Sandia National Laboratories pulsed power director Keith Matzen explains some intricacies of Sandia's Z machine to visitor Yasuyuki Kaneko. (Photo by Lloyd Wilson) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Z — the most powerful laboratory producer of X-rays on Earth — regularly examines plutonium to study the fissile material’s properties. The large accelerator has done this eight times in the last three years. The U.S. government’s view is that tests of a few grams of plutonium are ecologically responsible, safe and don’t violate the U.S. unofficial moratorium on nuclear testing that’s been in effect for more than two decades.

But each firing is widely reported in Japan, Kaneko said in an interview, and the reports motivate councilors in hundreds of Japanese cities to write letters of protest to President Barack Obama. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum resets its “Peace Watch Tower” clock to zero after each Z shot. The reset indicates the amount of time since the last global nuclear weapons test.

However, Kaneko doubted the danger widely perceived by his countrymen.

“I’ve read your website,” he said, “and I’m convinced the experiments are not dangerous.”

But millions of Japanese “think it’s a big explosion [when Z fires],” he said.

So, he said, “I have come here to see why you do your experiment with all my eyes.”

He came alone because no other Sapporo councilors wanted to come. Of his city’s 68 council members, he said, only three opposed sending letters to the American president. The other two dissenters, several decades older than the 42-year-old Kaneko, were reluctant to undertake the lengthy journey.

Sandia Pulsed Power Sciences Center director Keith Matzen, asked by the National Nuclear Security Administration to host the hour-long tour, answered Kaneko’s question of how much plutonium was involved in a Z test shot by pulling a nickel from his pocket. “The amount of plutonium used is less than the size of this coin,” he said.

Kaneko, who has little scientific background (he majored in college in economics and law), had no trouble understanding the coin comparison. He said later, “The amount is much smaller than I expected. It is not dangerous because I can touch the container in the facility. Also, they do experiments there every day [so it’s not a bomb site].”

Given that he held a favorable position toward Z before he came to Sandia, would his first-hand report be greeted by skepticism at home?

“The truth is most powerful to convince someone,” Kaneko said.

The Z machine is a contender to produce break-even nuclear fusion power in the laboratory. Break-even —  harvesting as much energy from a reaction as put into it — is the next major fusion goal and would be a step in acheiving virtually unlimited energy from sea water.

For more information, visit the Z machine website.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

Are you scratching your head yet? This is the daunting task faced by analysts working for the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems (PEO GCS), who help the nation’s top generals decide which Army vehicles to modernize for future wars.

Sandia National Laboratories worked closely with the U.S. Army and others to develop the Capability Portfolio Analysis Tool for the Army's Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems. The software can analyze countless what-if scenarios to help the nation's top generals decide which vehicles to modernize. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army.) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Sandia National Laboratories, working closely with the Army and other contractors, has developed key components of a software tool to help the PEO GCS analyze countless what-if scenarios that can be manipulated as technology advances and the global environment, the federal budget or other factors change. Sandia calls this advanced combination of modeling, simulation and optimization decision support software the Capability Portfolio Analysis Tool (CPAT).

Award-winning tool

CPAT won the 2012 Military Operations Research Society’s Richard H. Barchi Prize, and its Sandia developers say senior Army leaders are expanding the use of the 2-year-old tool across a number of Army modernization programs.

The Sandia researchers envision adapting CPAT to help make a variety of complex decisions easier throughout the military and elsewhere.

“This has really revolutionized the way the Army thinks about things. It’s been a big shift in paradigm for how they do analysis,” said Liliana Shelton, a Sandia computer scientist and CPAT’s technical lead. “About a year after we started from a blank sheet of paper, it started getting used by people once they saw the capability and the questions we could answer.”

Alan Nanco, Sandia’s CPAT capability manager, said the tool that supports PEO GCS answers questions about ground combat vehicle modernization by combining optimization — mathematical formulas, software language and a user interface that clarifies results — with a large number of choices that helps the Army leadership narrow millions of choices into a handful of options that best balance its goals while staying within budget, schedule or other constraints.

“The beauty of the tool that we have developed in collaboration with the Army is it’s better to evaluate how you’re going to pick among such a huge array of options if you have tools that will walk your equipment and your people through a scenario,” Nanco said.

Growing partnership with Army leads to CPAT

The analytic support CPAT provides grew out of a partnership between Sandia and the Army that started more than a decade ago. Sandia had been using computer modeling and simulation and system-of-systems engineering to support decisions for upgrading and modernizing nuclear weapons systems by making choices associated with reliability, safety and security, Nanco said. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Army wanted to use that systems engineering and analysis expertise to support complex decisions for modernizing the Army’s combat systems to create “modular brigade combat teams,” Nanco said.

For CPAT, Sandia worked closely with the Army to develop the structure of the models, the algorithms, the mathematical formulation for the optimization tool and the software that makes CPAT user-friendly and displays the results so analysts can use them to brief decision-makers, Shelton said. Other contractors are responsible for data collection feeding in and assumptions made by the software.

Craig Lawton, the lead for Sandia’s PEO GCS projects, said other contractors input specific requirements for each vehicle’s capabilities. Then, those capabilities are matched to each mission, and CPAT takes into account operating, maintenance and research and development costs.

Shelton added: “These are all the decisions you have to balance when you do an optimization run.”

When PEO GCS calls Sandia, Shelton said she can get answers in days — a process that used to take weeks. The results are a variety of data and graphs that help analysts quickly compare what-if scenarios or choose the best path to modernize a vehicle or see where different choices fall in meeting the military’s long-term goals. Eventually, Sandia envisions training Army systems analysts to use CPAT themselves.

In the real world, most choices are trade-offs, Shelton said.

“You look at different levels of modernization because at different budgets, you might not be able to afford the gold-plated solution. There’s something in between, like a happy medium, that they can afford, so they can still improve the capability without breaking the bank,” she said.

As a situation changes over time, Sandia and its partners can input new information into the underlying assumptions to show how various changes have an impact on the entire system, she said.

In its two-plus years of existence, CPAT already has shown its value by correcting a misconception as to whether two certain military vehicles could be modernized at the same time.

“The tool reported differently and bucked conventional wisdom, leading to its success,” Lawton said.

‘Sky’s the limit’ for CPAT applications

CPAT has been so successful that the assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology asked that it be briefed to other Army PEOs. As a result, Sandia is working with other Army PEOs, such as Enterprise Information Systems, to apply it to their complex decision-making processes. Sandia has taken action to meet anticipated demand for the tool, Lawton said.

Eventually, CPAT could be adapted to other military branches or applied to entirely different, complex decision-making processes in other large organizations.

“The challenge is each organization has different things that they are managing. Conceptually you are making decisions about how you invest your money, but the details of what goes into it are very, very different,” Lawton said. He added, “The sky’s the limit.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Heather Clark, hclark@sandia.gov, (505) 844-3511

But in the second round, the brain is back.

A Sandia National Laboratories-supported workshop in Albuquerque called NICE, for Neuro-Inspired Computational Elements workshop, discussed ways to use the brain’s superior ability to send electrical signals along massively parallel channels, with multiple intersections at downstream nodes, to handle rapidly changing, high-volume information.

The hope is that rather than using the limited “if this, then that” logic of conventional computer architectures to absorb steadily increasing yet often incomplete data, cognitive systems will be able — like the brain — to learn, adapt, hypothesize, and then suggest answers.

As Julia Phillips, Sandia vice president and chief technology officer, put it in her opening talk, “Neuro-inspired computing is at the intersection of cognitive science and technology, nano devices, microsystems and computer and information sciences. It transcends our traditional approaches.”

It also happens to reside at the major crossroads of Sandia research areas, she pointed out.

Of course, conventional computer architectures still predominate and Moore’s Law isn’t dead yet — just “eroding,” as Sandia director of computing research Rob Leland told the workshop. But when it becomes impossible to shrink circuits any smaller, as it seems will be the case in the next 10 years — what’s next? And as the von Neumann/Turing architecture of the last 60 years staggers beneath the weight of uncertainties increasingly inherent in working with huge realms of fuzzy data, what then?

Workshop participants proposed using the configuration of the brain as a model. First, isolate the brain tissues that control aspects of behavior. Then analyze — microscopically and in very small time steps — the shape and behavior of the neurons sending the signals. Then duplicate that arrangement using conventional hardware and software, or most likely, a new solid-state substrate.

“National security challenges — Sandia’s main interest — have historically been addressed in the physical domain, which remains vitally important,” Leland said. “But these challenges today have intrinsically a cognitive aspect concerning the behavior of the individual and group, so just the physical realm isn’t going to be sufficient to address these issues. Our aspiration is to deepen our understanding of cognitive science so we can address these problems in the behavioral realms.” He listed possible domain intersections that included tissue-based and in-vivo sensors, optical nanosensors for chemical analysis within cells, regulated nanoassembly of circuits, digital antibodies and virus-sized logic chips.

Jim Olds from the Krasnow Institute at George Mason University went further in not only predicting the end of Moore’s Law but denying it ever had the importance the computing world assigned it. He presented what he called “the great stagnation argument: that Moore’s Law is not like the industrial revolution or electricity” because it produced few jobs and lately, no real economic growth.

A brain-inspired industrial revolution

“There’s been a slowed-down technological revolution, despite our feelings to the contrary,” he said. Because Facebook, “for all its enormous market capitalization,” and Google have few employees compared with Ford Motor Co., “it’s clear that technology from Moore’s Law isn’t translated into day-to-day lives. For some reason, we’re not seeing opportunities for getting ahead by hard work. It’s enabled us to enjoy leisure, and load movies onto iPads, but flying cars haven’t come to pass.”

To the contrary, he said, real median household income, which increased dramatically since the beginning of the 20^th century, stopped increasing in the last 10 years. To solve this problem so “researchers are not sitting alone in their silos….we need a new, brain-inspired industrial revolution,” Olds said.

