The Energy Labs Snare 29 of 100

October / November 05 Volume 3 Number 5

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Each year, Chicago-based R&D Magazine presents awards to the top 100 industrial innovations worldwide. Often called the "Oscars of invention," awards will be presented in October. This year Department of Energy labs have won a total of 29 R&D 100 awards. They are:

Argonne National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, with four awards each; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, three awards each; the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, two awards; and Brookhaven National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory and Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, one award each. Here are highlights:

Sandia National Laboratories

TripleTred TechnologyTM Tire
What It Is: A new line of tires.
What It Does: Finite-element analysis was used to simulate and predict traction, wear, durability and other performance characteristics of the TripleTred in bringing it from concept to market in less than a year.
Potential Applications: Hello, it's a tire.
Who Did It: Martin Heinstein, Sam Key, Mark Blanford, Ken Alvin, Charles Stone, Harold Morgan, Greg Sjaardema, Arlo Ames, Deepesh Kholwadwala, Paul Wolfenbarger, Bob Kerr and John Mitchell along with the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

Ion-Photon Emission Microscope
What It Is: A patented exploratory ion beam microscope system.
What It Does: It determines the position at which an individual ion enters the surface of a sample.
Potential Applications: The machine's capabilities are identical with traditional single-ion nuclear microprobe analysis, mapping charge collection and other single-ion induced effects.
Who Did It: Barney Doyle, jointly with Mike Mellon of Quantar Technologies. Also, Paolo Rossi of the University of Padova, Italy, and Floyd Del McDaniel of the University of North Texas.

TEPIC Structural Foam
What It Is: Rigid structural foam developed at Sandia/California, designed originally to meet certain high-temperature and high-strength requirements for defense programs applications.
What It Does: Dimensionally and mechanically stable to temperatures in excess of 200º C, it meets processing requirements to be used as molding forms for advanced composite materials that cure at high temperatures.
Potential Applications: Cost and weight savings should allow smaller businesses, with less capital investment, to process new composite structures, and in general enable incorporation of advanced structural composites in aerospace, military, automotive and other consumer product industries.
Who Did It: Steve Goods, LeRoy Whinnery, Tom Bennett, Pat Keifer, Chris Binns, and Tim Shepodd. Also included is Jim Sampson of Scion Industries.

Global-Link
What It Is: Innovative data compression techniques.
What It Does: Allows rapid transmission of complex data that a doctor in the U.S. can confer with a doctor halfway around the world, viewing and manipulating 3-D MRI images in real time directly on each doctor's MRI computer. Similarly, oil team members can confer around the globe on observed data. So can military commanders.
Potential Applications: Extremely responsive interactions between an event and a remote, secure, high-resolution display are possible using Global-Link across the Internet.
Who Did It: Perry Robertson, Lyndon Pierson, John Eldridge, Ron Olsberg, Larry Pucket and Ed Witzke in collaboration with Logical Solutions, Inc.'s Ross Capen, Kevin Keefe and Mark Remlin.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The Biological Aerosol Mass Spectrometry (BAMS) System
What It Is: An advanced technology to rapidly detect the airborne release of biological threat agents.
What It Does: BAMS can analyze individual aerosol particles in real time and at high rates to almost instantly identify the presence and concentration of harmful biological particles in air samples.
Potential Applications: Designed for operation in office buildings that could be targets for a terrorist attack using a biological agent such as anthrax, or at ports of entry to monitor for potential epidemic diseases. Future biomedical applications could include rapid detection of respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and SARS.
Who Did It: Jim Birch, Keith Coffee, Matthias Frank, David Fergenson, Eric Gard, Norman Madden, Vincent Riot, Abneesh Srivastava, Paul Steele, Herbert Tobias, Todd Weisgraber and Bruce Woods.

NanoFoil®
What It Is: A heat source that enables lead-free soldering and brazing of materials at room temperature.
What It Does: The nanoengineered heat source heats only the interface being joined and permits large and small components to be metallically bonded with no thermal damage.
Potential Applications: NanoFoil acts as a rapid and local heat source replacing the furnaces and torches used in conventional soldering or brazing operations.
Who Did It: Troy Barbee Jr. shares the award with Reactive NanoTechnologies of Hunt Valley, Md. and Johns Hopkins University.

