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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 667 records · Page 37
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2014

An efficient polyenergetic SART (pSART) reconstruction algorithm for quantitative myocardial CT perfusion

Purpose: In quantitative myocardial CT perfusion imaging, beam hardening effect due to dense bone and high concentration iodinated contrast agent can result in visible artifacts and inaccurate CT numbers. In this paper, an efficient polyenergetic Simultaneous Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (pSART) was presented to eliminate the beam hardening artifacts and to improve the CT quantitative imaging ability. Methods: Our algorithm made threea priori assumptions: (1) the human body is composed of several base materials (e.g., fat, breast, soft tissue, bone, and iodine); (2) images can be coarsely segmented to two types of regions, i.e., nonbone regions and noniodine regions; and (3) each voxel can be decomposed into a mixture of two most suitable base materials according to its attenuation value and its corresponding region type information. Based on the above assumptions, energy-independent accumulated effective lengths of all base materials can be fast computed in the forward ray-tracing process and be used repeatedly to obtain accurate polyenergetic projections, with which a SART-based equation can correctly update each voxel in the backward projecting process to iteratively reconstruct artifact-free images. This approach effectively reduces the influence of polyenergetic x-ray sources and it further enables monoenergetic images to be reconstructed at any arbitrarily preselected target energies. A series of simulation tests were performed on a size-variable cylindrical phantom and a realistic anthropomorphic thorax phantom. In addition, a phantom experiment was also performed on a clinical CT scanner to further quantitatively validate the proposed algorithm. Results: The simulations with the cylindrical phantom and the anthropomorphic thorax phantom showed that the proposed algorithm completely eliminated beam hardening artifacts and enabled quantitative imaging across different materials, phantom sizes, and spectra, as the absolute relative errors were reduced from [−7.5%, 12.1%] for SART to [−0.1%, 0.1%] for pSART. When using low kVp spectra and high reference energies, pSART also showed improved reconstruction efficiency in terms of convergence speed compared to the conventional SART algorithm. The phantom experiment on a clinical CT scanner indicated that the quantitative advantage of pSART is realizable in experimental CT acquisition, as the absolute relative errors across material inserts were less than 0.4%. Conclusions: By incorporatinga priori information (material attenuation coefficients, x-ray source spectrum, and region type information) into the reconstruction process, the proposed pSART algorithm could effectively eliminate beam hardening artifacts, reconstruct the accurate attenuation coefficients for precise quantitative imaging, and accelerate the reconstruction process.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2012

Dielectric recombination and stability of warm gas in AGN

High resolution ultraviolet and X-ray spectra show that material outflow occur from the close neighbourhoods of super-massive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN). The absorption features seen in the high resolution soft X-ray spectra is attributed to gas which is conventionally termed as the warm absorber (WA) and often the thermal equilibrium (stability) curve is used as a theoretical tool to offer insights into the nature of the WA. The shape of the stability curve is determined by factors like the spectral energy distribution of the ionizing flux and the chemical composition of the absorbing gas. We found that the stability curves obtained under the same set of assumptions for the prevalent physical conditions in the AGN environment, but using recently derived dielectronic recombination rates, give significantly different results from what is predicted with older atomic data. The variations in phase space region of the stability curves corresponding to WAs, lead to different physical predictions. The results obtained with the current dielectronic recombination rate coefficients are more reliable because the WA models along the stability curve have computed, updated coefficient values.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Probing gluon saturation with next-to-leading order photon production at central rapidities in proton-nucleus collisions

Here, we compute the cross section for photons emitted from sea quarks in proton-nucleus collisions at collider energies. The computation is performed within the dilute-dense kinematics of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective field theory. Albeit the result obtained is formally at next-to-leading order in the CGC power counting, it provides the dominant contribution for central rapidities. We observe that the inclusive photon cross section is proportional to all-twist Wilson line correlators in the nucleus. These correlators also appear in quark-pair production; unlike the latter, photon production is insensitive to hadronization uncertainties and therefore more sensitive to multi-parton correlations in the gluon saturation regime of QCD. We demonstrate that k ⊥ and collinear factorized expressions for inclusive photon production are obtained as leading twist approximations to our result. In particular, the collinearly factorized expression is directly sensitive to the nuclear gluon distribution at small x. Other results of interest include the realization of the Low-Burnett-Kroll soft photon theorem in the CGC framework and a comparative study of how the photon amplitude is obtained in Lorenz and light-cone gauges.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

