Over the years, the Department of Energy has supported the basic research for 698 projects that have won R&D 100 Awards for promising technologies, products or processes—€”among the highest number collected for any government agency or private enterprise.

DOE laboratories, which won 34 percent of the R&D 100 awards this year are: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with seven awards; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with six awards; Los Alamos National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, with five awards each; Idaho National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with four awards each; Sandia National Laboratories with two awards; and Ames National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory with one award each.

"I congratulate the researchers who have won these awards, which highlight the power and promise of DOE's investments in science and technology," Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said. "Through the efforts of dedicated and innovative scientists and engineers at our national laboratories, DOE is helping to enhance our nation's energy, economic and national security."

Each year, R&D Magazine presents awards to the top 100 industrial innovations worldwide. Awards are based on each achievement's technical significance, uniqueness and usefulness compared to competing projects and technologies. Here's a sampling:

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Easy Livermore Inspection Test for Explosives (ELITE)

What It Is: An explosives detector designed for one-time use that can be disposed of as regular (non-hazardous) waste.
What It Does: The new explosives detector is highly sensitive to more than 30 different explosives, making it one of the most effective explosive detection systems available. It is light (weighing a fraction of an ounce), small (the size of a 2-inch by 3-inch index card), inexpensive (costing less than $25, and substantially less in higher quantities) and stable (with a shelf life of about two years). It can detect explosives within one to four minutes.
Potential Applications: Several of the devices can fit easily into a shirt pocket and can be used on vehicle door handles during routine traffic stops, on surfaces and door handles of suspicious parked vehicles or on suspicious packages.
Who Did It: John Reynolds, Peter Nunes, J. Del Eckels, Randall Simpson and former lab employee Jeff Haas.

UltraSpec

What It Is: A new high-precision radiation detector that operates at very low temperatures, and could assist security officials in identifying even small amounts of nuclear materials.
What It Does: UltraSpec offers comparable precision to mass spectrometers for quantifying material composition, yet its operation also is automated so that non-specialists can operate it with the push of a button.
Potential Applications: As a gamma-ray spectrometer, it provides an energy resolution that is 10 times better than conventional instruments. This capability is not only important for identifying illicit sources of nuclear material, but also for ensuring the safety of stored nuclear material at nuclear power plants, weapons stockpiles and waste facilities.
Who Did It: Stephan Friedrich, Simon Labov, Thomas Niedermayr, Owen Drury and Jan Batteux.

Sonoma Persistent Surveillance System

What It Is: The first integrated, broad-area, high-resolution, real-time motion imagery system for surveillance applications.
What It Does: Provides continuous, real-time video imagery of an area the size of a small city with resolutions sufficient to track up to 8,000 moving objects within the field of view.
Potential Applications: Monitoring traffic, special events, border security and harbors. Sonoma is expected to cost about one-tenth the price of comparably sized sensor systems.
Who Did It: Michael Kartz, Deanna Pennington, Gary Stone, David Bloom, Robert Sawvel, Allen House, Aaron Wegner, Curtis Brown and Michael Newman, and former employees Laurence Flath, John Marion and Daniel Knight.

YCOB Wavelength Converter

What It Is: A high-average-power wavelength conversion device, which uses an yttrium calcium oxyborate (YCOB) crystal that can change the "color" of laser light.
What It Does: Permits large-aperture high-average-power lasers to operate at half the wavelength of the laser crystal's natural emission wavelength.
Potential Applications: Ceramics and plastics could be more efficiently machined with ultraviolet light, and copper metal for electronic circuit boards could be more efficiently cut with green light. The YCOB wavelength converter holds the current world record for an average-power, high-pulse-energy laser. One YCOB crystal can replace eight optical components.
Who Did It: Chris Ebbers, Zhi Liao, Kathy Allen, Kathy Alviso, Andy Bayramian, Mike Benapfl, Camille Bibeau, Rob Campbell, Manuel Carrillo, Barry Freitas, Robert Kent, Tony Ladran, Rod Lanning, Steve Mills, Stan Oberhelman, Steve Payne, Noel Peterson, Greg Rogowski, Steve Sutton, Kathleen Schaffers, Steve Telford, Peter Thelin, Everett Utterback, Dave Van Lue and Bruce Warner.