Adaptable Radiation Area Monitor (ARAM)
What It Is: A portable radiation monitoring system that can detect small amounts of radioactive materials from a distance.
What It Does: System detects even small quantities of radioactive materials moving at either slow speeds or as fast as 60 miles per hour.
Potential Applications: It can be used as a fixed detector to monitor slow-moving packages, luggage or pedestrians; as a roadside detector to monitor high-speed traffic or as a portable detector.
Who Did It: Dan Archer, Brock Beauchamp, Joe Mauger, Mike Mercer, Karl Nelson, David Pletcher, Vincent Riot, Tom Schaffer (now retired), Jim Schek, Dave Trombino and Guy Urbina, along with Innovative Survivability Technologies (IST) of Goleta, Calif.

VisIt
What It Is: Visualization software geared toward the parallel processing of large amounts of data, including simulations comprising trillions of bytes.
What It Does: A free, interactive parallel visualization and analysis tool that operates on one-, two- and three-dimensional data to produce images, movies and statistical reports.
Potential Applications: To date, VisIt has been downloaded more than 25,000 times by users from throughout the world. VisIt runs on a multitude of platforms, from Top500 machines like the Advanced Simulation Computing White to smaller parallel platforms using all types of Unix to desktop computers running Windows, Macintosh OS X, or Linux.
Who Did It: Eric Brugger, Sean Ahern, Kathleen Bonnell, Hank Childs, Linnea Cook, Jeremy Meredith, Mark Miller, and Brad Whitlock of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

CartaBlanca
What It Is: An object-oriented simulation software package offering next-generation modeling and simulation capabilities to scientists across disciplines.
What It Does: It enables code developers to simulate complex non-linear effects such as airflow through a turbo booster, blast effects on buildings or heat transfer along a semi-conductor.
Potential Applications: Has applications in aerospace engineering, animation and special effects, computational fluid dynamics, fluid/solid interactions, automotive design, weapons/target interactions, pharmaceutical processing and homeland defense.
Who Did It: Brian VanderHeyden, Nely Padial-Collins, Duan Z. Zhang, Qisu Zou, Giovani M. Lapenta and Stefano Markidis.

MESA: Measuring Enzyme-Substrate Affinities
What It Is: A low-cost assay for detecting the binding of drugs to proteins without the biasing influence of adding fluorescent molecular labels.
What It Does: MESA's ability to measure a large number of protein-drug interactions and its resulting early detection of toxicity could save hundreds of millions of dollars in drug development costs.
Potential Applications: MESA has applications in personalized medicine and assists in treating currently incurable diseases through identification of new protein targets for drug therapies.
Who Did It: George Havrilla and Edel Minogue along with Benjamin Warner of Caldera Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

nanoFOAM
What It Is: A metal-nanofoam fabrication technique.
What It Does: The technique produces self-supporting, nanoporous metal foams by igniting a pressed pellet of a special compound in an inert atmosphere. Nanofoams produced to date include iron, cobalt, copper and silver, which have values comparable to silica aerogels, the lightest known solids
Potential Applications: It can improve oil-refining processes and electrical generation from fuel cells that run on hydrocarbons, enhance the strength and heat transfer properties of jet-turbine blades while decreasing their weight, reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides from internal combustion engines and coal-fired power plants, remediate chlorohydrocarbons in the environment and increase the sensitivity of biomedical detectors.
Who Did It: Bryce C. Tappan, My Hang Huynh, Steven F. Son, Michael A. Hiskey, David E. Chavez and David M. Oschwald.

NESSUS
What It Is: A general-purpose tool for computing the reliability of engineered systems.
What It Does: Originally developed by a team led by Southwest Research Institute as part of a NASA project to develop a design tool for the space shuttle main engine. Recently, a team from LANL and SwRI enhanced and applied NESSUS to the lab's weapon reliability assessments for Stockpile Stewardship Program.
Potential Applications: New features include support for extremely large multi-physics models, a sophisticated Java-based graphical user interface, three-dimensional probability contouring and results visualization, advanced design of experiment and sensitivity analysis.
Who Did It: Edward Rodriguez and Jason Pepin in collaboration with a team from the Southwest Research Institute.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

The Sinton QSSPC Silicon Evaluation System
What It Is: A method of detecting impurities and defects in silicon boules—€”the material from which solar cells are made—€”early in the manufacturing process.
What It Does: The process gives manufacturers information to identify substandard silicon before it is made into cells, thereby increasing the number of efficient cells produced, boosting yields and reducing manufacturing costs.
Potential Applications: The evaluation system will enable the solar industry to keep up with product demand and growth.
Who Did It: David Mooney, Katie Brown and Sinton Consulting, Inc.

