Apropriate Ultrasonic System Components for NDE of Thick Polymer-Composites

In certain marine applications, thick polymer-composite materials may have to endure different operating environments than those experienced in traditional aerospace applications. In particular, structures made of such materials may experience very large compressive and bending forces. To prevent in-service failure, appropriate NDE methods and instrumentation are needed to characterize the state of the material. Specifically, in addition to detecting high-contrast anomalies (cracks and delaminations) it may be of interest to determine the pore content, measure the fiber volume, assess the severity of fiber waviness, and the like [1]

Precision measurement of the speed of propagation of neutrinos using the MINOS detectors

We report a two-detector measurement of the propagation speed of neutrinos over a baseline of 734 km. The measurement was made with the NuMI beam at Fermilab between the near and far MINOS detectors. The fractional difference between the neutrino speed and the speed of light is determined to be (v/c−1)=(1.0±1.1)×10−6, consistent with relativistic neutrinos

Cryogenic Fountain Development at NIST and INRIM: Preliminary Characterization

This paper describes the new twin laser-cooled Cs fountain primary frequency standards NIST-F2 and IT-CsF2, and presents some of their design features. Most significant is a cryogenic microwave interrogation region which dramatically reduces the blackbody radiation shift. We also present a preliminary accuracy evaluation of IT-CsF2

Synchronization between remote sites for the MINOS experiment

In the context of time-of-flight measurements, the timing at the departure and arrival locations is obviously critical to the outcome of the experiment. In the case of neutrino time-of-flight experiments, the locations are many hundreds of kilometers apart with synchronization requirements of nanoseconds for several months at a time. In addition to the already stringent set of requirements outlined above, the locations of the origin of the particle beam and the detector need to be precisely determined. NIST and USNO have provided the MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) collaboration with both hardware and expertise to synchronize the two sites of the experiment, the accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, IL and the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota. Two GPS receivers are installed at each location where the local clocks are commercial Cesium clocks. Two more GPS receivers are constantly traveling between locations (including NIST in Boulder, CO) to provide multiple differential calibrations of the fixed receivers. The availability of the TWTFST equipment from USNO allowed for one comparison between the GPS and TWSTFT for the link between the locations, providing an independent means of determining the accuracy of the synchronization. Several months of continuous GPS data are now available, including the two-way calibration instance and several differential GPS calibrations. The results of data processing yielded synchronization stability below one nanosecond with accuracy at the nanosecond level over several months. © (2012) by the Institute of Navigation. All rights reserved