That might be found in the Obama administration’s recently announced project to map the neurons and network functions of the human brain. The $100 million project, which received a mixed reception from neuroscientists, will launch in 2014 and may continue for 10 years.

“This is a transformation from letting a million flowers bloom — from single PIs [principal investigators] to a major strategic investment,” Olds said.

“Brains are highly parallel, can reconfigure themselves dynamically in a few minutes and use molecular signal transduction [to pass messages],” he said. “In message-passing they use little power and finesse around bottlenecks [that would slow silicon] parallel computing systems.”

Apparently, though, the brain’s advantage isn’t speed. The brain uses wet-ware, Olds said, and is therefore slow compared to the speed of silicon chips, though more complex and therefore more powerful in many other ways.

A modest proposal

Slow signal speed didn’t faze Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of Allen Institute for Brain Science. “I have a modest proposal,” he told the group. “Imagine a 1-kilogram, three-dimensional block of silicon, or stacks of chips, all with 10 kilohertz clocks and each consuming microwatts of power. There’s much more silicon, and therefore it’s very expensive and heavy, like the brain! But, much less cost for heat sinks, much less air conditioning.”

The Allen Institute, he said, was founded in 2003 to support basic research in the brain sciences with a staff of 210, including 50 Ph.D.s.

“There are a thousand different cell types in the brain,” Koch said. “Every time we look at the brain, we see more and more complexities, like astronomers looking at the universe every ten years.”

The problems include science’s inability to simultaneously record more than 0.0001 percent of firing neurons, and, before the Obama proposal, “no central unifying projects. There are 10,000 labs with different questions, methods, protocols and standards, heading off exuberantly in all directions. Universities are not set up for large-scale systematic efforts.”

Jacob Vogelstein, a program manager at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory, spoke about moving ideas into practical engineering. He described taking slices of mouse brain 2 to 3 millimeters on a side and 49 nanometers thick. “Line them up on top of each other and extract the [neuronal] network,” he said. Inputs and outputs can be simulated with Monte Carlo techniques that allow for randomness.

Is the brain really the right model?

Again, the difficulties could not be minimized. “In a tiny [brain] region, there are 25,000,000 synapses and cell bodies working through dendrites and axons,” Vogelstein said about the difficulties of creating a copy that might serve as a computing template.

Of course, there is always the question of whether the brain provides the right model, cautioned Mike Vahle, Sandia’s chief information officer. “Computer problems are taking characteristics that the brain seems particularly well-suited to handle,” he said. “But is pattern-matching the right paradigm? Is the technology attainable, are the ethical and cultural issues understood? Can we avoid the pitfalls that plague modern computers and networks: viruses, worms, hacking and computer security [problems in general]?”

Murat Okandan, who proposed and helped organize the workshop for Sandia, suggested the brain did indeed show the path for dealing with large, incomplete, noisy data sets. “First we’ll work with conventional CMOS devices and tools, with simulations of conventional system and architectures, and we’ll cross-pollinate. The ultimate goal would be to learn from the motifs we see in neural computation and instantiate that capability in a massively interconnected, self-reconfigurable substrate that natively does the computation. The question will always be, how much fidelity do you need to get the functionality you want?”

“It’s national reinvention: Time to lead again,” said Olds. He prophesized that the brain’s secrets, morphed into new computers, would “enhance the range of productivity to include retirement years; increase levels of safety and security so that normal decline of physical and mental abilities are lessened; improve method of wealth development leveraging Moore’s law. And help develop enhanced modeling of societies to keep life meaningful.

“To do that, we need to prime the pipeline with the right kind of folks: a transdisciplinary scientist that enhances ‘team science’ approaches,” he said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, 505-845-7078.

More than 50 representatives from 23 European countries toured Sandia National Laboratories during a recent three-day visit. (Photo by Randy Montoya.) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The visitors included more than 50 representatives from 23 European countries, along with officials from the Department of Defense, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the State Department and other U.S. government agencies.

The delegates were accompanied by Andrew Weber, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, and by Elaine Bunn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy.

Sandia President and Laboratories Director Paul Hommert, welcoming the visitors on Wednesday, presented an overview of the Laboratories’ history, from its beginnings in the World War II Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs, to a focus on nuclear weapons components manufacturing that gave birth to Sandia as a separate laboratory in 1949. He outlined Sandia’s focus on nuclear weapons safety and security through the 1950s and its subsequent evolution into broader national security research, including energy and a variety of Department of Defense work.

Hommert also emphasized that the highly diverse laboratory Sandia has become remains focused on its core responsibility, nuclear weapons life extension programs.

“We are in full gear to execute this mission” with the alliance in mind, Hommert said.

The visit aimed at demonstrating the science, engineering, and technology required to implement U.S. policies that support the alliance. The agenda included an overview of national security and nuclear weapons programs at Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories and the NNSA’s nuclear weapons enterprise, as well as mission briefings for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center on Kirtland Air Force Base.

Sandia officials also demonstrated various capabilities associated with the labs’ pivotal role in life extension programs. The delegates took a windshield tour of Sandia’s large-scale experimental test areas, saw demonstrations of nuclear incident response equipment and viewed exhibits about homeland and global security programs.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency provided briefings on how they support nuclear surety and inspections, as well as the on-site inspection program activities that support treaty verification activities.

Five members of the delegation participated in a National Security Speakers Series panel, moderated by Bunn. The panel addressed U.S. allies’ views of extended deterrence, the role of NATO member states in the nuclear deterrent and arms control negotiations. The session drew a standing-room-only crowd of Sandians, which Hommert said demonstrated that “our staff understands that if it says ‘life extension program,’ it’s important.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contacts: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362; Jim Danneskiold, (505) 844-0587.

Sandia National Laboratories physicist Clark Highstrete is the new commander of the New Mexico Air National Guard 150th Fighter Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base. He says the post is the ultimate test of what a traditional, part-time Guard member can accomplish. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Highstrete works in Sandia’s Quantum Information Sciences department and is a colonel in the New Mexico Air National Guard with more than 2,500 flying hours, including 200 in combat in Bosnia and Iraq. He recently assumed command of the Guard’s 150th Fighter Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base, made up of more than 900 airmen. He previously was director of operations for the New Mexico Air National Guard, responsible for strategic planning and policy, and oversight and guidance for its missions.

“Science and the Air Force have both been very rewarding parts of my professional life,” Highstrete said. “I’ve been fortunate to have such fantastic opportunities on both sides.”

The 150th Fighter Wing, whose missions involve security police, logistics and medical services, has been known since its days in Vietnam as the Tacos. The Tacos’ F-16 fighter jets were transferred to other fighter wings in 2010 when the Pentagon opted to speed up retirement of its fourth-generation fighters in favor of fifth-generation stealth fighters.

Since then, the 150th has taken on four new missions, including a merger with Kirtland’s 58th Special Operations Wing, training crews on MC/HC-130 aircraft and two types of helicopters. The 150th also picked up a rapidly deployable engineering unit known as Red Horse and an Intelligence Target Production Center that does imagery and computer analysis for target planning.

A mix of military service and science

Highstrete said he has long felt the pull of two professions.

He graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in applied physics. He was commissioned out of college by the University of Southern California ROTC program and served on active duty from 1990 to 2000 as an F-16 pilot, mission commander and instructor pilot. He left the Air Force to attend graduate school in New Mexico.

“I had two very distinct interests,” Highstrete said. “I was interested in flying and military service. I also wanted to pursue a science career. I thought the best mix for me was to continue doing the operational military role as a citizen airman in the Air National Guard. I could do that part time and pursue a scientific career on the civilian side. I also wanted to dedicate my technical work toward national security, so New Mexico was a logical choice.”

Highstrete joined the Guard in Albuquerque as a full-time instructor then went to traditional part-time status to begin graduate school. He earned a Master of Science and doctorate in physics from the University of New Mexico. He joined Sandia in 2004 as a student intern, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship. He joined Sandia as a full-time staff member in 2010.

“I have a pretty diverse background in physics,” Highstrete said. He started graduate school in quantum information sciences and did his Sandia internship in solid state physics, examining high-frequency electronic properties of nanomaterials. At Sandia his research also has included ion trapping for quantum information science applications. He now does a mix of research and program management in a variety of technical areas.

The test of what a traditional Guardsman can accomplish

Highstrete’s post as 150th Fighter Wing commander is part-time. “The traditional guardsman is the cornerstone of the National Guard,” he said. “The central principle is the militia construct provided in the Constitution and realized in the National Guard.”

Highstrete said his vision and motivation throughout his military career have been to take on challenges that reinforce the importance of the traditional Guard member in U.S. society. “Taking on leadership roles and more challenges requires more effort, but I look to that to set an example of what a traditional Guardsman can and should be,” he said.

He said his role as Wing commander is the ultimate test of that. “Part of the challenge I was given was to pave the way, to show how it can be done,” he said. “We haven’t had a traditional commander in recent memory. Our New Mexico guardsmen are all highly dedicated, selfless and professional airmen. The adjutant general has made the service of our traditional Guard members in particular a top priority. What better way to emphasize and realize that priority than to have a traditional guardsman as a commander?”

He said his dual path is possible because of the support of an excellent staff and vice commander, Col. Joel Harris, and the enthusiastic support of his Sandia management. “Sandia is exceptional in its support of the Guard and Reserves,” he said. “I have been consistently supported throughout my Air National Guard service. Without that, I could not have done it.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Michelle Racicot says she learns something new every day in her job as a contract nurse practitioner at Sandia National Laboratories. She says she was honored to be recognized by first lady Michelle Obama for her community work. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The first lady recognized the group on behalf of her Joining Forces Initiative, which helps veterans and military families receive benefits, support and respect.

“You are the leaders in our businesses and schools in our communities,” she said. “You don’t stop serving after you hang up your uniforms. And that’s something that we say all the time about our veterans. It’s important for the nation to understand that you all keep working.”

