Improving Access to Apprenticeship: Strengthening State Policies and Practices

Describes state efforts to expand the apprenticeship model through outreach, recruitment, and subsidies to strengthen labor market-based education and skills development strategies. Discusses obstacles, lessons learned from states, and recommendations

Building Opportunity: How States Can Leverage Capital and Infrastructure Investments to Put Working Families on a Path to Good Jobs

Recommends state policies to boost the supply of skilled workers by expanding education and skills development opportunities for low-income, low-skilled adults and strengthening employer demand for and commitment to hiring them at family-sustaining wages

Aligning Community Colleges to Their Local Labor Markets

Examines ways to better align community college curricula with employer needs, including analyzing online job ads to gather data on occupation and skill demands; examples of use of labor market information; and the potential and limitations of such data

Ending the Economic War Among States

The United States is under siege; however, the cause is not a foreign adversary. Rather, infighting among states to attract and retain big businesses is jeopardizing the Nation’s economic prosperity. States compete for businesses, using tax incentives, hoping to capitalize on the benefits these businesses represent. Benefits include improved job growth numbers, a future increase in tax revenue, or, simply, elevated political clout. While competition can lead to a more efficient use of resources, unregulated competition between states for businesses does not illustrate this theory. A national auction for a business, where states are blind to rival offers, may, and arguably does, lead to states offering inflated tax incentives—tax incentives that discriminate against interstate commerce. Nonetheless, the Constitution appears to provide a path forward. As seen through dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence, the Constitution makes it unlawful for states to implement tax incentives that discriminate against interstate commerce. But the current case-by-case approach of litigating the legality of state-level tax incentives suffers from various inefficiencies. This Note offers an alternative solution. This Note argues that ending the economic war among states, caused by the imprudent distribution of state-level tax incentives, requires Congress to promulgate legislation modeled after the European Union\u27s State Aid Control Treaty

A Pathway to Clean Jobs and Prosperity: State Policies for Helping Low-Income Families Build Clean Energy Careers

Describes barriers to expanding access to clean energy jobs and state policy options. Recommends ways to invest in skills development programs for low-skilled, low-income workers; enhance employer commitment to hiring them; and raise the quality of jobs

Miracles Are Not Only Possible But Have Actually Occured

Miracles! What are they? Are they possible? Do they actually occur? Can they be explained

Extension of the ANSYS® creep and damage simulation capabilities

The user programmable features (UPF) of the finite element code ANSYS® are used to generate a customized ANSYS-executable including a more general creep behaviour of materials and a damage module. The numerical approach for the creep behaviour is not restricted to a single creep law (e.g. strain hardening model) with parameters evaluated from a limited stress and temperature range. Instead of this strain rate - strain relations can be read from external creep data files for different temperature and stress levels. The damage module accumulates a damage measure based on the creep strain increment and plastic strain increment of the load step and the current fracture strains for creep and plasticity (depending on temperature and stress level). If the damage measure of an element exceeds a critical value this element is deactivated. Examples are given for illustration and verification of the new program modules

Generation of a High Temperature Material Data Base and its Application to Creep Tests with French or German RPV-steel

Considering the hypothetical core melt down scenario for a light water reactor (LWR) a possible failure mode of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) and its failure time has to be investigated for a determination of the loadings on the containment. Numerous experiments have been performed accompanied with material properties evaluation, theoretical, and numerical work /REM 1993/, /THF 1997/, /CHU 1999/. For pre- and post-test calculations of Lower Head Failure experiments like OLHF or FOREVER it is necessary to model creep and plasticity processes. Therefore a Fi-nite Element Model is developed at the FZR using a numerical approach which avoids the use of a single creep law employing constants derived from the data for a limited stress and temperature range. Instead of this a numerical creep data base (CDB) is developed where the creep strain rate is evaluated in dependence on the current total strain, temperature and equivalent stress. A main task for this approach is the generation and validation of the CDB. Additionally the implementation of all relevant temperature dependent material properties has been performed. For an evaluation of the failure times a damage model according to an approach of Lemaitre is applied. The validation of the numerical model is performed by the simulation of and com-parison with experiments. This is done in 3 levels: starting with the simulation of sin-gle uniaxial creep tests, which is considered as a 1D-problem. In the next level so called "tube-failure-experiments" are modeled: the RUPTHER-14 and the "MPA-Meppen"-experiment. These experiments are considered as 2D-problems. Finally the numerical model is applied to scaled 3D-experiments, where the lower head of a PWR is represented in its hemispherical shape, like in the FOREVER-experiments. This report deals with the 1D- and 2D-simulations. An interesting question to be solved in this frame is the comparability of the French 16MND5 and the German 20MnMoNi55 RPV-steels, which are chemically nearly identical. Since these 2 steels show a similar behavior, it should be allowed on a lim-ited scale to transfer experimental and numerical data from one to the other

Fluid-Structure Interaction Investigations for Pipelines

The influence of the fluid-structure interaction on the magnitude fo the loads on pipe walls and support structures is not yet completely understood. In case of a dynamic load caused by a pressure wave, the stresses in pipe walls, especially in bends, are different from the static case

Fracture mechanics investigation of reactor pressure vessel steels by means of sub-sized specimens (KLEINPROBEN)

The embrittlement of reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steels due to neutron irradiation restricts the operating lifetime of nuclear reactors. The reference temperature 0, obtained from fracture mechanics testing using the Master Curve concept, is a good indicator of the irradiation resistance of a material. The measurement of the shift in 0 after neutron irradiation, which accompanies the embrittlement of the material, using the Master Curve concept, enables the assessment of the reactor materials. In the context of worldwide life time extensions of nuclear power plants, the limited availability of neutron irradiated materials (surveillance materials) is a challenge. Testing of miniaturized 0.16T C(T) specimens manufactured from already tested standard Charpy-sized specimens helps to solve the material shortage problem. In this work, four different reactor pressure vessel steels with different compositions were investigated in the unirradiated and in the neutron-irradiated condition. A total number of 189 mini-C(T) samples were fabricated and tested. An important component of this study is the transferability of fracture mechanics data from mini-C(T) to standard Charpy-sized specimen. Our results demonstrate good agreement of the reference temperatures from the mini-C(T) specimens with those from standard Charpy-sized specimens. RPV steels containing higher Cu and P contents exhibit a higher increase in 0 after irradiation. The fracture surfaces were investigated using SEM in order to record the location of the fracture initiators. The fracture modes were also determined. A large number of test results formed the basis for a censoring probability function, which was used to optimally select the testing temperature in Master Curve testing. The effect of the slow stable crack growth censoring criteria from ASTM E1921 on the determination of 0 was analysed and found to have a minor effect. Our results demonstrate the validity of mini-C(T) specimen testing and confirm the role of the impurity elements Cu and P in neutron embrittlement. We anticipate further research linking microstructure to the fracture properties of materials before and after neutron irradiation and the optimization of Master Curve testing using the results from our statistical analysis