a parabolic deformation within the encircled area. We built an assembly using a 25.4 mm diameter, 1 mm thick mirror with a wedge of less than 10 arc seconds that was deformed with a 12 mm diameter annulus at the back of the mirror. Using a Shack-Hartman wavefront sensor we performed careful measurements to characterize the performance of the mirrors.

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Sandia National Laboratories has completed thermal performance testing on the Schott parabolic trough receiver using the LS-2 collector on the Sandia rotating platform at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility in Albuquerque, NM. This testing was funded as part of the US DOE Sun-Lab USA-Trough program. The receiver tested was a new Schott receiver, known as Heat Collector Elements (HCEs). Schott is a new manufacturer of trough HCEs. The Schott HCEs are 4m long; therefore, two were joined and mounted on the LS-2 collector module for the test. The Schott HCE design consists of a 70mm diameter high solar absorptance coated stainless steel (SS) tube encapsulated within a 125mm diameter Pyrex{reg_sign} glass tube with vacuum in the annulus formed between the SS and glass tube to minimize convection heat losses. The Schott HCE design is unique in two regards. First, the bellows used to compensate for the difference in thermal expansion between the metal and glass tube are inside the glass envelope rather than outside. Second, the composition of materials at the glass-to-metal seal has very similar thermal expansion coefficients making the joint less prone to breakage from thermal shock. Sandia National Laboratories provided both the azimuth and elevation collector module tracking systems used during the tests. The test results showed the efficiency of the Schott HCE to be very similar to current HCEs being manufactured by Solel. This testing provided performance verification for the use of Schott tubes with Solargenix trough collector assemblies at currently planned trough power plant projects in Arizona and Nevada.

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There is a keen interest in using periodic structures to model such structures as phased arrays, frequency selective surfaces, and metamaterials. Recent interest has focused on modeling the truncation effects of periodic structures. The GIFFT (Green's function Interpolation using Fast Fourier Transform) method has recently been proposed as an efficient integral equation approach for handling moderate-to-large structures with essentially arbitrary (but identical) elements within each cell. The method uses an array mask--a listing of whether or not an element of the periodic structure is present at each potential cell location within the structure's bounding box--to simplify the handling of arbitrary array boundaries and missing elements. The interaction between adjacent cells is treated using the method of moments in its usual form,but periodicity reduces the number of distinct near-interactions over the entire structure to a 3 x 3 block matrix. The inverse of this block or even of its central block serves as an effective preconditioner. The calculation of interactions between non-adjacent cells relies on the following features: (1) For cell sizes less than a few wavelengths, the Green's function is sufficiently smooth that it may be interpolated accurately over both source and observation points within interacting cell pairs via equispaced Lagrange polynomial interpolation. (2) Periodicity of the interpolation points over the entire transverse dimensions of the array implies that the Green's function samples connecting source and observation cell interpolating polynomials form a discrete convolution matrix. (3) Basis and testing function projections for subdomains within a cell are onto the cell interpolation polynomials, and the resulting projection matrix is identical for every cell of the structure. These features imply that the matrix/vector product in an iterative scheme can be accelerated using FFT to perform the discrete convolution between the Green's function sample matrix and the column vector of surface current projections onto interpolation polynomials. This GIFFT approach, which shares many features with the AIM method, is found to be ideal for quasi-planar periodic structures. In this paper, we extend GIFFT to treat manufacturing defects in periodic structures that inevitably arise in producing nano-meter structures. Calculations for several structures of interest are presented. The main generalizations required are the following: (1) Both 'background' and 'defect' elements must now be separately defined in translatable unit cells. (2) The near-interaction block matrix must allow for the possibility of background-to-defect cell interactions. (3) Matrices of projections of both background and defect subdomain bases onto the interpolation polynomials must be defined and selected appropriately while forming the matrix/vector product.

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The ion photon emission microscope, or IPEM, is the first device that allows scientists to microscopically study the effects of single ions in air on semiconductors, microchips and even biological cells without having to focus the beam. Reported here is a prototype, the size of a conventional optical microscope, developed at Sandia. The alpha-IPEM, that employs alpha particles from a radioactive source, represents the first example of IBA imaging without an accelerator. The IPEM resolution is currently limited to 10 {micro}m, but we also report a gridded-phosphor approach that could improve this resolution to that of the optical microscope, or {approx} 1 {micro}m. Finally, we propose that a simple adaptation of the alpha-IPEM could be the only way to maintain the high utility of radiation effects microscopy into the future.

A Ka-band RF MEMS enabled frequency reconfigurable triangular microstrip patch antenna has been designed for monolithic integration with RF MEMS phase shifters to demonstrate a low-cost monolithic passive electronically scanned array (PESA). This paper introduces our first prototype reconfigurable triangular patch antenna currently in fabrication. The aperture coupled patch antenna is fabricated on a dual-layer quartz/alumina substrate using surface micromachining techniques.

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