Racicot, an Albuquerque native, enlisted in the military straight out of high school in 1997. She ended her service 13 years later, transformed into an Army nurse who saved lives on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Advocate for servicewomen

Racicot is vice executive director of American Women Veterans (AWV), a national organization that advocates on behalf of servicewomen, veterans and their families. She’s also vice chairwoman of Cuidando Los Ninos, an Albuquerque nonprofit committed to ending child homelessness. She educates legislators and community members on homelessness, post-traumatic stress disorder, women in combat and health issues.

“I love everything I do,” she said. “It’s just who I am.”

Through Army training Racicot became a medic and a licensed practical nurse while stationed in Fort Lewis, Wash. The Army awarded her a Green to Gold Scholarship that sent her to college to become an officer. She earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Pacific Lutheran University. “I became a registered nurse and an Army officer,” she said.

Nurse in two combat zones

Racicot was stationed in Germany on a hospital surgical floor taking care of wounded soldiers from Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. Hurricane Katrina took her to New Orleans in 2005 and deployment with the Army’s 21^st Combat Support Hospital (CSH). She returned to Germany briefly then was deployed with the 21^st CSH to Iraq for 12 months in 2006-2007.

She completed trauma training at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, a Level 1 Trauma Center and part of the U.S. Army Medical Command. She was deployed to Afghanistan for nine months with a Forward Surgical Team, working in tents near combat zones.

Racicot worked through rocket and mortar attacks, often sleeping in the trauma bay with a radio in hand. “There are times when you are scared, but the crazy thing is you’re more scared for your patients,” she said. “You’re more anxious to save patients’ lives. That’s the most important thing.” She did ground patrols, not routine for a nurse, meeting Afghan citizens and helping out in orphanages.

Thirteen years after saying good-bye to her family, Racicot returned to Albuquerque to get a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico and become a nurse practitioner. “I loved what I was doing but knew I needed to continue my education,” she said. She graduated from UNM in May 2012 and joined Sandia as a contractor eight months later.

Colleague AnnaMarie DeCoste said Racicot is enthusiastic about patient care and eager to learn as a healthcare provider. “She not only cares about patients but equally cares about her community,” DeCoste said. “Michelle is a young woman who wants to make a difference and she is definitely making a difference in our community.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Sandia has decided not to patent or license the formula, but to make it freely available in hopes of saving lives.

Sandia National Laboratories chemical engineer Vicki Chavez worked with Kevin Fleming to prove that iron sulfate mixed with ammonium nitrate could produce a non-detonable fertilizer. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Ammonium nitrate fertilizer is illegal in Afghanistan but legal in neighboring Pakistan, where a quarter of the gross domestic product and half the workforce depend on agriculture. When mixed with a fuel such as diesel, ammonium nitrate is highly explosive. It was used in about 65 percent of the 16,300 homemade bombs in Afghanistan in 2012, according to government reports. There were 9,300 IED events in the country in 2009.

IEDs have killed more American troops than any other weapon during the 11-year war in Afghanistan. About 1,900 troops were killed or wounded in IED attacks in 2012, 60 percent of American combat casualties.

Ammonium nitrate explosives are not limited to Afghanistan. More than 700 IED attacks take place outside Afghanistan each month, and more than 17,000 global IED events have occurred in 123 countries in the past two years. The United States witnessed how deadly ammonium nitrate can be in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.

U.S. efforts to curb the flow of ammonium nitrate fertilizer into Afghanistan through seizures, export controls and diplomacy have had limited success. The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) was established by the Department of Defense in 2006 to reach out to the armed services, private sector and academia for counter-IED technologies. JIEDDO last year issued a call for ideas on how to neutralize ammonium nitrate as an IED explosive.

Sandia optical engineer Kevin Fleming took on the challenge and developed a fertilizer formula as good as, if not better, than ammonium nitrate, but not detonable.

An Achilles heel

“I looked at it differently,” said Fleming, who retired from the labs in February. “I’ve been an organic gardener since I was eight. We had five acres in Las Cruces with the problems of calcareous soils that are very similar to those in the Middle East. I know something about commercial farming.”

He also knew the chemistry of IEDs from years of training soldiers how to deal with them.

From a terrorist’s perspective, ammonium nitrate has an Achilles heel. The ammonium ion is weakly attached to the nitrate ion. They hang onto each other, but the right chemical reaction can easily pull them apart. Fleming reasoned you could separate the ions by adding a compound they would rather cling to, called a metathesis reaction. “It would change into something else at the molecular level,” he said.

Fleming tried several materials including iron sulfate, a readily available compound that steel foundries throw away by the tons. When mixed with ammonium nitrate, the iron ion “grabs” the nitrate and the ammonium ion takes the sulfate ion. Iron sulfate becomes iron nitrate and ammonium nitrate becomes ammonium sulfate. This reaction occurs if someone tries to alter the fertilizer to make it detonable when mixed with a fuel.

“The ions would rather be with different partners,” Fleming said. “The iron looks at the ammonium nitrate and says, ‘Can I have your nitrate rather than my sulfate?’ and the ammonium nitrate says, ‘I like sulfate, so I’ll trade you.’”

Ammonium sulfate and iron nitrate are not detonable, even when mixed with a fuel, as is ammonium nitrate. “It’s a different compound,” said Fleming, who completed work on the formula in late 2012. “At the chemical level it’s a great fertilizer but does not detonate.”

Sandia chemical engineer Vicki Chavez ran a small-scale proof-of-concept of the reaction, and validated it. “We were able to prove that there was little to no ammonium nitrate left in the resulting process,” she said. “It was very cool. We looked at pure ammonium nitrate and pure ammonium sulfate. The resulting sample looked more like ammonium sulfate.”

Fleming said iron sulfate in fertilizer adds iron and acidifies soil. “It does good things for soil health. It takes alkaline soil and makes it more neutral, closer to an ideal pH level,” he said. “The closer you get a neutral pH, the more crops grow. Crop yield would improve significantly.

“And iron-containing fertilizer added to the soil would be taken up in crops and help fight anemia and other iron deficiencies in people who eat them.”

The soil in Afghanistan is alkaline with a high pH, and could benefit from an ammonium nitrate/iron sulfate fertilizer, Fleming said. “What they use now, ammonium nitrate with calcium carbonate — which makes soil more alkaline — doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Danger to soldiers

Sandia could have patented the formula but opted to waive ownership rights for humanitarian reasons.

“One of Sandia’s priorities is deploying the technologies that result from our research for the public good,” said Pete Atherton, senior manager of industry partnerships at Sandia. “We think that making the fertilizer formula as accessible as possible is the best way to accomplish this mission.”

Replacing ammonium nitrate with a non-detonable fertilizer in Afghanistan and other parts of the world will not happen overnight, Fleming said. Ammonium nitrate is produced in huge plants in many locations. “It’s easy to get in large quantities,” he said. “The sheer volume of ammonium nitrate is gigantic.”

But he said there are some ideas about how to get the non-detonable formula, which would not cost more to produce, into the marketplace. “We could give the formula to a neutral party and let them work with the Afghans, Pakistanis and others,” he said. “They could set up side-by-side demonstrations to see which fertilizer works better. Prove it to them gradually.”

Fleming has informed JIEDDO of his results. He said his sense of urgency in tackling the issue came from looking into the eyes of hundreds of soldiers he trained in anti-IED tactics. “Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs see a lot of IEDs, and about one third of them will die, be maimed or injured by IEDs before getting through their tours, and most from ammonium nitrate-based explosives,” he said.

At a meeting last year in Crystal City, Va., Fleming sat next to an ex-Marine who had lost both legs trying to find IEDs. “He had a metal detector, but some bombs are chemically initiated with no metal parts. He stepped on a non-metal trigger and set off a blast that took off both legs. He became a double amputee in milliseconds. So when I sit next to him and see the aftermath of an IED, I have to think of any way possible to keep this from happening.”

For more information on Sandia’s collaborations to bring new technologies to the marketplace, visit the Technology Partnerships web page.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

When steel is too hard it becomes brittle, so the plant ended up getting new tubing. However, Deibler said KCP needed a backup in case it couldn’t find replacements in time to meet deadlines.

Sandia’s modeling, coupled with experiments, allowed the rapid design of an annealing process to soften the tubing while keeping the metal’s desired structure. The model predicted how the microstructure would be affected by variations in the process, which improved researchers’ confidence that the heat treatment would produce parts that met specifications.

Brown, a modeler at Sandia’s Livermore, Calif., site, said working on the model was a natural extension of a larger project, supported by Sandia’s Nuclear Weapons program, called Predicting Performance Margins. Under that program, numerous Sandia researchers are studying the way microstructure affects properties of materials at various scales. Brown became involved in the project as a member of a team that developed a thermal-mechanical modeling tool to predict how microstructure and other properties change during forging. That led to his collaboration with Deibler and Joe Puskar, her Sandia technical adviser, on thermal profiles for welds.

When the need arose to address the tubing issue, Puskar contacted Brown to see if he could work with Deibler to help optimize a heat treatment, Brown said.

Sandia National Laboratories researcher Lisa Deibler holds a tubing specimen in a grip, ready to load it into the thermal-mechanical experimental system behind her. She and Arthur Brown at Sandia's California site worked together to develop a simulation for an annealing process to soften tubing that was too hard for the requirements of the job. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Experiments, modeling work together

Deibler, a postdoctoral appointee in Sandia’s Materials Characterization and Performance Department in Albuquerque, provided experimental data that Brown fed into his model of stainless steel recrystallization. Recrystallization, in which grains in deformed microstructures are replaced by strain-free grains, occurs during annealing — the process of heating metal to dissipate energy built up while the metal is compressed, twisted or otherwise worked. Heat makes the metal softer and more ductile.

Deibler and Brown were able to solve the plant’s real-life problem since recrystallization is part of the annealing process. And they were able to do it quickly because the model already existed.

Deibler’s experiments indicated it was important to model two softening mechanisms, recovery and recrystallization. Recovery happens first within a microstructure when material is heated and softens. By measuring the hardness and the amount of recrystallization after each heat treatment, the team identified how much softening was due to recovery.