SU-E-J-269: Assessing the Precision of Dose Delivery in CBCT-Guided Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy for Lung and Soft Tissue Metastatic Lesions

Purpose: Ensuring reproducibility of target localization is critical to accurate stereotactic body radiation treatment (SBRT) for lung and soft tissue metastatic lesions. To characterize interfraction variability in set-up and evaluate PTV margins utilized for SBRT, daily CBCTs were used to calculate delivered target and OAR doses compared to those expected from planning. Methods: CBCT images obtained prior to each fraction of SBRT for a lung and thyroid metastatic lesion were evaluated. The target CTV/ITV and OARs on each of 8 CBCT data sets were contoured. Using MIM fusion software and Pinnacle{sup 3} RTP system, delivered dose distribution was reconstructed on each CBCT, utilizing translational shifts performed prior to treatment. Actual delivered vs. expected doses received by target CTV/ITV and adjacent critical structures were compared to characterize accuracy of pre-treatment translational shifts and PTV margins. Results: The planned CTV/ITV D95% and V100% were 4595cGy and 91.47% for the lung lesion, and 3010cGy and 96.34% for the thyroid lesion. Based on CBCT analysis, actual mean D95% and V100% for lung ITV were 4542±344.4cGy and 91.54±3.45%; actual mean D95% and V100% for thyroid metastasis CTV were 3005±25.98cGy and 95.20±2.522%. For the lung lesion, ipsilateral lung V20, heart V32 (cc) and spinal cord (.03 cc) max were 110.15cc, 3.33cc, and 1680cGy vs. 110.27±14.79cc, 6.74±3.76cc, and 1711±46.56cGy for planned vs. delivered doses, respectively. For the thyroid metastatic lesion, esophagus V18, trachea (.03 cc) max, and spinal cord (.03 cc) max were 0.35cc, 2555cGy, and 850cGy vs. 0.16±0.13cc, 2147±367cGy, and 838±45cGy for planned vs. delivered treatments, respectively. Conclusion: Minimal variability in SBRT target lesion dose delivered based on pre-treatment CBCT-based translational shifts suggests tighter PTV margins may be considered to further decrease dose to surrounding critical structures. Guidelines for optimal target alignment during CBCT-guidance for lung and soft tissue metastatic lesions treated with SBRT are being established.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Global weak solutions for a nonlocal multispecies Fokker–Planck–Landau system

The global-in-time existence of weak solutions to a spatially homogeneous multispecies Fokker–Planck–Landau system for plasmas in the three-dimensional whole space is shown. The Fokker–Planck–Landau system is a simplification of the Landau equations assuming a linearized, velocity-independent, and isotropic kernel. The resulting equations depend nonlocally and nonlinearly on the moments of the distribution functions via the multispecies local Maxwellians. Furthermore, the existence proof is based on a three-level approximation scheme, energy and entropy estimates, as well as compactness results, and it holds for both soft and hard potentials.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2018

Static Thermochemical Model of COREX Melter Gasifier

COREX is one of the commercial smelting reduction processes. It uses the finer size ore and semi-soft coal instead of metallurgical coke to produce hot metal from iron ore. The use of top gas with high calorific value as a by-product export gas makes the process economical and green. The predictive thermochemical model of the COREX process presented here enables rapid computation of process parameters such as (1) required amount of ore, coal, and flux; (2) amount of slag and gas generated; and (3) gas compositions (based on the raw material and desired hot metal quality). The model helps in predicting the variations in process parameters with respect to the (1) degree of metallization and (2) post-combustion ratio for given raw material conditions. In general reduction in coal, flux, and oxygen, the requirement is concomitant with an increase in the degree of metallization and post-combustion ratio. The model reported here has been benchmarked using industrial data obtained from the JSW Steel Plant, India.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2016