TREAT 2.6
What It Is: An energy modeling software that determines building energy consumption and cost effective energy efficiency upgrades for buildings.
What It Does: The tool gives building performance contractors and energy auditors a competitive edge in the areas of accurate energy-use analysis, energy efficiency improvement options and customer confidence.
Potential Applications: TREAT helps reduce home energy consumption and emission of carbon dioxide and other pollutants to the environment while minimizing home energy costs.
Who Did It: Michael Deru along with Taitem Engineering, Performance Systems Development and the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority.

Argonne National Laboratory

Microstimulator
What It Is: A miniature, self-contained, rechargeable, implantable neurostimulator.
What It Does: Designed to treat a wide variety of diseases including incontinence, chronic headaches, peripheral pain, angina and epilepsy, through minimally invasive surgery.
Potential Applications: An estimated 50 million Americans suffer from debilitating conditions that may benefit from treatment.
Who Did It: Khalil Amine, Bookeun Oh, Ilias Belharouak, Qingzheng Wang, Donald Vissers, Jeff Greiner, Curt Hafner, Kelly McClure, Matt Haller, Todd Whitehurt, Carla Mann and Alfred Mann; along with Joe Schulman, Dan Dell and John Gord of Alfred Mann Foundation; Hisashi Tsukamoto of Quallion LLC; and Robert West of the Organosilicon Research Center at the University of Wisconsin.

MPICH2
What It Is: A high-performance, portable implementation of community standards for the message-passing model of parallel computation.
What It Does: It enables application developers to run the same code on a wide variety of platforms through clusters of computers that can be assembled from off-the-shelf components.
Potential Applications: Materials science, combustion simulation, astrophysics, climate modeling and bioinformatics.
Who Did It: William Gropp, Ewing Lusk, Robert Ross, Rajeev Thakur and Brian Toonen. Additionally, significant contributors include David Ashton at Argonne, Ralph Butler at Middle Tennessee State University, and Anthony Chan at the University of Chicago.

Multilayer Lens Wafers for X-ray Lenses
What It Is: Helps focus the X-rays at the nanometer scale.
What It Does: The brilliant X-rays help researchers find infinite detail in a range of materials.
Potential Applications: Researchers will be able to visualize three-dimensional electronic circuit boards to find circuit errors or map impurities in biological or environmental samples at the nanometer scale. They can also analyze samples inside high-pressure or high-temperature cells.
Who Did It: Chian Liu, Raymond Conley and Albert Macrander.

Oxygen Sensor
What It Is: A high-temperature potentiometer oxygen sensor that can withstand the heat inside combustion chambers, allowing monitoring at the source in real time.
What It Does: Monitors combustion processes in coal-fire power plants, petrochemical plants, blast furnaces, glass processing equipment and internal combustion engines.
Potential Applications: By eliminating the need for costly and bulky high-temperature external plumbing for reference air, the sensor provides oxygen-sensing accuracy for about one-twentieth the cost.
Who Did It: Jules Routbort and Dileep Singh.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

The Morning Report
What It Is: A computational tool used to analyze large datasets of aviation information collected by onboard aircraft instruments.
What It Does: Continuous analysis of flight data can be used by aviation safety experts and airline policy makers to determine subtle but potentially serious safety issues.
Potential Applications: Aviation safety experts can pinpoint anomalies, share information with other decision makers and possibly prevent accidents.
Who Did It: Thomas A. Ferryman and Brett G. Amidan; along with Irving C. Statler and Thomas R. Chidester of NASA Ames; Loren J. Rosenthal of BMI; Robert E. Lynch of Flight Safety Consultants; Gary L. Prothero of ProWorks Corp; and Robert E. Lawrence of Safe Flight.