“It was important to model both softening mechanisms because we were seeing microstructures that contained no new recrystallized grains, but which had changed properties from the initial deformed material,” Deibler said. “By failing to include the effects of recovery, our model couldn’t predict why the properties weren’t the same as the initial deformed material. Adding in recovery allowed us to account for the changed properties in microstructures with no recrystallization.”

She described the work in a poster, “Design of a Heat Treatment to Soften Stainless Steel Tubing,” presented at Sandia’s winter 2012 Post-Doctoral Technical Showcase.

Heated furnace experiments form baseline

The team first developed a baseline for the model. Deibler performed heat experiments on the steel tubing since she didn’t know the conditions under which it was manufactured. That effort required “a lot of shipping tubing around the country for various heat treatments,” she recalled.

She put tubing samples in Sandia’s thermal-mechanical experimental system at various temperatures for different lengths of time. Then she had the tubing sectioned, polished and etched, and analyzed the images to see how much the microstructures had recrystallized. Brown fit her data with the model to simulate different heat treatments.

The simulation also required details about the furnace where the tubing would be softened. Heating a furnace quickly tends to overshoot the desired temperature, so the team used the model to determine whether it was better to heat the furnace quickly or slowly raise it to the correct temperature, Deibler said. Once Brown identified the optimal rate of increase and other factors, KCP technicians filled a furnace with tubing and measured temperatures at several locations inside. Brown then ran those profiles through the model, which allowed him to predict the impact of temperature variations on the tubing’s final properties.

Forging, welding considered for computer model

The researchers want the model to handle both forging and welding because in some ways the two processes work against one another. Forging steel gives it a strong microstructure, but welding adds heat that can destroy those properties. “So if you were able to model that process, that would provide a lot more confidence in the overall modeling that their parts aren’t going to fail,” Deibler said.

In the future, the researchers want use the model for all kinds of welding at Sandia: laser welding, resistance welding and gas tungsten arc welding. Types of welding vary in their thermal rates — how fast something is heated.

“Looking at how different heating and cooling rates affect the microstructure during welding would give us valuable information,” Deibler said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362 

Sandia National Laboratories' Manos program teaches Hispanic children about science, math and engineering. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The program was launched 23 years ago by Sandia’s Hispanic Leadership Outreach Committee, today led by Sandia employees Pat Sena and Miquelita Carrion, and the Community Involvement department in partnership with Albuquerque Public Schools.

The monthlong program meets at Rio Grande High School twice a week for two hours after the school day ends. Students select one of seven workshops focused on physics, chemistry, electronics, computer design, robotics, finances and an introduction to engineering.

Activities include building and flying rockets, learning what causes fireworks to have different colors and what makes bread rise, circuitry and controlling the flow of electricity, building web pages, building and programming Lego robots, making money “grow” and building cars and bridges. All of the teachers are volunteers from Sandia Labs.

Media are invited to see the Manos program in action at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, April 16. Contact Stephanie Hobby in advance at 505-280-3905.

“We really want to increase the pool of Hispanic students who pursue science, technology, engineering and math university degrees by showing students the possibilities and highlighting the accomplishments made by Hispanic professionals,” said Javier Ruiz, a Sandia volunteer who helps coordinate the Manos program. “One of our goals is to increase and promote academic excellence for students at the precollege level. We provide hands-on learning experiences to help inspire these young minds, and to see them succeed is very rewarding.”

This year, more than 140 students are enrolled in Manos. The four participating middle schools are Ernie Pyle, Polk, Harrison, Truman, John Adams and Jimmy Carter.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, shobby@sandia.gov, (505) 280-3905

LIVERMORE, Calif.— Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ Combustion Research Facility, the University of Manchester, Bristol University, University of Southampton and Hong Kong Polytechnic have successfully measured reaction rates of a second Criegee intermediate, CH₃CHOO, and proven that the reactivity of the atmospheric chemical depends strongly on which way the molecule is twisted.

The measurements will provide further insight into hydrocarbon combustion and atmospheric chemistry. A paper describing the research findings titled “Direct Measurements of Conformer-Dependent Reactivity of the Criegee Intermediate CH₃CHOO” is featured in the April 12 edition of Science magazine.

Criegee intermediates — carbonyl oxides — are considered to be pivotal atmospheric reactants, but only indirect knowledge of their reaction kinetics had previously been available. Last year, Sandia and its UK-based partners reported, for the first time, direct measurements of reactions of the smallest gas-phase Criegee intermediate using photoionization mass spectrometry. That research was featured in the January 13, 2012, edition of Science. A short video featuring two Sandia researchers describing the work can be seen on Sandia’s YouTube channel.

New findings include confirmed fast reactions, first-time measurements with water

Sandia combustion chemist Craig Taatjes, the lead author on the Science papers, said there are several significant aspects about the new research findings.

In particular, the measurements show that the reaction rate depends dramatically on whether the CH₃CHOO is bent, with the CH₃– and –OO ends pointing toward the same side, a conformation called “syn–” or more straightened, with the CH₃– and –OO ends pointing away from each other, called “anti–”.

“Observing conformer-dependent reactivity represents the first direct experimental test of theoretical predictions,” said Taatjes. “The work will be of tremendous importance in validating the theoretical methods that are needed to accurately predict the kinetics for reactions of Criegee intermediates that still cannot be measured directly.”

In fact, said Taatjes, the latest results supply one of the most critical targets for such validation. Because of the large concentration of water in Earth’s atmosphere, Criegee concentrations — and, hence, the tropospheric implications of all Criegee intermediate reactions — depend on knowing the rate constant for reaction with water.

Although the reactions for most Criegee intermediates, including the syn- conformer of CH₃CHOO, with water may simply be too slow to be measured by the research team’s methods, anti-CH₃CHOO has been predicted to have a vastly enhanced reactivity with water. Taatjes and his colleagues confirmed this prediction and made the first experimental determination of the reaction rate of a Criegee intermediate with water. “A Criegee intermediate’s reaction with water determines what the concentration of these intermediates in the atmosphere is going to be. This is a significant benchmark,” he said.

Taatjes said one of the questions remaining after the first direct measurement of Criegee reactions was whether the remarkably fast reaction of CH₂OO with SO₂ was representative of other Criegee intermediates.

“This measurement of a second intermediate — which we found to react just about as fast with sulfur dioxide as the intermediate we measured last year — supports the notion that the reactions of all Criegee intermediates with SO₂ will occur easily,” said Taatjes “It also confirms that Criegee intermediate reactions are likely to make a contribution to sulfate and nitrate chemistry in the troposphere.” This increase in reactivity, he said, provides additional evidence that Criegee intermediates will play a significant role in the oxidation of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.

Unraveling the mysteries, complexities of Criegee intermediates

Hydrocarbons that are emitted into Earth’s troposphere, either naturally or by humans, are removed by many reactive atmospheric species. For unsaturated hydrocarbons — molecules with at least one C=C double bond — a prominent removal mechanism is reaction with ozone, called ozonolysis. It is accepted that ozonolysis produces other reactive species, including carbonyl oxides, which are known as Criegee intermediates. Rudolf Criegee, a German chemist, first proposed the mechanism of ozonolysis in the 1950s.

Because so much ozonolysis happens in the atmosphere, the reactions of Criegee intermediates are thought to be very important in a wide range of tropospheric processes like secondary organic aerosol formation and nighttime production of highly reactive OH radicals. As a result, the chemistry of these reactive Criegee intermediates has been the subject of intense investigation for decades, but without any direct measurement of their reaction rates until last year’s published work by Sandia and its collaborators.

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and conducted using the Advanced Light Source, a scientific user facility also supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

Sandia National Laboratories' Tom Reichardt, left, and Aaron Collins, center, chat with John McGowen of the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation (AzCATI). Sandia has developed several complementary technologies to help the algae industry in detecting and recovering from pond crashes, and is making use of the AzCATI test-bed facility to collect data and apply its technologies. (Photo by Steffan Schulz) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The research, which focuses on monitoring and diagnosing algal pond health, draws upon Sandia’s longstanding expertise in microfluidics technology, its strong bioscience research program and significant internal investments.

Because of the way algae is grown and produced in most algal ponds, they are prone to attack by fungi, rotifers, viruses or other predators. Consequently, algal pond collapse is a critical issue that companies must solve to produce algal biofuels cost-effectively. The issue was identified as a key component in the Department of Energy’s National Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap.

A three-pronged technical approach

Sandia is addressing the algal pond crash issue in three complementary ways:

• Developing a real-time monitoring tool for algal ponds that can detect indications of a problem days in advance of a crash
• Successfully applying pathogen detection and characterization technologies honed through the lab’s Rapid Threat Organism Recognition (RapTOR) work
• Employing its innovative SpinDx diagnostic device to dig deeper into problems after they’ve occurred and help to identify specific biological agents responsible for crashes

Sandia’s Tom Reichardt, a researcher who works in the lab’s remote sensing unit, led development of an online algal reflectance monitor through an internally funded project. The instruments are typically set up alongside the algal pond, continuously monitoring, analyzing the algae’s concentration levels, examining its photosynthesis and performing other diagnostics.

“In real-time, it will tell you if things are going well with the growth of your algae or whether it’s beginning to show signs of trouble,” said Reichardt.  However, he cautioned, while this real-time monitoring will warn pond operators when the ponds have been attacked, it may not be able to identify the attacker.

For brief interviews of Sandia remote sensing researcher Tom Reichardt, Sandia biochemist Aaron Collins and AzCATI program manager John McGowen, visit Sandia’s YouTube channel.

Quick identification of organisms in ponds is key to mitigation

To help pinpoint the problems, a Sandia team led by researcher Todd Lane recently developed a process to quickly and accurately identify pond crash agents through ultra-high-throughput sequencing using RapTOR.

RapTOR, originally developed for homeland security purposes, was developed to solve the “unknown unknowns” problem – lethal agents that could be weaponized from ordinary viruses or disguised to look harmless. It was designed to serve as a tool to rapidly characterize a biological organism with no pre-existing knowledge.