Externally Dispersed Interferometer (EDI)

What It Is: A technique to conduct precision measurements of the Doppler velocities of stars or sunlit targets.
What It Does: The EDI technique provides a threefold improvement in spectral resolution at a tiny fraction of the cost of a $4 million conventional grating spectrograph. The EDI system also is much smaller, weighing 50 pounds and about the size of a television set, compared with the conventional grating spectrograph, which weighs 16,000 pounds and is the size of a kitchen. It is believed that with EDI more universities and colleges that could otherwise not afford multi-million installations could now conduct precision Doppler measurements.
Potential Applications: Using a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, and in conjunction with collaborators from Cornell University and UC Berkeley, the team plans to search for planets around low-temperature stars in the infrared region. The work is under way at the Mount Palomar Observatory near San Diego.
Who Did It: LLNL physicist, David Erskine, and Jerry Edelstein, an astronomer at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory.

Sapphire

What It Is: A technology that analyzes algorithms allowing the exploration of large, complex and multidimensional data sets.
What It Does: By applying ideas from data mining, video processing, statistics and pattern recognition, lab researchers are developing new computational tools and techniques that are used to extract useful information from huge data sets.
Potential Applications: Sapphire technology is being applied to a variety of disciplines, including plasma physics experiments and simulations, remote sensing imagery, video surveillance, climate simulations, astronomy, and fluid mix experiments and simulations. The lab team has six patents on Sapphire technology.
Who Did It: Chandrika Kamath, Abel Gezahegne, Cyrus Harrison, and Nu Ai Tang and former lab employees Erick Cantu-Paz and Samson Cheung.

Babel

What It Is: A tool distinguished by its high-performance language interoperability, enabling cross language communication with minimal runtime overhead.
What It Does: Babel's Scientific Interface Definition Language (SIDL) describes the calling interface (but not the implementation) of a particular software library. SIDL tools such as Babel use this interface description to generate glue code that allows a software library implemented in one supported language to be called from any other supported language.
Potential Applications: The scientists who use Babel, or Babel-based component models, are given the ability to cheaply integrate almost any library or third-party tool available into their scientific application. It also ends the old "language wars," as the best language for the job can be used for each component of the system.
Who Did It: Tom Epperly, Gary Kumfert, Tamara Dahlgren and James Leek. Former team member Scott Kohn played a key role in the original LDRD project.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Green Primaries

What It Is: Novel, nontoxic, explosive chemical compounds designed to replace lead-based primary explosives.
What It Does: In addition to being more environmentally friendly (no heavy-metal residues), they are safer to manufacture. They pose no explosion danger during the manufacturing process because they are insensitive to spark and can be manufactured in several variants.
Potential Applications: Civilian ammunition for both hunting and law enforcement; military ammunition and explosive devices; mining, excavation, and demolition detonators; projectile propellants; industrial motors, actuators, and valves; gas generators; pyrotechnics; and miniaturized explosive systems.
Who Did It: My Hang V. Huynh, Ernest L. Hartline, Dennis P. Montoya, Herbert H. Harry, Kien-Yin Lee, Jose Gil Archuleta, Edward L. Roemer, Kenneth E. Laintz, Scott A. Kinkead, Victor E. Sanders, Anna M. Giambra and Lloyd L. Davis.

MICHELLE

What It Is: A general purpose 2-D and 3-D charged-particle optics code that self-consistently computes the emission and transport of charged particles in the presence of electrostatic and magnetostatic fields.
What It Does: It simulates the operation of a wide variety of charged-particle-beam devices and can calculate up to 200,000 particle trajectories. It is the only code that provides accurate simulations of several advanced guns and collectors used in high-power microwave tubes.
Potential Applications: These simulations provide physical insights that have saved years of trial-and-error in the laboratory and led to longer-lasting microwave tubes for defense-radar systems, more cost-effective tubes for satellite-communication systems, and higher power tubes for particle-accelerator and deep-space communication systems.
Who Did It: Eric Nelson of Scientific Visual and Computational Geometry (X-3-SVCG); Baruch Levush of the Naval Research Laboratory; John Petillo, Kenneth Eppley, Dimitrios Panagos, Paul Blanchard, Warren Krueger, Tom McClure, and Alfred Mondelli of the Science Applications International Corp.; John DeFord, Ben Held and Liya Chernyakova of Simulation Technology and Applied Research Inc.; Norman Dionne of Raytheon; Stan Humphries Jr. of Field Precision; Jim Burdette of L-3 Communications, Electron Technologies Inc.; Mark Cattelino of Communications and Power Industries and Richard True of L-3 Communications, Electron Devices.