Single spin asymmetry in forward pA collisions

In this paper, we compute the transverse single spin asymmetry in light hadron production p↑p→hX and p↑A→hX including the gluon saturation effect in the unpolarized nucleon/nucleus. In the forward (large-xF) region, the dominant contribution comes from the so-called derivative term associated with the soft gluonic pole. This leads to the cancellation of nuclear effects in AN which can be tested at the RHIC. We also show that the soft fermionic pole disappears in the saturation environment.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2013

Detection and Correction of Silent Data Corruption for Large-Scale High-Performance Computing

Faults have become the norm rather than the exception for high-end computing on clusters with 10s/100s of thousands of cores. Exacerbating this situation, some of these faults remain undetected, manifesting themselves as silent errors that corrupt memory while applications continue to operate and report incorrect results. This paper studies the potential for redundancy to both detect and correct soft errors in MPI message-passing applications. Our study investigates the challenges inherent to detecting soft errors within MPI application while providing transparent MPI redundancy. By assuming a model wherein corruption in application data manifests itself by producing differing MPI message data between replicas, we study the best suited protocols for detecting and correcting MPI data that is the result of corruption. To experimentally validate our proposed detection and correction protocols, we introduce RedMPI, an MPI library which resides in the MPI profiling layer. RedMPI is capable of both online detection and correction of soft errors that occur in MPI applications without requiring any modifications to the application source by utilizing either double or triple redundancy. Our results indicate that our most efficient consistency protocol can successfully protect applications experiencing even high rates of silent data corruption with runtime overheads between 0% and 30% as compared to unprotected applications without redundancy. Using our fault injector within RedMPI, we observe that even a single soft error can have profound effects on running applications, causing a cascading pattern of corruption in most cases causes that spreads to all other processes. RedMPI's protection has been shown to successfully mitigate the effects of soft errors while allowing applications to complete with correct results even in the face of errors.

Fiala, David J↗
DOE OSTI2010

An evaluation of parallel optimization for OpenSolaris Network Stack

Computing is now shifting towards multiprocessing. The fundamental goal of multiprocessing is improved performance through the introduction of additional hardware threads or cores (referred to as 'cores' for simplicity). Modern network stacks can exploit parallel cores to allow either message-based parallelism or connection-based parallelism as a means to enhance performance. OpenSolaris has redesigned and parallelized to better utilize additional cores. Three special technologies, named Softring Set, Soft ring and Squeue are introduced in OpenSolaris for stack parallelization. In this paper, we study the OpenSolaris packet receiving process and its core parallelism optimization techniques. Experiment results show that these techniques allow OpenSolaris to achieve better network I/O performance in multiprocessing environments; however, network stack parallelization has also brought extra overheads for system. An effective and efficient network I/O optimization in multiprocessing environments is required to cross all levers of the network stack from network interface to application.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2011

Secure Data Transfer Guidance for Industrial Control and SCADA Systems

This document was developed to provide guidance for the implementation of secure data transfer in a complex computational infrastructure representative of the electric power and oil and natural gas enterprises and the control systems they implement. For the past 20 years the cyber security community has focused on preventative measures intended to keep systems secure by providing a hard outer shell that is difficult to penetrate. Over time, the hard exterior, soft interior focus changed to focus on defense-in-depth adding multiple layers of protection, introducing intrusion detection systems, more effective incident response and cleanup, and many other security measures. Despite much larger expenditures and more layers of defense, successful attacks have only increased in number and severity. Consequently, it is time to re-focus the conventional approach to cyber security. While it is still important to implement measures to keep intruders out, a new protection paradigm is warranted that is aimed at discovering attempted or real compromises as early as possible. Put simply, organizations should take as fact that they have been, are now, or will be compromised. These compromises may be intended to steal information for financial gain as in the theft of intellectual property or credentials that lead to the theft of financial resources, or to lie silent until instructed to cause physical or electronic damage and/or denial of services. This change in outlook has been recently confirmed by the National Security Agency [19]. The discovery of attempted and actual compromises requires an increased focus on monitoring events by manual and/or automated log monitoring, detecting unauthorized changes to a system's hardware and/or software, detecting intrusions, and/or discovering the exfiltration of sensitive information and/or attempts to send inappropriate commands to ICS/SCADA (Industrial Control System/Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems.