Lane’s team also created a method for creating a field-ready assay for those agents, something that works quickly and is relatively inexpensive. They are applying SpinDx, a device developed by other Sandia/California researchers that can (among other features) analyze important protein markers and process up to 64 assays from a single sample, all in a matter of minutes.

Finally, a Sandia team led by researcher Jeri Timlin, in collaboration with the University of Nebraska’s Van Etten lab, enhanced the RapTOR diagnostics by studying interactions of a certain virus with algal cells. Using hyperspectral imaging, they identified spectroscopic signatures of viral infections arising from changes in algal pigmentation. These signatures potentially could be exploited for early detection and subsequent mitigation of viral infections in algal ponds.

Advanced tools, instruments could be part of “arsenal” for pond operators

“It’s important for the growth of an algal industry to develop a method where algal pond operators can learn immediately when there’s a problem with their ponds from a biological agent standpoint,” said Lane. “It’s equally important that they learn – within a very short period of time, like 24 hours – what specific agent is eating away at their algae, and have a technology available that could develop an assay to combat the agent. Our tools come very close to accomplishing all of those things.

“We couldn’t really do an exhaustive characterization of all of the kinds of agents that could be at the root of pond crashes,” Lane explained. “But we confirmed some that had been identified before, and we found some others that weren’t familiar to the research community. The important achievement was to develop the methodology, which hadn’t existed before.”

In practical terms, the process developed by Sandia involves a central facility where pond operators would send samples of agents that have appeared in their ponds, and assays that could be deployed back to the pond site. That’s where SpinDx comes in.

Pond site operators, Lane said, know their environments best and, especially with instruments like those developed by Reichardt, understand the signs that could indicate “sick” ponds. He envisions pond operators using a SpinDx-like device as part of their regular arsenal of equipment so they could run early detection tests whenever they sensed instability in their ponds. They could then provide samples to an off-site facility, which in turn would send back assays to allow the operator to investigate the problem more thoroughly and ward off pond crashes before they occur.

“That’s the beauty of SpinDx,” said Lane. “The disks are inexpensive, require little technical expertise and can be manipulated by non-scientists.”

Sandia National Laboratories’ SpinDx-like device could run early detection tests for algal pond operators whenever they sensed instability in their ponds. Issues could then be investigated more thoroughly, with SpinDX helping to determine the root biological cause of the problem. (Photo by Jeff McMillan) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Sandia technology being tested as part of AzCATI algae testbed project

Now that the core principles of pathogen detection and characterization technologies for pond crash forensics have been successfully proven, the next step will be to conduct more robust demonstrations. Serendipitously, Lane’s and Reichardt’s groups will be continuing their work as part of the Algae Testbed Public-Private Partnership (ATP³) led by Arizona State University (ASU), the first national algae testbed. The Sandia team will apply the technologies, collect more data and seek additional collaborations.

“Our results over these past couple of years have been compelling, but now we need to deploy the technology into real-world ponds,” Lane explains. The original work, he says, has moved from the laboratory environment into the operational realm, with only modest research and development now necessary.

Sandia will make use of an algal test bed facility at ASU known as the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation (AzCATI). The facility features algal ponds and closed photobioreactor algae cultivation systems of various sizes and serves as a hub for research, testing and commercialization of algae-based products.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

From left to right, Sandia National Laboratories’ Matt Piccini, Chung-Yan Koh and Anup Singh lead the SpinDx team. A new National Institutes of Health-funded project will take the device to a new level and is expected to result in an instrument that can detect a suite of biothreat agents. (Photo by Jeff McMillan) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The device, once developed, approved by the Food and Drug Administration and commercialized, would most likely be used in emergency rooms in the event of a bioterrorism incident.

“This is an unmet need for the nation’s biodefense program,” said Anup Singh, senior manager for Sandia’s biological science and technology group. “A point-of-care device does not exist.”

Sandia’s work is funded by a recent grant – nearly $4 million over four years – from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. NIH has funded a number of recent projects at Sandia.

Sandia’s biosciences and microfluidics program areas have continued to evolve with a string of notable projects, including:

• MicroChemLab, a trailblazer in lab-on-a-chip technology, developed in the early 1990s
• The “saliva device” and a follow-up technology, RapiDx, developed in the early-to-mid 2000s
• SpinDx, the latest medical diagnostic tool developed at Sandia

“This will take things to the next level,” said Singh. In addition to the broader suite of toxins and bacterial agents that the device would test for, the project includes comprehensive testing with animal (mouse) samples.

This is an important step, Singh said, since toxins may behave differently in live animals and humans than in laboratory blood samples. “We are getting closer and closer to translational elements of research, which involves testing in animal and clinical facilities. This is part of the maturation of our bioresearch activities at Sandia.”

The project also will increase what SpinDx can do, he added.

“When you look for bacterial agents, you don’t want to rely solely on proteins because you won’t get the detection sensitivity you need,” explained Singh. “So we are also using other methods that may lead to better detection limits and additional confirmation.”

Sandia’s SpinDx device features centrifugal microfluidics, or “lab-on-a-disk” technology, which uses centrifugal forces to manipulate samples and reagents through microfluidic channels implanted on disks that are of the same size as a standard CD or DVD. (Photo by Jeff McMillan)

The new NIH project includes collaborators with expertise in animal modeling as well as device manufacturing.

The University of Texas Medical Branch, with whom Sandia enjoys a years-long partnership, together with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Western Regional Research Center in Albany, Calif., are providing Sandia with expert insight into toxins and diseases at animal lab facilities. Bio-Rad, a manufacturer and distributor of a variety of devices and laboratory technologies, is serving as a consultant on the project to evaluate plans for product development, assist with manufacturers’ criteria on the device that is developed, and provide important feedback when a prototype is built.

Although the latest NIH award represents a continuing success story for Sandia’s microfluidics/bioresearch work, Singh stresses that it was part of a thoughtful multi-year strategy.

“You’ve got to keep innovating and coming up with the next thing,” he said. “Every technology has its lifecycle. As good as SpinDx is, we know there will be other technologies, better technologies that come along in the next few years. We have to continue to innovate to meet the needs of our customers, understand what other competing technologies are being designed to solve the problems and develop technologies that provide an improvement.”

The need for diagnostic devices for biodefense is not going away, Singh said, since there are always new diseases springing up that lack good diagnostic assays.

“Plus, we want dual-use devices that combat both man-made and nature-made problems,” he added. “We’re not just going to wait for the next anthrax letter incident to happen for our devices to be used and tested; we want them to be useful for other things as well, like infectious diseases.”

Expanding into those areas, he said, will keep Sandia’s bioresearch efforts engaged for years to come.

“That’s where the value of the national labs really comes in,” Singh said. “Our capabilities and culture are a very good fit for tackling long-term problems that require a sustained effort.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

Laurence Brown, Matt Donnelly and Jim Pacheco received Entrepreneurial Spirit Awards for their participation in a Sandia program that encourages researchers to take jobs at startup or expanding businesses.

Laurence Brown launched a tribal partnerships program at Sandia National Laboratories after returning from entrepreneurial leave. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Entrepreneurial Separation to Transfer Technology (ESTT) was started in 1994, and since then 144 Sandia employees have left the labs, 57 of them to start a business and 85 to help expand an existing one. ESTT has had an impact on 96 companies, most of them in New Mexico.

Jackie Kerby Moore, Sandia’s manager of Technology and Economic Development, said the awards recognize the labs’ legacy of entrepreneurship. “We initiated the Entrepreneurial Spirit Awards as a way to recognize and celebrate Sandia entrepreneurs,” she said.

The program guarantees Sandia employees reinstatement if they return within two years. A third-year extension can be requested. Forty-one ESTT participants returned to Sandia and 97 did not. Six are currently on ESTT leave. Brown, Donnelly and Pacheco all returned to Sandia from the business world.

Information highway            

Brown used ESTT in 1995, six years after joining Sandia as a researcher in thin-film and vacuum system design. He and some partners founded Advanced Tribal Integrated Information Networks, or ATIIN, a company offering Internet-based services to Native American tribes and businesses.

“The vision was to use the Web for multimedia purposes, as a tool for national and international native communities,” he said. “It was a way to create a presence on the Internet for communities that might not have that infrastructure.”

ATIIN, the Navajo word for “highway,” built an online marketplace called Native CyberTrade for Indian businesses and developed educational and language tools. The company installed intranet infrastructure for native communities throughout the Southwest.

Brown sold the company in 1997 and returned to Sandia with a vast network of Native American contacts. He moved from research into business development, and built a program to foster tribal partnerships in Sandia’s Government Relations office. “I coordinate technical assistance and collaboration with tribal governments that align with our national security mission,” said Brown, who is Government Relations tribal program manager. “I develop strategic relationships nationwide.”

A better container

Matt Donnelly stepped into a management role to help start-up Aerobox Composite Structures get on its feet. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Donnelly joined Sandia in 1988 in mechanical process engineering and moved into plastics applications, including fabrication and use of composites.

When a group of Albuquerque entrepreneurs wanted to develop an aerospace transportation container made of durable composite materials in 1998, they approached Sandia for assistance and collaboration. Matt was tapped to work with the group on composites. “I helped steer them to a honeycomb sandwich-panel construction,” he said. “The honeycomb was polypropylene and the skins polypropylene glass. Through collaboration we found the right material for the containers.”

The group formed Aerobox Composite Structures LLC. There was commercial interest in the containers, and with funds from an initial public offering Aerobox established a manufacturing plant in Bernalillo, aiming to make 15,000 units a year.

Donnelly left Sandia through ESTT in 2004 to become the company’s manufacturing and engineering manager. “I helped them get set up, get production capability going, and troubleshoot the problems,” he said. “My goal was to get them on their feet. We helped them develop a world-class product.”

Donnelly returned to Sandia after 14 months and is now manager of Design Methods and Quality. “The experience served me well. I learned a lot about managing in the real world,” he said.