PixelVizion

What It Is: A network processor unit-based computer visualization tool that brings a hardware-assisted, lossless, highly scalable, high-frame-rate solution to the bottleneck created by image compositing.
What It Does: The tool composites data at rates 10 to 20 times faster than those of current technologies. As a cost-effective, commercial, off-the-shelf technology, it eliminates the need for an expensive network interconnect and accommodates a variety of software rendering packages.
Potential Applications: Orthopedics, rehabilitation, and sports science; virtual medical training; specialized diagnostic imaging; virtual skin grafting; weather patterns; large-scale scientific problems; animation and special effects; video game graphics; and film post processing.
Who Did It: Carolyn Connor Davenport, David H. DuBois, Andrew J. DuBois, Parks M. Fields, Fredie Marshall, Laura M. Monroe, Stephen W. Poole, David R. Pugmire and Alfred Torrez.

Energetic Neutral Atom Beam Lithography & Epitaxy (ENABLE)

What It Is: Employing an energetic collimated beam of neutral nitrogen or oxygen atoms, ENABLE comprises a dual-function nanofabrication technology capable of both growing thin films and etching high-aspect-ratio nanostructures.
What It Does: Its low-temperature operation eliminates diffusive and other unwanted surface chemical changes, which are drawbacks of existing nanofabrication processes. Because its precise, high-aspect-ratio nanoscale etching and rapid, high-quality thin film growth capabilities readily can be combined, ENABLE technology is theoretically capable of fabricating details down to one nanometer or less in size, giving it greater versatility than current nanofabrication processes.
Potential Applications: Wide bandgap semiconductors, solid-state lighting, ultraviolet and blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and lasers, multicolor flat-panel display technologies, photovoltaic devices, nanowires, high-quality dielectrics (supercapacitors) and high-capacity microbatteries.
Who Did It: Mark Hoffbauer, Alexander H. Mueller and Elshsan Akhadov.

Trident

What It Is: A high-level language compiler that supports floating-point data types and operations.
What It Does: It translates into field programmable-gate-array hardware scientific algorithms in the C computer programming language that contain floating-point mathematics.
Potential Applications: Trident, combined with tools to locate computationally intensive regions, may be used to identify blocks of code suitable for acceleration through the use of reconfigurable-logic arrays.
Who Did It: Justin L. Tripp, Kristopher D. Peterson, Jeffrey D. Poznanovic, Christine Ahrens, Neil J. Steiner and Maya B. Gokhale.

Sandia National Laboratories

Compute Process Allocator (CPA)

What It Is: A computer algorithm technology that increases processing efficiency on massively parallel supercomputers.
What It Does: Maximizes throughput by managing how processors are assigned to particular computing jobs, given a stream of computing jobs submitted to a job queue.
Potential Applications: The optimized node allocation strategy employed by CPA increased throughput by 23 percent, in effect, processing five jobs in the time it normally took to process four.
Who Did It: Kevin Pedretti and Vitus Leung.

HTSS10V

What It Is: A solid-state, fluoride-based battery that is safer than traditional batteries in high-temperature applications such as oil, gas and geothermal drilling.
What It Does: Solid-state battery technology offers the largest temperature range—€”room temperature to 500 degrees Celsius—€”of any battery technology.
Potential Applications: The batteries will be produced in Sarov, Russia, and in San Diego, Calif., for high-end oil and gas drilling uses. Researchers are currently working on a rechargeable version for laptop computers.
Who Did It: Gloria Chavez and Randy Normann.

