Measurements of a 1/4-scale model of an explosives firing chamber

In anticipation of increasingly stringent environmental regulations, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) proposes to construct a 60-kg firing chamber to provide blast-effects containment for most of its open-air, high-explosive, firing operations. Even though these operations are within current environmental limits, containment of the blast effects and hazardous debris will further drastically reduce emissions to the environment and minimize the generated hazardous waste. The major design consideration of such a chamber is its overall structural dynamic response in terms of long-term containment of all blast effects from repeated internal detonations of high explosives. Another concern is how much other portions of the facility outside the firing chamber must be hardened to ensure personnel protection in the event of an accidental detonation while the chamber door is open. To assess these concerns, a 1/4-scale replica model of the planned contained firing chamber was designed, constructed, and tested with scaled explosive charges ranging from 25 to 125% of the operational explosives limit of 60 kg. From 16 detonations of high explosives, 880 resulting strains, blast pressures, and temperatures within the model were measured to provide information for the final design. Factors of safety for dynamic yield of the firing chamber structure were calculated and compared to the design criterion of totally elastic response. The rectangular, reinforced-concrete chamber model exhibited a lightly damped vibrational response that placed the structure in alternating cycles of tension and compression. During compression, both the reinforcing steel and the concrete remained elastic

Bobbin-Tool Friction-Stir Welding of Thick-Walled Aluminum Alloy Pressure Vessels

It was desired to assemble thick-walled Al alloy 2219 pressure vessels by bobbin-tool friction-stir welding. To develop the welding-process, mechanical-property, and fitness-for-service information to support this effort, extensive friction-stir welding-parameter studies were conducted on 2.5 cm. and 3.8 cm. thick 2219 Al alloy plate. Starting conditions of the plate were the fully-heat-treated (-T62) and in the annealed (-O) conditions. The former condition was chosen with the intent of using the welds in either the 'as welded' condition or after a simple low-temperature aging treatment. Since preliminary stress-analyses showed that stresses in and near the welds would probably exceed the yield-strength of both 'as welded' and welded and aged weld-joints, a post-weld solution-treatment, quenching, and aging treatment was also examined. Once a suitable set of welding and post-weld heat-treatment parameters was established, the project divided into two parts. The first part concentrated on developing the necessary process information to be able to make defect-free friction-stir welds in 3.8 cm. thick Al alloy 2219 in the form of circumferential welds that would join two hemispherical forgings with a 102 cm. inside diameter. This necessitated going to a bobbin-tool welding-technique to simplify the tooling needed to react the large forces generated in friction-stir welding. The bobbin-tool technique was demonstrated on both flat-plates and plates that were bent to the curvature of the actual vessel. An additional issue was termination of the weld, i.e. closing out the hole left at the end of the weld by withdrawal of the friction-stir welding tool. This was accomplished by friction-plug welding a slightly-oversized Al alloy 2219 plug into the termination-hole, followed by machining the plug flush with both the inside and outside surfaces of the vessel. The second part of the project involved demonstrating that the welds were fit for the intended service. This involved determining the room-temperature tensile and elastic-plastic fracture-toughness properties of the bobbin-tool friction-stir welds after a post-weld solution-treatment, quenching, and aging heat-treatment. These mechanical properties were used to conduct fracture-mechanics analyses to determine critical flaw sizes. Phased-array and conventional ultrasonic non-destructive examination was used to demonstrate that no flaws that match or exceed the calculated critical flaw-sizes exist in or near the friction-stir welds

The Scrounge-atron: a phased approach to the Advanced Hydrotest Facility utilizing proton radiography

The Department of Energy has initiated its Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program (SSMP) to provide a single, integrated technical program for maintaining the continued safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile in the absence of nuclear testing. Consistent with the SSMP, the Advanced Hydrotest Facility (AHF) has been conceived to provide improved radiographic imaging with multiple axes and multiple time frames. The AHF would be used to better understand the evolution of nuclear weapon primary implosion shape under normal and accident scenarios. There are three fundamental technologies currently under consideration for use on the AHF. These include linear induction acceleration, inductive-adder pulsed-power technology (both technologies using high current electron beams to produce an intense X-ray beam) and high-energy proton accelerators to produce a proton beam. The Scrounge-atron (a proton synchrotron) was conceived to be a relatively low cost demonstration of the viability of the third technology using bursts of energetic protons, magnetic lenses, and particle detectors to produce the radiographic image. In order for the Scrounge-atron to provide information useful for the AHF technology decision, the accelerator would have to be built as quickly and as economically as possible. These conditions can be met by "scrounging" parts from decommissioned accelerators across the country, especially the Main Ring at Fermilab. The Scrounge-atron is designed to meet the baseline parameters for single axis proton radiography: a 20 GeV proton beam of ten pulses, 10 degrees protons each, spaced 250 ns apart. (2 refs)

Dataflow Analysis for Real-Time Embedded Multiprocessor System Design

Dataflow analysis techniques are key to reduce the number of design iterations and shorten the design time of real-time embedded network based multiprocessor systems that process data streams. With these analysis techniques the worst-case end-to-end temporal behavior of hard real-time applications can be derived from a dataflow model in which computation, communication and arbitration is modeled. For soft real-time applications these static dataflow analysis techniques are combined with simulation of the dataflow model to test statistical assertions about their temporal behavior. The simulation results in combination with properties of the dataflow model are used to derive the sensitivity of design parameters and to estimate parameters like the capacity of data buffers

