Laser peening of a turbine engine blisk

Success Stories--Lawrence Livermore National Lab

April / May 2005 Volume 3 Number 2

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Metal Improvement Company of Paramus, N. J., recently passed a significant milestone: laser peening of more than 10,000 Rolls Royce Trent fan blades for use in commercial aircraft engines.

Laser peening, a technique developed by Lawrence Livermore, extends beneficial compressive stress four times deeper below the surface than traditional shot peening can. By increasing the resistance to fatigue and failure of metal parts, the parts last longer and the required maintenance cycle is extended. For a major aircraft company, the payoff can be tens of millions of dollars.

The breakthrough that provides these benefits is a powerful LLNL laser and shock-generation technology used by Metal Improvement to treat the surface of metal parts.

Laser peening used to be a slow, R&D process restricted to the laboratory. Then Livermore applied its expertise in short-pulse lasers to it, and today laser peening is a production process. A laser generating pressure pulses of one million pounds per square inch repeating three times every second creates shockwaves that travel through the metal to impart a layer of beneficial compressive stress.

Livermore's technology for laser peening was licensed to Metal Improvement, a subsidiary of Curtiss-Wright Corp., in 1997 and has been extended through joint research with the company during the past seven years. In May 2002, MIC started operations at a new laser peening production facility in Livermore. The Livermore facility has since been approved by the Federal Aviation Administration as a repair station for specialized laser peening services.
Laser peening may find use in the future for upgrading other commercial aircraft components, such as discs, landing gear, wing skins, bulkheads and rotary drive gears. It also has potential for use in other industries, including components and structures for high-performance military jets; parts for deep-sea oil drilling equipment; welds for nuclear waste storage containers, and for medical devices such as knee and hip implants.

During their collaboration, LLNL's Laser Science and Technology Division and the company have won four R&D 100 awards for developing laser peening-related technologies.

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A Detector That Screens for Radioisotopes

In late 2002, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration identified an urgent national need for a portable, easy-to-use radiation detector that could accurately screen for dangerous radioisotopes in luggage or shipping containers and report its results on the spot.

Just such a detector, called RadScout, had already been built and demonstrated at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but it was not yet available as a commercial product that could be used by security and emergency response workers.

RadScout project managers and business development experts from the lab's Industrial Partnerships and Commercialization (IPAC) office went to work to find a company that could quickly move the LLNL technology to the marketplace. By the end of 2002, the lab had agreed in principal with ORTEC Products of Oak Ridge, Tenn., to develop RadScout into a commercial product.

ORTEC, a business unit of AMETEK, Inc. and a world leader in the manufacture of radiation detectors, had prior experience working with LLNL and was "eager to make it happen," said Ray Pierce of the Lab's Defense and Nuclear Technologies Program. With a product line that includes more than 1,600 products, ORTEC "brought a lot to the table," Pierce said. "They didn't want to just buy the technology from us and make the detector. They wanted to add their strengths and make it even better."

The RadScout licensing agreements included several unusual features that helped ORTEC meet an accelerated deadline for commercializing the technology. Instead of providing only basic patent descriptions, the laboratory supplied ORTEC with engineering drawings and detailed specifications for RadScout, as well as the computer software that allows the detector to distinguish among different types of radioisotopes with much greater accuracy than traditional radiation detectors.

For its part, the company agreed to quality and production performance specifications that would ensure the detector would meet the government's homeland security requirements in rapid time. The agreements gave the company flexibility to improve the design if it could.

The agreements were formally signed in the spring of 2003, and the first commercial version of RadScout, called the ORTEC Detective, was available for sale within a few months. Since its introduction in October 2003, ORTEC has sold dozens of units to the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and various homeland security and law enforcement agencies. There has been even greater interest in the Detective EX, with additional features, launched in December 2003.

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Detecting, Diagnosing Health Threats

Cepheid, a diagnostics instrumentation company in Sunnyvale, Calif., is another fast-growing Livermore spinoff that is applying LLNL technology to enhance both health care and homeland security.

Cepheid uses a Livermore-developed method for quickly analyzing DNA samples to detect the presence of biohazards such as anthrax, as well as cancer and infectious diseases. The brainchild of researcher Allen Northrup, Livermore's rapid polymerase chain reaction, or rapid PCR, technique makes it possible to genetically analyze a sample of air, blood, urine or feces for the presence of a health hazard and report the results in just 30 minutes. Physicians can use the technology to determine the stage of a disease and assess what therapy might be most effective. Other potential applications include ensuring that pregnant women are free of Group B streptococcus bacteria, and helping to identify populations at risk for certain diseases.

Genetic testing involves a number of complicated steps, including sample preparation, amplification and detection. Based on state-of-the-art microfluidic and microelectronic technologies, Cepheid's systems integrate these steps and analyze complex biological samples in proprietary test cartridges.

Cepheid was launched in 1996 by Northrup and Silicon Valley engineer/entrepreneur Kurt Petersen, acquired a license for rapid PCR from Livermore within a year, and quickly raised $3.2 million to begin developing the technology into a commercial product. Three years and $62 million later, Cepheid's first product, SmartCycler®, was ready to ship to researchers; the innovative technology won a 2000 R&D 100 award from R&D Magazine.

Although initially developed primarily for critical medical tests, SmartCycler won national attention for its biohazard detection capabilities shortly after deadly anthrax powder began showing up in the U.S. mail in the fall of 2001. SmartCycler machines were used to help determine where the anthrax contamination had spread. Soon Cepheid teamed with Northrup Grumman to develop fast-turnaround detection systems for the U.S. postal service using Cepheid's second-generation GeneXpert® machines. The USPS plans to deploy the systems in more than 250 mail processing centers across the country.

The SmartCycler also forms the heart of the BASIS, or Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information System, an environmental monitoring system developed jointly by Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories along with Ruprecht and Patashnick Co., Inc., of New York. Using a network of sampling stations to collect aerosol samples, the BASIS system can detect a biological incident within a few hours of an attack, permitting effective medical intervention.