Argonne National Laboratory

Ultrafast Hydrogen Sensor

What It Is: The world's fastest commercially producible hydrogen sensor, which will be used in cars to detect unsafe levels of hydrogen.
What It Does: The new sensor detects hydrogen quickly and at low enough levels to allow closing of safety valves before dangerous concentrations are reached.
Potential Applications: The sensors also have applications in space stations, mining and medical devices. Argonne's hydrogen sensor will greatly increase safety for future hydrogen-powered buses, cars and space applications.
Who Did It: Michael Zach, Tao Xu and Zhili Xiao (joint with Northern Illinois University).

Anti-scatter Grids and Collimators for Nuclear Imaging

What It Is: Improves x-ray imaging, used in mammography, chest x-rays and other medical imaging applications.
What It Does: As x-rays interact with tissue and bones, the x-rays scatter at random angles as well as hitting their target, resulting in noise and fog in each individual image. Anti-scatter grids, placed between the x-rays and their target, yield higher-quality images.
Potential Applications: Collimators, similar to grids, are used for nuclear imaging to direct only the desired radiation to the detector. These improved images will reduce both false positives and false negatives, leading to an ultimate result of saved lives and lower costs.
Who Did It: Derrick Mancini, Ralu Divan and Judi Yaeger at Argonne; Olga Makarova, Guohua Yang and Cha-Mei Tang at Creatv MicroTech, Inc.; and former Argonne employees Vladislav N. Zyryanov, now at Illinois Institute of Technology, and Nicolaie Moldovan, now at Northwestern University.

Metal Dusting

What It Is: Materials resistant to metal dusting degradation.
What It Does: It will be used to make more durable equipment in plants that manufacture hydrogen.
Potential Applications: This innovation could save $220-290 million per year in the hydrogen industry alone and could increase industrial productivity by enabling machinery to function with fewer maintenance shutdowns. Such savings will become increasingly important as hydrogen is used more as a source of energy.
Who Did It: Ken Natesan and Zuotao Zeng.

Multiport Dryers

What It Is: Will improve the efficiency of dryers used in paper mills.
What It Does: It dramatically increases the effectiveness of heat transfer from steam to the paper, increasing productivity and saving energy.
Potential Applications: It is being designed so that it may be installed in existing dryer cylinders at a cost that may be less than 20 percent of the installed cost of a new dryer.
Who Did It: Stephen U.S. Choi and Ralph Niemann of Argonne. Other institutions involved, the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Kadant Johnson, Three Rivers, Mich.

Separative Bioreactors

What It Is: A separative bioreactor for the production and recovery of biobased products, which will enable biobased chemical products to be used in place of petrochemicals.
What It Does: Combines the selectivity of fermentation reactions, the technical advantages of heterogenous catalysis (where a substance is used to speed the reaction of another substance in a different phase) and the energy efficiency of electrically driven separations with the performance advantages of chromatography in a single operation.
Potential Applications: The Separative bioreactor enables the efficient production of organic acids, reducing the cost of producing biobased products by half from previous methods.
Who Did It: Seth W. Snyder, YuPo J. Lin, Michael P. Henry, Michelle B. Arora, Edward J. St. Martin, Jamie A. Hestekin (now at Kraft Foods) and James R. Frank; Thomas P. Binder, Rishi Shukla, K.N. Mani, Ahmad Hilaly, Wuli Bao and William F. Ellis of Archer Daniels Midland Company.

Idaho National Laboratory

Nano-Composite Arsenic Sorbent (N-CAS)

What It Is: A long-lasting, high-capacity nano-composite polymer particle
What It Does: Removes arsenic concentrations from water
Potential Applications: It renders water safe to drink and compliant with U.S. and world drinking water standards.
Who Did It: Troy Tranter, Nick Mann, Scott Herbst and Terry Todd.