03 NATURAL GAS↗
DOE OSTI2013

Alignment Focus of Daily Image Guidance for Concurrent Treatment of Prostate and Pelvic Lymph Nodes

Purpose: To determine the dosimetric impact of daily imaging alignment focus on the prostate soft tissue versus the pelvic bones for the concurrent treatment of the prostate and pelvic lymph nodes (PLN) and to assess whether multileaf collimator (MLC) tracking or adaptive planning (ART) is necessary with the current clinical planning margins of 8 mm/6 mm posterior to the prostate and 5 mm to the PLN. Methods and Materials: A total of 124 kilovoltage cone-beam computed tomography (kV-CBCT) images from 6 patients were studied. For each KV-CBCT, 4 plans were retrospectively created using an isocenter shifting method with 2 different alignment focuses (prostate, PLN), an MLC shifting method, and the ART method. The selected dosimetric endpoints were compared among these plans. Results: For the isoshift contour, isoshift bone, MLC shift, and ART plans, D99 of the prostate was ≥97% of the prescription dose in 97.6%, 73.4%, 98.4%, and 96.8% of 124 fractions, respectively. Accordingly, D99 of the PLN was ≥97% of the prescription dose in 98.4%, 98.4%, 98.4%, and 100% of 124 fractions, respectively. For the rectum, D5 exceeded 105% of the planned D5 (and D5 of ART plans) in 11% (4%), 10% (2%), and 13% (5%) of 124 fractions, respectively. For the bladder, D5 exceeded 105% of the planned D5 (and D5 of ART) plans in 0% (2%), 0% (2%), and 0% (1%) of 124 fractions, respectively. Conclusion: For concurrent treatment of the prostate and PLN, with a planning margin to the prostate of 8 mm/6 mm posterior and a planning margin of 5 mm to the PLN, aligning to the prostate soft tissue can achieve adequate dose coverage to the both target volumes; aligning to the pelvic bone would result in underdosing to the prostate in one-third of fractions. With these planning margins, MLC tracking and ART methods have no dosimetric advantages.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2012

AdS/QCD, Light-Front Holography, and Sublimated Gluons

The gauge/gravity duality leads to a simple analytical and phenomenologically compelling nonperturbative approximation to the full light-front QCD Hamiltonian - 'Light-Front Holography', which provides a Lorentz-invariant first-approximation to QCD, and successfully describes the spectroscopy of light-quark meson and baryons, their elastic and transition form factors, and other hadronic properties. The bound-state Schroedinger and Dirac equations of the soft-wall AdS/QCD model predict linear Regge trajectories which have the same slope in orbital angular momentum L and radial quantum number n for both mesons and baryons. Light-front holography connects the fifth-dimensional coordinate of AdS space z to an invariant impact separation variable {zeta} in 3+1 space at fixed light-front time. A key feature is the determination of the frame-independent light-front wavefunctions of hadrons - the relativistic analogs of the Schroedinger wavefunctions of atomic physics which allow one to compute form factors, transversity distributions, spin properties of the valence quarks, jet hadronization, and other hadronic observables. One thus obtains a one-parameter color-confining model for hadron physics at the amplitude level. AdS/QCD also predicts the form of the non-perturbative effective coupling {alpha}{sub s}{sup AdS} (Q) and its {beta}-function with an infrared fixed point which agrees with the effective coupling a{sub g1} (Q{sup 2}) extracted from measurements of the Bjorken sum rule below Q{sup 2} < 1 GeV{sup 2}. This is consistent with a flux-tube interpretation of QCD where soft gluons with virtualities Q{sup 2} < 1 GeV{sup 2} are sublimated into a color-confining potential for quarks. We discuss a number of phenomenological hadronic properties which support this picture.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2018