High-temperature electrical conductivity of aluminium nitride

The electrical conductivity of hot-pressed polycrystalline aluminium nitride doped with oxygen and beryllium was measured as a function of temperature from 800 to 1200° C and over a range of nitrogen partial pressure from 10 2 to 10 5 Pa. The effect of beryllium dopant, the independence of conductivity from nitrogen partial pressure, and the observed activation energy suggested extrinsic electronic species or aluminium vacancies as charge carriers. Polarization measurements made with one electrode blocking to ionic species indicated that the aluminium nitride with oxygen impurity was an extrinsic electronic conductor.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44688/1/10853_2005_Article_BF01161209.pd

Real-time aware rendering of scalable arbitrary-shaped MPEG-4 decoder for multiprocessor systems

The MPEG-4 video standard extends the traditional frame-based processing with the option to compose several video objects (VO) superimposed on a background sprite image. In our previous work, we presented a distributed, multiprocessor based, scalable implementation of an MPEG-4 arbitrary-shaped decoder, which forms together with the background sprite decoder an essential part for further scene rendering. For control of the multiprocessor architecture, we have constructed a Quality-of-Service (QoS) management that monitors the availability of required data and distributes the processing of individual tasks with guaranteed or best-effort services of the platform. However, the proposed architecture with the combined guaranteed and best-effort services poses problems for real-time scene rendering. In this paper, we present a technique for proper run-time rendering of the final scene after decoding one VO Layer. The individual video-object monitors check the data availability and select the highest quality for the final scene rendering. The algorithm operates hierarchically both at the scene level and at the task level of the video object processing. Whereas the earlier work on scalable implementation concentrated only on guaranteed services, we now introduce a new element in the system architecture for the real-time control and fall back mechanism of the best-effort services. This element is based on first, controlling data availability at task level, and second, introducing the propagation service to QoS management. We present our simulation results in the comparison with the standard "frame-skipping" technique that is the only currently available solution to this type of rendering a scalable processing

Realization of QoS Management Using Negotiation algorithms for Multiprocessor NoC

Abstract-With the growing complexity of new multimedia applications and the parallel execution enabled by multiprocessor architectures, Quality-of-Service (QoS) management for modern Network-on-Chip (NoC) systems becomes relevant. This paper presents an approach for efficient usage of platform resources and simultaneously controlling overall system performance, when multiple applications are active. Therefore, on top of the con- ventional QoS, we introduce an algorithm for setting quality levels of parallel executed applications on a multiprocessor Network-on-Chip. The new concept is a hierarchical system, where an application manager negotiates with the resource management to jointly optimize the quality of individual and overall application settings. The proposed QoS manager concept was successfully evaluated by an experimental set-up, employing two independent video-object decoders, a background sprite decoder from the MPEG-4 standard and an abstract audio object. This simultaneous execution of four independent applications was mapped on a simulator based on AEthereal network and eight ARM7 processors executed with a clock-cycle true simulator. The proposed distributed QoS management decreases the complexity of the overall management and improves the transparency and responsibilities in the decision taking

QoS concept for scalable MPEG-4 video object decoding on multimedia (NoC) chips

Scalable implementations of multimedia applications offer increased flexibility in mapping those applications onto the executing platform used in a consumer product. In this paper, we describe a hierarchical quality-of-service (QoS) model for managing multimedia applications running on a multiprocessor systems-on-chip (SoC). First, we present the possible scalability of an MPEG-4 arbitrary-shaped video decoder with respect to computational and communicational resources. Second, we provide a novel model for QoS management based on the principles of predictable mapping and run-time information on the resource utilization. We demonstrate the QoS framework by mapping of an MPEG-4 arbitrary-shaped decoder on a NoC, employing eight ARM cores with specific monitoring features in the network (e.g. Ethereal NoC). The scalable implementation results in lowering the computational requirements by 26% and communication by 43%. Experiments revealed that the combination results in more than 85% decoded frames of higher quality than in a QoS approach based on the predictable mapping onl

QoS concept for scalable MPEG-4 video object decoding on multimedia (NoC) chips

Scalable implementations of multimedia applications offer increased flexibility in mapping those applications onto the executing platform used in a consumer product. In this paper, we describe a hierarchical quality-of-service (QoS) model for managing multimedia applications running on a multiprocessor systems-on-chip (SoC). First, we present the possible scalability of an MPEG-4 arbitrary-shaped video decoder with respect to computational and communicational resources. Second, we provide a novel model for QoS management based on the principles of predictable mapping and run-time information on the resource utilization. We demonstrate the QoS framework by mapping of an MPEG-4 arbitrary-shaped decoder on a NoC, employing eight ARM cores with specific monitoring features in the network (e.g. Ethereal NoC). The scalable implementation results in lowering the computational requirements by 26% and communication by 43%. Experiments revealed that the combination results in more than 85% decoded frames of higher quality than in a QoS approach based on the predictable mapping onl