Compact High Efficiency Natural Gas Liquefier

What It Is: A new, patented process to make liquefied natural gas (LNG) directly from pipeline gas.
What It Does: It significantly decreases the work involved with precleaning the methane.
Potential Applications: Other plant models are being designed to adapt to higher CO2 concentrations, nitrogen content, higher and lower pressure distribution lines, connections at non-letdown points, and to liquefy a higher percentage of incoming gas.
Who Did It: Bruce Wilding, Terry Turner, Mike McKellar, Kerry Klingler, Dennis Bingham, Frank Carney and Douglas Stacey.

INL Robot Intelligence Kernel

What It Is: A low-cost, on-board control architecture.
What It Does: It gives robots exceptional new levels of autonomy and intelligence that revolutionizes robot capabilities and the robot/operator relationship.
Potential Applications: Provides performance enhancements in areas including urban search and rescue, landmine detection, remote characterization of high-radiation environments, facility security, assessing hazardous spills and identifying and pursuing criminals or terrorists.
Who Did It: David Bruemmer, Douglas Few, Miles Walton, Curtis Nielsen and Robert Kinoshita.

Xtreme Xylanase (Hemicellulase)

What It Is: A highly acid- and thermo-stable xylanase (an enzyme).
What It Does: It breaks down cellulose and hemicellulose from biomass into simple sugars used to produce fuels and chemicals.
Potential Applications: It can help to make biorefineries commercially competitive with petroleum much sooner than with current technologies.
Who Did It: Bill Apel, Vicki Thompson, David Thompson, Kastli Schaller, Elizabeth Taylor and Morgan Bruno.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Ti MIM

What It Is: A technique for titanium metal injection molding.
What It Does: It enables production of high-quality titanium metal parts for biomedical, aviation and automotive industries at lower cost, higher production rates and better quality than existing production processes.
Potential Applications: Ti MIM is expected to be a boon for biomedical, aerospace and automotive industries.
Who Did It: Eric Nyberg, Kevin L. Simmons and K. Scott Weil.

SIM

What It Is: A surface-induced mineralization technique.
What It Does: It allows calcium-phosphate coatings enhanced with therapeutic agents to be deposited on orthopedic implants and medical devices, enhancing bone-bonding and reducing or eliminating the growth of bacteria and thereby reducing the rate of post-surgical infection.
Potential Applications: Will allow for enhanced bone bonding of artificial joints.
Who Did It: Allison A. Campbell, Xiaohong Shari Li, Peter Rieke and Barbara Tarasevich; and former lab staff members Lin Song and Marisol Avila.

The MilliWave Thermal Analyzer

What It Is: A thermal analysis instrument.
What It Does: It uses millimeter-wave electromagnetic radiation to measure the temperature, amount of energy emitted, and physical change of materials, processes, and systems.
Potential Applications: This technology can function under extreme environments (such as very high temperatures) because contact is not required between the instrumentation and the materials; therefore, sampling of the materials is not required and the measurements can be made in real-time.
Who Did It: SK Sundaram (PNNL), Paul Woskov (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and William E. Daniel, Jr. (Savannah River National Laboratory).

e-RESS

What It Is: Improves the process for using nanoparticles in coating medical devices, such as cardiovascular stents.
What It Does: Allows for more consistent delivery of pharmaceutical agents.
Potential Applications: Could potentially reduce the need for replacement surgeries caused by the build-up of tissue.
Who Did It; John L. Fulton, George S. Deverman and Clement R. Yonker of PNN and James B. McClain, Charles Douglas Taylor and James DeYoung of Micell Technologies.

Cesium-131 Brachytherapy Seed

What It Is: A significant advancement in brachytherapy for cancer treatment.
What It Does: It delivers a highly targeted therapeutic dose of radiation to the tumor quickly and with potentially fewer side effects than other treatment options.
Potential Applications: It is used for the treatment of prostate and other cancers.
Who Did It: Larry Greenwood, Mark Murphy, Darrell Fisher, Deborah Coffey, Chuck Soderquist and Roman Piper (PNNL); David Swanberg, Donald Segna, Lane Bray, Garrett Brown, Matthew Bales, Clay O'Laughlin, Oleg B. Egorov and Michael Dunlop (IsoRay Medical); Christopher Smith (Intellegration); James Madsen (Columbia Basin Consulting Group); and Leroy Korb (Cancer Care Center, Warren, Pa.).