Electroweak logarithms in inclusive cross sections

We expand the framework to perform all-orders resummation of electroweak logarithms of Q/M for inclusive scattering processes at energies Q much above the electroweak scale M . We determine all ingredients needed at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) order and provide an explicit recipe to implement this for 2 → 2 processes. PDF evolution including electroweak corrections, which lead to Sudakov double logarithms, is computed. If only the invariant mass of the final state is measured, all electroweak logarithms can be resummed by the PDF evolution, at least to LL. However, simply identifying a lepton in the final state requires the corresponding fragmentation function and introduces angular dependence through the exchange of soft gauge bosons. Furthermore, we show the importance of polarization effects for gauge bosons, due to the chiral nature of SU(2) — even the gluon distribution in an unpolarized proton becomes polarized at high scales due to electroweak effects. We justify our approach with a factorization analysis, finding that the objects entering the factorization theorem do not need to be SU(2) × U(1) gauge singlets, even though we perform the factorization and resummation in the symmetric phase. We also discuss a range of extensions, including jets and how to calculate the EW logarithms when you are fully exclusive in the central (detector) region and fully inclusive in the forward (beam) regions.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2012

Characterization of a triboelectric x-ray spectrum

Low-energy X-ray imaging system has been useful in medical diagnostic in order to obtain high contrast in soft tissue. Recently, Camara et al. and most recently Hird et al. have produced low-energy X-rays using a triboelectric effect. The main aim of this work is to characterize the penetration (beam quality) of a triboelectric X-ray source in terms of the computed Half Value Layer (HVL). Additionally, the computed HVL of the triboelectric X-ray source has been compared with the HVL of X-ray tube Mo-anode (Apogee 5000). According to our computations the triboelectric X-ray source has a similar penetration such as a X-ray tube source.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2021

Pre- and post-treatment image-based dosimetry in 90 Y-microsphere radioembolization using the TOPAS Monte Carlo toolkit

Objective.To evaluate the pre-treatment and post-treatment imaging-based dosimetry of patients treated with 90Y-microspheres, including accurate estimations of dose to tumor, healthy liver and lung. To do so, the Monte Carlo (MC) TOPAS platform is in this work extended towards its utilization in radionuclide therapy. Approach. In this study, five patients treated at the Massachusetts General Hospital were selected for this study. All patients had data for both pre-treatment SPECT-CT imaging using 99mTc-MAA as a surrogate of the 90Y-microspheres treatment and SPECT-CT imaging immediately after the 90Y activity administration. Pre- and post-treatment doses were computed with TOPAS using the SPECT images to localize the source positions and the CT images to account for tissue inhomoegeneities. We compared our results with analytical calculations following the voxel-based MIRD scheme. Main results. TOPAS results largely agreed with the MIRD-based calculations in soft tissue regions: the average difference in mean dose to the liver was 0.14 Gy GBq -1 (2.6%). However, dose distributions in the lung differed considerably: absolute differences in mean doses to the lung ranged from 1.2 to 6.3 Gy GBq -1 and relative differences from 153% to 231%. We also found large differences in the intra-hepatic dose distributions between pre- and post-treatment imaging, but only limited differences in the pulmonary dose. Significance. Doses to lung were found to be higher using TOPAS with respect to analytical calculations which may significantly underestimate dose to the lung, suggesting the use of MC methods for 90Y dosimetry. According to our results, pre-treatment imaging may still be representative of dose to lung in these treatments.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2018

EUV photolithography mask inspection using Fourier ptychography

Fourier ptychography is a computational imaging techniques that combines various full-field coherent images acquired under varied illumination angles and combined to yield a angular spectrum with a large synthetic numerical aperture and non-interferometric phase information. We present here the implementation of this technique in a full-field soft x-ray microscope designed to emulate modern EUV lithography tools imaging conditions, and we show that this technique can be used for the study of EUV photomasks. The technique allows us to quantitatively characterize phase defects (predominant in EUV lithography), to study new mask designs made of phase structures, to study sub-resolution assist features and extend the resolution of the microscope down to 26-nm, correspond to the N1 technology node.

Wojdyla, Antoine↗
NASA NTRS1982

Fault-tolerance memory system architecture for radiation induced errors

A fault-tolerant memory (FTM) architecture is presented which can be used to overcome soft memory errors induced by alpha particles, cosmic radiation, or other random sources. The characteristics of the FTM are presented, a mathematical model is developed, and numerical examples are considered to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach. The FTM architecture has been incorporated in the NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer (NSSC-II) which will be employed in a variety of future space payloads and experiments.

White, J. B., Jr.↗