Follow the sun

Pacheco’s focus at Sandia was in concentrating solar power (CSP). He worked in CSP development programs for 15 years after coming to the labs in 1987. One program was Solar Two, a large

Jim Pacheco built a reputation in concentrating solar power and was recruited by several companies when the technology took off in the marketplace. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

solar power plant built in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, Calif., by 11 organizations led by Southern California Edison Co. in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. Sandia was the technical adviser.

“It demonstrated thermal storage. You could collect energy during the day and dispatch it in the evening or night, producing power when the sun was not shining,” Pacheco said. “It was a very successful project in that it led to a number of such power plants being built by other companies around the world.”

Pacheco was involved with Solar Two through concept, design, construction, test and evaluation. He was recruited by several companies when CSP technology took off in the marketplace.

Pacheco left Sandia through ESTT in 2008 and joined eSolar, a Burbank, Calif., startup that was developing a 5-megawatt commercial demonstration project near Lancaster. He stayed three years. “I helped steer the company toward more advanced technology,” Pacheco said.

Click here for more information on Sandia’s technology partnerships.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

“This agreement will lead to an expanded relationship with Caterpillar,” said Vic Weiss, the Sandia business development specialist who helped negotiate the CRADA. “It’s a strategic collaboration.”

From left, Sandia National Laboratories computer scientists Brian Adams, Jim Stewart and John Siirola look over the results of a Dakota optimization study. Caterpillar Inc.’s interest in Dakota, an open-source software tool developed by Sandia, launched talks that led to the signing of a Cooperative Research & Development Agreement. (Photo by Norman Johnson) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The labs had a pair of standard CRADAs with Caterpillar a decade ago, each dealing with a specific project in diesel combustion. The umbrella CRADA has a broader scope, covering multiple projects in a variety of categories over three years.

The CRADA authorizes work in computer and computational science, information and data analysis, mathematics, engineering science and high-performance computing. Technical categories include simulation design exploration, advanced analytics, multi-physics engineering modeling and simulation and high-performance computing. The agreement includes training, education, technical support and staff visits.

“We’re excited about this new CRADA. We hope to do many new projects with Caterpillar in different technical areas,” Weiss said. “These agreements benefit our partners and Sandia by allowing us to do more research and advance our scientific knowledge. We learn when we partner with industry.”

CRADA partners share the cost of research, inventions, copyrights and patents. Legal terms and conditions are negotiated just once, so each new project does not have to go through that process.

Caterpillar is the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives. The company is looking to Sandia to help it develop advanced modeling and simulation technologies for virtual product development.

The first project under the agreement focuses on optimization in support of Caterpillar’s product engineering, said Jim Stewart, manager of Sandia’s Optimization and Uncertainty Quantification department.

“Caterpillar wants to work with us on software capabilities to help do optimization studies on their engineering designs,” Stewart said.

The work will involve Sandia’s Dakota open-source software tool that helps researchers adjust and assess the accuracy of computational simulations. Dakota shortens design cycles and cuts development costs.

“Caterpillar’s interest in Dakota initiated the discussions about a CRADA,” Stewart said. “Dakota is installed in their system but they have a need to tailor it in ways to make it work better for them.”

Chris Ha, a manager in Caterpillar’s Information Analytics Division, said the company “is excited to collaborate with Sandia in the optimization and uncertainty quantification space focused around Dakota.”

“We recognize that Sandia is one of the world’s leading experts in these fields, and this relationship will help enable opportunities for Caterpillar to leverage such expertise,” he said.

Sandia will provide training and research. Another effort will combine the capabilities of Dakota and a newer software package, Pyomo (Python Optimization Modeling Objects), to provide a wider range of optimization capabilities. Pyomo is a Sandia-developed open-source tool for formulating and manipulating algebraic models within the Python programming environment.

“We’ve had an interest in getting Dakota and Pyomo to work together in the software sense,” Stewart said. “This is something we’ve wanted to do and now we can through this CRADA.”

Stewart said the project will lead to other avenues of research. “The aim is to get some good work started and build from it in future projects.”

Click here for more information on Sandia technology partnerships.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

For her work on combustion and atmospheric science and black carbon (soot), Sandia National Laboratories scientist Hope Michelsen has been honored with a place in the Alameda County Women's Hall of Fame. (Photo by Randy Wong) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Michelsen is being honored for her combustion and atmospheric science research — specifically, developing methods of measuring soot, understanding how soot is formed and building and deploying a mobile research facility that uses computer models of the atmosphere to identify the origins of greenhouse gases.

“Hope’s work in atmospheric science has been outstanding and clearly places her in the prestigious ranks of the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame,” said Bob Carling, director of the lab’s Transportation Energy Center in Livermore. “This is a well-deserved recognition.”

Looking back, Michelsen has been drawn to science her entire life. “Even before I understood what a scientist was, I was acting like one — writing everything down in notebooks and just being captivated by data,” she said.

But science wasn’t Michelsen’s only love — she began college at Dartmouth as an English major. “I always loved to write,” she said. “The great thing about being a scientist is I get to do so much writing.”

She was interested in environmental science, but switched her major to chemistry at the suggestion of her department chair at Dartmouth. She earned her doctorate in chemistry from Stanford University, researching surface science and physical chemistry. “After getting my PhD I wanted to do something different, so I went to Harvard as a post-doc and studied atmospheric chemistry,” she said.

Michelsen has been at Sandia for 13 years, where she discovered another fascinating research area: black carbon, i.e., soot. “I had never expected to study soot, but it’s actually very cool,” she said. “On a microscopic level, soot is usually composed of very small carbonaceous particles that are tightly bound together in dendrite chains, like the arms of a tree. It is really quite beautiful.”

One goal of Michelsen’s research is to understand what happens when soot is measured and how that affects the measurement itself. “We want to make measurements more quantitative under a whole range of conditions,” she said. “The particles are tiny to begin with and, as environmental regulations become tighter, we need to be able to measure the smallest ones.”

In another project, Michelsen and her Sandia colleagues are collaborating with the University of Michigan and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to better understand how soot is formed. “This is actually not very well understood,” she said.

Michelsen is also part of a team that built a mobile greenhouse gas test facility that measures greenhouse gases and other similar chemicals so they can be traced and identified. She is now leading an internally-funded project to build a similar instrument to measure black carbon in the atmosphere.

“My work at Sandia is a combination of physical chemistry and atmospheric research. It’s really the perfect job for me,” she said. “My colleagues are amazing — all of those interactions are what makes Sandia a really fun place to work.” Michelsen can’t single out one greatest accomplishment in her time at Sandia, but she’s most proud of helping move Sandia into new areas, such as climate research.

Michelsen received her award, along with nine other winners, on March 23 at a special ceremony in Oakland, Calif. The Women’s Hall of Fame was established in 1993 by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, the Alameda County Health Care Foundation and the Alameda County Commission on the Status of Women. This is the 20th Anniversary of Alameda County’s Women’s Hall of Fame, which now has honored 176 local women.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

Sandia researcher Lennie Klebanoff is confident that the book’s content will give readers a sense of urgency about the need to get zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the road, and to get other hydrogen-based power equipment into the marketplace.

Sandia National Laboratories' Lennie Klebanoff says he feels a personal responsibility to inform technical readers and the public about the urgent need to get zero-emission hydrogen technology into the nation’s vehicles and other carbon-producing applications. (Photo by Dino Vournas) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Klebanoff, who serves as the book’s editor and co-wrote half the chapters, knows his topic well. He was director of the Metal Hydride Center of Excellence (MHCoE), one of three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Hydrogen Storage Centers of Excellence dedicated to solving the problem of storing hydrogen on automobiles. This Center, competitively selected and funded through DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), included 21 partners from industry, academia, and national laboratories from 2005 through 2010.

In addition to Klebanoff’s own background, he drew upon the considerable hydrogen expertise at Sandia/California to complete the book. Sandia’s Daniel Dedrick, Terry Johnson and Vitalie Stavila each contributed to various chapters, and now-retired Sandia hydrogen program manager Jay Keller co-wrote a pair of chapters as well. “It was a real team effort and clearly shows the level and breadth of hydrogen knowledge here at Sandia,” Klebanoff said.

In addition to the Sandia authors, 21 others contributed, including authors from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and from other countries including Canada, China, and the United Kingdom. “I felt strongly it was important to have an international perspective, as our energy issues are global and interconnected,” said Klebanoff.

Climate change, other factors drive need for hydrogen use

In addition to his work with the MHCoE, Klebanoff also led a successful effort to develop a fuel cell mobile lighting system, so it didn’t come as a shock when publisher Taylor & Francis asked if he’d edit this book on hydrogen storage.

He agreed, realizing that work in the MHCoE and the other two Hydrogen Storage Centers of Excellence had resulted in a great deal of technical data that was ready to be compiled and shared with researchers. In addition, Klebanoff said he feels a personal sense of responsibility to inform technical readers and the public about the urgent need to get zero-emission hydrogen technology into the nation’s vehicles and other carbon-producing applications.

“Not only does this book go into significant technical details, it can also help consumers, political leaders and even some scientists get a better understanding of how bad the global climate change problem really is, and that it has been with us for a century,” Klebanoff said. The book also discusses fuel resource insecurity and political energy insecurity as viable reasons for the nation to convert to hydrogen-based vehicle and power technology. Klebanoff defines political energy insecurity as the political difficulties that can emerge when the energy resources that one country needs depend on another country.

Hydrogen Storage Technology addresses such technical issues as the chemistry of hydrogen storage materials, codes and standards, pressure vessels and engineered hydrogen storage systems. A chapter led by Johnson reviews a recent General Motors/Sandia project that developed the first engineered hydrogen storage bed that could satisfy the fuel demands of real automotive drive cycles.

Storage not a barrier for fuel cell vehicle commercialization

Klebanoff himself said storage isn’t the technical hurdle some believe it to be.

“We actually make the argument that storage is not a huge barrier,” he said. “All of the major car manufacturers have produced hydrogen vehicles, and they can all run for at least 240 miles, and in one case, even up to 430 miles.”

