The Pacific Northwest is blessed with an abundance of precipitation. This rainfall, however, can have important consequences for industries that must process the resulting stormwater for proper discharge. This is particularly true of wood treatment facilities. Past management practices at wood preserving facilities located in the Western United States create...
Circuits operating outside the earth’s atmosphere are more vulnerable to cosmic radiation and require special design consideration. The purpose of this work is to explore methods of mitigating the effect of radiation in phase locked loop (PLL) circuits. Several voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) and two complete PLLs are designed and...
Hygro-mechanical effect is a general term applied to all phenomena that involves interaction between moisture content and mechanical characteristics of hygroscopic materials by analogy to thermo-mechanical effects. The hygromechanical effects include (but are not limited to) free shrinkage/swelling, effect of moisture on elastic modulus, strength, creep, failure mechanisms, and mechano...
The advent of synthetic adhesives has transformed the structural applications of wood. However, a persistent issue in adhesively-bonded wood products has been moisture durability. When designing wood based composites, moisture durability will depend on both the wood phase and the adhesive phase. A key question, therefore, is how does one...
The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate orthogonal cutting as a method to determine the fracture toughness of low and high density polyethylene and wood plastic composites. A test fixture was developed to capture normal and tangential cutting forces at variable depth and rake angle. A tool interface method...
Detection systems used to monitor reactor operations are of significant interest as tools for verification of operator declarations. Current reactor site safeguards are limited to visual inspections and intrusive monitoring systems. The recent development of antineutrino detectors may soon allow real-time monitoring from an unobtrusive location. Antineutrinos are produced through...
The Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor (MASLWR) is a small natural circulation pressurized light water reactor design that was developed by Oregon State University (OSU) and Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) under the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative (NERI) program to address the growing demand for energy and electricity....
Training is a key business process used to increase the skills and knowledge of employees in an effort to improve overall performance. Evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of training processes is necessary to ensure time, money, and resources are used to provide the most benefit possible. This investigation is...
This study investigated gel dosimetry with X-ray CT imaging as a possible means for extracting dose information from a 3D gel dosimeter. Currently Optical CT and MRI are the popular means of dose extraction, but X-ray CT imaging has the advantage of being more convenient and cost effective. The dosimetric...
The Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) has two possible core configurations, a hexagonal prismatic and a pebble bed. It is essential that an experimental facility be built for the validation of computer codes for the safe operation of the VHTR. The scaling of the prismatic core configuration has been analyzed...
As a major natural component of the extracellular matrix (ECM),
hyaluronic acid (HA) is an excellent choice for biomimetic, biocompatible
therapeutic materials. Furthermore, thiol-modified forms of HA are capable of
forming macroporous hydrogels that allow for both controlled cytokine release and
extensive vessel in-growth. It has previously been shown that...
A lack of data concerning tungsten-based medical shields, specifically unit dose transport pigs, may lead to unnecessary exposure to medical personnel. Available research comparing lead to sintered tungsten shows that tungsten is approximately 1.5 - 10.0 times more effective as a radiation shield. However, this research lacks high-energy vs. low-energy...
The application of lean to new product development (NPD) processes has been claimed to generate positive impact on NPD performance. There are very few empirical studies, however, on how organizations should apply lean practices or on the exact nature of the impact of lean on NPD performance. To further understand...
A limited scope Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) of a vented nuclear fuel system for a Generation IV Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Plant was performed. The goal of the study was to better understand the safety and licensing implications of vented fuel technology. A Level 1 PRA was performed to determine the...
The problem of determining whether a crack impinging on an interface will penetrate into the substrate or deflect along the interface is vital to the effective design of layered and composite material systems. Of particular interest is the transition between crack propagation by penetration through an interface and deflection along...
Compliance with 10CFR 20.101 requires that exposure to the skin be assessed at a depth of 0.007 cm over 10 cm² area. This depth generally corresponds to the interface between the epidermal and dermal layers of the skin. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission states the criteria for evaluating skin dose from...
Fortuitous dosimeters are radiosensitive objects carried by an individual who was exposed to radiation. These objects can be analyzed some time after exposure and the results can be used to aid in calculating radiation fields and doses received by individuals. Items that make good fortuitous dosimeters are those that are...
