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Metal casting is an important manufacturing process and most castings are made by small to mid-sized foundries. Sand molded castings account for 85% of all iron and steel castings produced and approximately 5 out of 30 major casting defects including gas blows and sand burn-on are related to poor sand mold atmosphere control. Mold atmosphere control should become more crucial in the coming years a ...

Additive Manufacturing (AM), where three-dimensional (3D) objects are created from a digital model by depositing and fusing successive layers of material, provides the ability to produce low-volume, customized products with complex geometries relatively quickly at a moderate cost. However, AM processes sometimes fail to produce acceptable parts, due to either geometric in- accuracy (e.g., shrinkag ...

Neutron scattering is one of the most useful methods of studying the structure and dynamics of matter. Therefore, a number of new large neutron facilities have recently being constructed, upgraded or planned around the world. Examples include the new, 1.4 billion-dollars Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at DOEs Oak Ridge National Laboratory and upgrades of ORNLs High- Flux Isotope Reactor and N ...

Currently, the most promising types of radiotherapy is proton or carbon therapy, as they have demonstrated significant improvements in clinical efficiency and reduced toxicity profiles. Unfortunately, the high cost of treatments using both proton and carbon beams is the limiting factor preventing hadron therapy from becoming the standard of care for a wider range of cancers. Designing a linear acc ...

Metrology is a multi-billion dollar industry that is an indispensable part of science and manufacturing. A variety of techniques including interferometric microscopes, scanning electron microscopes (SEM), X-ray, and atomic force microscopes (AFM) are used in X- ray mirror manufacturing. The performance of any tool directly depends on the ability to characterize and tune it. Modulation Transfer Fun ...

A major problem with nuclear fission reactors is the welding of components of dissimilar metals, where the filler is usually of an additional metal alloy that is not necessarily the same as the two parts to be joined. Welding of metals will often have a heat affected zone (HAZ) and a thermo- mechanically affected zone (TMAZ), which need to be post-weld heat treated to minimize precipitation or seg ...

The understanding of how fuel evaporates and mixes when injected into an engine cylinder is of key importance for the design of cleaner, more efficient vehicles. To meet the Department of Energy & apos;s goals of improving fuel efficiency in gasoline engines by 25 percent and diesel engines by 40 percent, advanced tools for research on fuel injection dynamics are needed. Existing techniques for in ...

In this phase-I proposal, the effect of terrestrial cosmic rays on the failure rate of commercial 1200V SiC power MOSFETs will be studied. The goal of the study is to quantify the appropriate breakdown voltage de-rating needed for SiC MOSFETs subject to cosmic rays. The failure rate of SiC power MOSFETs as a function of the reverse blocking voltage will be determined and compared to failure rate o ...

The new shale oil and gas boom in the United States has propelled the US to the largest oil and gas producer in the world. A consequence of this prosperity is an oversupply of shale gas on the market. With steady growth in the ethylene market at 4 - 5% per year, new ethylene production capacity near the source of shale gas would create a valuable market for excess shale gas and reduce the flaring ...

The reaction catalyzed by dihydroxyacid dehydratase is a key bottleneck in the biosynthesis of isobutanol from glucose, caused in part by extremely inefficient maturation of the catalytically essential Fe-S cofactor (~1%) when the dehydratase is recombinantly expressed. One strategy to relieve this bottleneck is to replace this complicated, energetically expensive enzyme with a simpler one that us ...