The Hydro-Mechanical Fuel Test Facility (HMFTF) is being built at Oregon State University to evaluate fluid flow through plate-type fuel assemblies. The first plate assembly that will be examined in the facility is the Generic Test Plate Assembly (GTPA). The GTPA consists of an array of six parallel flat plates,...
Population counts of aquatic insects can be a credible indicator of the overall health of a waterway. Stonefly (Plecoptera) larva are very sensitive to chemicals present within the waterway, however obtaining population counts of the larvae can be very labor intensive and thus costly. The BugID project has been working...
Currently, the temporal arc distribution across the ingot during the vacuum arc remelting (VAR) process is not a known or monitored parameter. It is has previously been shown that arcs can spatially constrict during VAR, and this constriction can lead to undesired defects in the material. Additionally, correct accounting for...
The advances in the nuclear sciences over the past sixty years have yielded many beneficial technologies and applications, such as power generation, food irradiation, and medical diagnostic devices and techniques. However, these advances have also allowed the advent of nuclear and radiological weapons. This paper will focus on one type...
A new group of lead free piezoelectric perovskite solid solutions, (1-x)Bi(B'B")O₃-xABO₃, were obtained via solid-state processing techniques. The solubility of unstable perovskite Bi(B'B")O₃ compounds into stable perovskite compounds was found to be related to the tolerance factor of the ABO₃ perovskite endmembers. The morphotropic phase boundary (MBP) in perovskite solid...
In source-detector radiation transport simulations, pulse height distributions are a useful metric in assessing the effectiveness of nuclear instrumentation. In the area of spectroscopy, pulse height distributions are used to identify an unknown source. It is widely believed that pulse height distributions cannot be created using deterministic methods. This quantity...
Nanostructured ceramics offer significant improvements in properties over the
corresponding materials with grain sizes on the order of tens to hundreds of microns.
Silicon carbide (SiC) is an important structural ceramic whose properties can
potentially be enhanced due to nanoscale microstructures. It has been suggested that
SiC samples with grain...
Oregon Department of Transportation’s bridge no. 9743b is a multi-span, two-girder steel deck bridge connecting the busy interstates 5 and 205. Vertical cracks have been detected in the welded girder-to-crossbeam connections at the bents. Distortion-induced fatigue is suspected to be responsible for the cracking. Linear elastic beam analysis, 2-D and...
This work entails both imaging and therapeutic applications of biomedical optics. In both contexts, an understanding of light transport in tissues is necessary. An overview of optical transport in tissues is given, including scattering theory. Digital Fourier holographic microscopy is introduced and applied as a means of metrology via optical...
Digital Image Correlation(DIC) is one of full-field strain measurement techniques devel- oped in recent decades, which has been well-demonstrated to conduct the mechanical properties study of solid materials, by collecting data using digital cameras. X-ray to- mography(CT) imaging helps the correlation techniques expanded to three dimensional investigation of materials, known...
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are a recent advancement in commercial nuclear reactor design with growing interest worldwide. New SMR concepts, such as the Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor (MASLWR), must undergo a licensing processes established by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) prior to commercial operation. Given the lack of...
For over 30 years, the Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) method has been used to
solve challenging problems in thermal radiative transfer. These problems are typically optically thick and di ffusive, as a consequence of the high degree of "pseudo-scattering" introduced to model the absorption and reemission of photons from a...
Irradiation of a tryptamine linked through its side-chain nitrogen to an alkylidene malonate residue results in an intramolecular [2 + 2] cycloaddition to the indole 2,3-double bond. The resultant cyclobutane undergoes spontaneous retro-Mannich fission to produce a spiro[indoline-3,3-pyrrolenine] with relative configuration defined by the orientation of substituents in the transient...
In order to address the energy needs of developing countries and remote communities, Oregon State University has proposed the Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor (MASLWR) design. In order to achieve five years of operation without refueling, use of 8% enriched fuel is necessary.
This dissertation is focused on core design...
Since its discovery, the anomalous dielectric behavior of CaCu₃Ti₄O₁₂ (CCTO)
has drawn a great deal of attention for many possible applications in electronic
devices. The origin of the giant dielectric constant in CCTO was explained via an
internal barrier layer capacitor model, and it has been reported that the dielectric...
Dendrimers are nanoscale macromolecules that have highly branched, core-shell structures. Higher generation dendrimers have close-packed peripheral functional groups and a hollow interior. The chemistry of the core and the terminal functionalities can be tailored according to the specific application. These structural characteristics provide room for the design of dendrimers to...