He acknowledged that the research community must work harder to meet the government and industry consumer vehicle target of at least 300 miles across a range of vehicle types and sizes.

“However, there is no technical hydrogen storage barrier preventing the roll-out of the first hydrogen-powered vehicles today,” Klebanoff asserted.

Independent reviewers of the book have been enthusiastic. Professor Klaus Yvon from the University of Geneva, an international leader in the hydrogen storage community, has called it “a breath of fresh air in the field of hydrogen storage research. This book is unique in that it combines materials science, physics and engineering aspects on various hydrogen storage methods into a single volume, while not forgetting application issues.” Yvon added that “it should be treated as compulsory reading for students and researchers in the field.”

Partial support for the work resulting in the book came from the EERE’s Fuel Cell Technologies Office. More information about Hydrogen Storage Technology – Materials and Applications is available directly from the CRC Press website.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

Sandia National Laboratories first investigated the gold-silver-germanium alloy about 15 years ago as a possible bonding material in a new neutron tube product. But a design change forced Sandia to shelve the material, said Paul Vianco, who has worked in soldering and brazing technology at Sandia for 26 years.

Then a few years ago, researchers working on other projects with applications inside a well, referred to as downhole, asked Sandia’s geothermal group to develop electronics to monitor well conditions in field operations. Circuit boards placed downhole in oil and geothermal wells must withstand high temperatures and pressures, excessive vibrations and other extreme environments.

The gold-silver-germanium alloy is suitable for those conditions, Vianco said.

It’s technically a solder, but it’s at the upper limits for what’s considered a solder — materials that melt at no higher temperature than 450 degrees Celsius (842 degrees Fahrenheit), Vianco said. The American Welding Society deems materials that melt at higher temperatures as brazing filler metals.

Sandia fills niche in downhole uses

The alloy’s potential for downhole electronics gives Sandia a unique niche, Vianco said.

Sandia National Laboratories researcher Tom Crenshaw sets up a specimen in a test frame that will pull a solder joint apart to determine its tensile strength. He co-authored a paper that won the Best of Proceedings category in the Surface Mount Technology Association’s International 2012 Best Papers conference. (Photo by Norman Johnson) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“So there’s this no man’s land in which the only materials that are available are aluminum-based brazing alloys that melt at about 600 degrees C,” Vianco said. But aluminum-based alloys are difficult to process for electronics.

In addition, the gold-silver-germanium alloy is lead-free, making it environmentally friendly for geothermal work in countries such as Iceland, which, like the rest of Europe, is moving away from materials that contain lead. The alloy’s fundamental mechanical and processing properties also are nearly fully characterized. That’s important because it saves about two years of development that would be required to establish how well the alloy makes a reliable solder joint, Vianco said.

“All that’s done,” he said. “We have the preliminary work completed that allows us to consider this material for a range of applications, including downhole electronics.”

Alloy developed from earlier work

The alloy originally was developed from the gold-germanium system, which has traditionally been a die attachment material used in microelectronics packaging. But a higher melting temperature was required for the neutron tube application, so Vianco and colleagues John J. Stephens, now deceased, and F. Michael Hosking, now retired, added silver and adjusted the concentrations to reach a near-uniform melting point for the alloy.

“It was so close to brazing that we didn’t think that there would be much interest in the electronics industry until the option came up for downhole applications,” Vianco said.

He is now seeking funds to develop the material to a prototype stage for geothermal and oil and gas well tools. “We really think it is a material that’s suitable for these higher temperature applications,” Vianco said. “In this no man’s land of filler metal technology, there are really not a lot of options out there other than lead-containing alloys. Companies are exploring lead-bearing solders, albeit begrudgingly so.”

When interest in downhole applications arose, Vianco and his colleagues needed to pull together information on the alloy from the mid-1990s. They resurrected the data and re-evaluated it, and Vianco wrote a paper assessing its properties.

That wasn’t as easy as it might sound.

“Photographs were all on film; we had to scan these pictures into an electronic format. Documents and presentations were in unusable formats or archived on software that is no longer supported by the labs.

So everything was brought up to a level that is compatible with current computer resources,” Vianco said.

Paper compiled research data

The paper, “Ag-Au-Ge Alloys for High Temperature Geothermal and Oil Well Electronics Applications,” won the Best of Proceedings category in the Surface Mount Technology Association International 2012 Best Papers conference announced in January. Vianco will receive the award at SMTA’s meeting in October in Fort Worth, Texas.

He wrote the paper largely to compile the data in case interest developed within the oil, gas and geothermal industries, and hadn’t planned to submit it for publication. But SMTA International, aware of Sandia’s leadership role in soldering technology, asked the labs to provide a paper for a session on alternative solders for electronic applications, so Vianco submitted it.

He believes Sandia might be able to use the gold-silver-germanium alloy as a joining material in high-precision components.

The paper and the publicity surrounding the award have raised awareness of the alloy and the growing  need for high-temperature materials to support downhole electronics, Vianco said.

“This is how tech transfer works the best — publish the material and let the folks who have the need become aware of it and then work with their specific applications,” he said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

The team, mentored for more than two years by Sandia National Laboratories cyberengineers, emerged as the top team in the All-Service Division.

CyberPatriot is designed to introduce students to the foundations of cybersecurity. In each competition, students are given GNU-Linux or Windows virtual machines with several vulnerabilities. Students work against the clock and other teams to eliminate the vulnerabilities. Teams that find and neutralize the most vulnerabilities in a set period advance to the next round.

Students compete in either the All-Service Division, which is open only to Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, Civil Air Patrol and Sea Cadet Units, or the Open Division, for accredited public or private institutions or registered home school associations.

The contest provides participants with unsecure machines that have been compromised, both by turning on legitimate services that aren’t needed and can compromise security, and by introducing malicious executable programs. Students decide what to turn off, what to leave on and what malicious programs need to be removed and cleaned up after.

Chris Davis of Sandia’s Effects-Based Studies department  and Ted Reed of the labs’ Cyber Security Technologies department have worked with the La Cueva team for the past two years.

Reed said it’s not easy to train students on cybersecurity issues, partly because they need compromised computers to train on, but most school and home computers are locked down.

During after-school practices, Reed and Davis gave students basic security guidance about how to secure Windows and Linux machines and how to work with Linux. They helped students understand the problems and figure out how they could improve their security posture.

Reed said the program offers students an understanding of computer security, especially the most important principle: If you don’t need the service, turn it off.

Davis said the students didn’t know much about cybersecurity when they started, but now they’re able to fix things at the command line, and they do it naturally.

“Two years ago Ted and I were giving them very basic help. Today, they’re asking us questions that are out at the edges of my understanding of things,” Davis said.

Prior to Sandia’s help, previous La Cueva teams were eliminated in the first round.

“I grew up with computers in my house, but these kids are digital natives born within 10 feet of a cell phone. They think about things differently. Watching how they operate has been eye-opening and educational for us,” Davis said.

First Sgt. A.R. Griego, senior instructor for La Cueva High School’s Marine Corps JROTC team, said Reed and Davis have been a massive help to the team.

At first, the pair visited the school together. As work progressed, they alternated weeks, while assisting students in creating a playbook that documented the team’s progress and will help train future teams.

“It’s been rewarding watching them go from average, perhaps mildly unprotected, computer users to people who are securing themselves and their families,” Davis said.

Last year’s team passed their documentation to this year’s team, so the team started with the help and guidance of past teammates and experienced peers, Davis said.

Last fall, with support from Sandia’s Community Involvement Department, Reed and Davis organized a Cyber Boot Camp for high school students. About 25 La Cueva students attended the one-day boot camp, running through CyberPatriot-style practice rounds. Sandia plans future boot camps for other local high schools.

Tyler Morris, the La Cueva team captain, joined Sandia’s Center for Cyber Defenders (CCD) as a student intern last year. Using funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate and tools from The Deter Project and University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, he and other CCD interns developed training courses that could go into a controlled test environment so they can be accessed online. He also worked to pass along the team’s knowledge and experience, helping develop an app for basic cybersecurity education.

Davis said a few other students from last year’s team have pursued college majors related to computer security. But the experience has been beneficial for all of the participants.

“Even if they don’t pursue it as a profession, their security hygiene has improved greatly. They know how to assess risks and protect themselves and their families. The more people protect themselves, the less governments and other officials have to intervene,” Davis said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Holinka, slholin@sandia.gov, (505) 284-9227

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A warning of “malicious cyber activity,” sent out one day earlier by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, accompanied a growing flood of news releases from major businesses and large institutions acknowledging their websites had been hacked and data sometimes compromised.

Posed on open-house day are, from left, Acting VP of Science and Technology Duane Dimos, UNM research VP John McGraw, Executive VP Kim Sawyer, NNSA official Dimitri Kusnezov, Cray President Peter Ungaro, Sandia Computing Research Director Rob Leland, U.S. Senator Tom Udall, Sandia President Paul Hommert, Bernallilo county commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins, and U.S. Representative Ben Ray Lujan. (Photo by Randy Montoya)

U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., mentioned Winston Churchill’s book “While England Slept,” which in 1938 criticized the English government’s lack of preparation against the threat from Nazi Germany.

“Cyberthreat is not one of guns and tanks but we need to take it seriously. … The threat is real to … our water systems, oil pipelines, hospital systems … and we should bring justice to those who would do us harm. CERL is a crucial part of our defenses,” Udall said.

Activities at CERL — located in the Sandia Science & Technology Park — are expected to marry computing expertise from across Sandia Labs with that of universities and businesses to develop long-term solutions against the increasingly serious challenges posed by hackers and cybercriminals to individuals, business and government.

U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., who stressed partnerships between businesses and New Mexico’s national labs, Sandia and Los Alamos, said, “Personal information taken and used in some way, from an ATM machine or anywhere else, can allow someone from around the world to get into something personal (of a U.S. citizen).”

Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry said the takeover of four TV stations by attackers who jokingly advertised “the zombie apocalypse” was not funny in what it said about communications security.

Dimitri Kusnezov, chief scientist and director of the Office of Science and Policy at the National Nuclear Security Administration, offered a historical view.  “The need for secrecy (has ranged historically) from clay tablets and cuneiform to today’s complex protocols. … Our cybersecurity needs will not recede in time but only get greater as data complexity gets greater. … There is no scientific silver bullet. The key is to train our people to be more aware, smarter, building in as many safeguards as we can, co-developed with technology. Centers like this can forward these steps,” he said.

Sandia President and Labs Director Paul Hommert spoke in support of Kusnezov’s comprehensive approach to move security forward: better training, improved search algorithms, another level of equipment.

“(Cybercrime) can’t be tackled alone,” Hommert said. “The public and private worlds must combine efforts to work as a team.”

He mentioned Sandia’s Center for Cyberdefenders student internship program, which has honed the skills of more than 300 students in the past decade in an effort to develop the next generation of cyber workers.

CERL projects are more complex than what the public may imagine to be a James Bond-style response to strike back immediately at cyber adversaries.

One project improves and tests algorithms to prevent adversaries from penetrating emails or damaging websites. The effort involves a kind of electronic topographical map that charts entry points and paths of a large number of emails within a system to recognize anomalies — messages that stand out because of their oddness.

In another, the brainwaves of students wearing electroencephalograph caps (the same as used in hospitals and gaming) are mapped to build a library of what success looks like in handling particular cyber tasks. The idea is to cut in half the time needed to train a cybersecurity professional — by some estimates, about five years.

Students from colleges and high schools also compete in virtual cyber exercises to solve enough digital clues to catch an imaginary “bad guy” molesting the economic well-being of a large coffee company.

John McGraw, vice president for research at the University of New Mexico, recognized the complexity of the response needed. “Sandia’s unique mission is to protect the public against vulnerabilities not recognized by the public,” he said.

Sandia has had a head start in computer security, said Ben Cook, a member of the CERL leadership group,  because it was safeguarding nuclear weapons secrets at the dawn of the computer age, long before the term “cyberspace” was in common usage.

Cray Computing CEO and President Peter Ungaro, who has made no secret of his feeling that Sandia kept Cray solvent by helping create what he termed “the most successful family of supercomputers ever built (the Sandia/Cray Red Storm supercomputer),” advocated CERL collaborations to “develop a technical roadmap to take problems currently intractable and solve those to make them broadly applicable across a wide variety of frameworks.

“Cybersecurity is one of the largest threats out there today,” he said. “The vast amount of digital data is growing at an exponential rate — every two days, there’s more data created than from the dawn of civilization to 2003. Our hacker adversaries are getting more sophisticated in using data against us.”

Rob Leland, director of Sandia’s Computing Research center, concluded the talks by speculating that, just as the development of the laminar flow clean room ushered in a revolution in microelectronics, “there’s the potential for us to do something similar in the cyberworld and that CERL will play a key role in bringing that about.”

The clean room, invented at Sandia and patented by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1962, made the microelectronic age possible by providing a simple, standardized way to greatly lessen the number of dust particles in research labs and electronic production lines.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov,  (505) 845-7078

Tsao is a researcher in the solid-state lighting group, working to cut back the worldwide cost of electricity by using semiconductor light-emitting diodes as sources of illumination instead of electrical filaments, plasma or gas.

Sandia's Jeff Tsao was recognized with an Asian American Engineer of the Year award for his technical achievement, leadership and public service. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

This year Tsao became the 13^th Sandia staff member honored with an Asian American Engineer of the Year (AAEOY) award. The prestigious recognition program was started in 2001 by the Chinese Institute of Engineers-USA to honor outstanding Asian American professionals in science and engineering for their leadership, technical achievement and public service.

This year’s 12^th annual event was held March 2 in Dallas as a finale to National Engineers Week. Albuquerque hosted the 2012 AAEOY last March with Sandia President and Laboratories Director Paul Hommert as keynote speaker.

Since 2002, some 160 engineers from leading U.S. technology corporations, research institutions and the U.S. Armed Forces have received the AAEOY award, including seven Nobel laureates.

“Getting this award is an amazing honor,” Tsao said.

Tsao is a Los Angeles native who attended Stanford University, earning in four years a bachelor’s in math and a master’s in electrical engineering. Grad school took him to the opposite side of the country and Harvard University.

“Harvard was great, but that first year was tough coming from perfect weather in California,” he said. “My first winter in Boston was the famous blizzard of ’78. The storm was so bad that Harvard had to shut down. Here I was this California kid wearing flip flops. I figured I’d better get some real shoes.”

With a doctorate in applied physics in hand, Tsao arrived at Sandia in 1984. He had a background in lasers, laser spectroscopy and quantum electronics, and a strong interest in materials science. He joined a project involving pulsed laser annealing of silicon to look at the dynamics of ultra-fast crystal growth. He later switched to a study of crystal growth on a slower time scale using a then-emerging technique, molecular beam epitaxy.

Tsao wrote a book, “Materials Fundamentals of Molecular Beam Epitaxy,” and in the early 1990s became a manager in Sandia’s Microelectronics and Microsystems center. About seven years later, aware of the commercial potential of semiconductor materials and devices, he took an entrepreneurial leave of absence to work at a small Los Angeles startup company that made fiber optic communications components.

“I spent a year there,” Tsao said. “I wanted to see how the high-tech world functioned.”

He returned to Sandia in 2001 as a researcher in the solid state lighting group. “It was the beginning of a new field,” Tsao said. “At first nobody had a clue if it would take off. It was kind of a dream, but we could see the potential. Now nobody has any doubt it will pretty much replace every light bulb on Earth.”

Jerry Simmons, senior manager of Sandia’s Semiconductors and Optical Sciences department, said Tsao was one of the first people to push for a national initiative in solid-state lighting, coauthoring a white paper on the topic in 1999 with Jeff Nelson of Sandia and Fred Kish and Roland Haitz of Hewlett Packard.

In subsequent years, Tsao was instrumental in helping identify and articulate the major science and technology research challenges for solid-state lighting. Simmons said Tsao also did an “amazing” study on the consumption of light across several continents going back 300 years, showing that humanity tends to spend roughly 0.7 percent of its gross domestic product on lighting, regardless of its efficiency or of standard of living.

Tsao said his career has spanned a wide range of work, from in-the-lab experimental science to management and entrepreneurship to serving the larger research community through papers, roadmaps and forward-looking ideas.

“Most importantly, it’s been full of wonderful friends, colleagues, and managers,” he said.  “And for that I am grateful.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

More than 130 students from 29 teams representing 12 New Mexico middle schools participated in the annual event. A fast-paced question-and-answer tournament tests students’ knowledge in biology, chemistry, physics and math.

The winning team received an all-expenses-paid trip to the nation’s capital to compete against top teams from across the country in late April.

The students representing the first-place team are Harrison Bay, Eric Swiler, Henry Luo, Mark Swiler and team captain Thor Larson, coached by Barbara Gilbert. Second place was Team 1 from Los Alamos Middle School, and Team 2 from Albuquerque Academy took the third spot.

Sandia National Laboratories coordinates the New Mexico Regional Middle School Science Bowl for DOE’s Office of Science. The National Science Bowl for Middle School students was started in 2002 and includes two types of competitions: an academic math and science competition and a model car race. Teams design, build and race models cars to apply science and engineering principles. DOE created the National Science Bowl for High School Students in 1991 to encourage students to excel in math and science and pursue careers in related fields. More than 200,000 students have participated in the National Science Bowl in the 23 years since its inception.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, (505) 280-3905, shobby@sandia.gov

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories has become a pioneer in large-scale passive optical networks, building the largest fiber optical local area network in the world.

Steve Gossage, a senior engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, looks at fiber optics in a cable box that replaced heavier and bulkier copper cable for high-speed communications throughout much of the labs. Fiber offers more capacity and is more reliable than copper. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The network pulls together 265 buildings and 13,000 computer network ports and brings high-speed communication to some of the labs’ most remote technical areas for the first time. And it will save an estimated $20 million over five years through energy and other savings and not having to buy replacement equipment. Sandia expects to reduce energy costs by 65 percent once the network is fully operational.

Fiber offers far more capacity, is more secure and reliable and is less expensive to maintain and operate than the traditional network using copper cables.

An optical local area network (LAN) gives people phone, data and video services using half-inch fiber optic cables made of 288 individual fibers, instead of the conventional 4-inch copper cables. Copper cables used to fill up underground conduits and required steel overhead racks of connecting cable, along with distribution rooms filled with separate frames for copper voice and data cables. The fiber distribution system uses only part of the conduit and needs only a 2- by 3-foot cable box.

“The frames go away, and the walls are bare and the tray empties,” said senior engineer Steve Gossage, who has spent his 36-year career at Sandia in advanced information and network systems engineering.

The national laboratory has always pushed for speed beyond the fastest transmission rate available, Gossage said. “When people were working in much slower data rates, kilobit-type rates at short distances, we were trying to get 10 times the distance and 10 times the speed,” he said.

Adopting fiber optics

Sandia began looking at fiber optics early in the technology’s development because of its promise of higher bandwidth — greater communication speed — at longer distances. The labs started converting from copper in the 1980s, first installing then-emerging fiber optics in a single building and bumping that facility to megabit speeds. “Today we’re way past that. We’re at 10 gigabit-type rates and looking hard at 100,” Gossage said.

After years of planning, Sandia completed a formal network plan in late 2008 and sought competitive bids the following year. Sandia selected Tellabs of Naperville, Ill., as the equipment vendor for the network, and Gossage and his colleagues simultaneously began to jumpstart the deployment of the fiber infrastructure and set up a test lab to validate the performance of configurations for the equipment and various network functions. The technology began moving to desktops in 2011, and by the end of 2012, Sandia had converted more than 90 percent of bulky copper cable to a fiber optics LAN.

Sandia, which will spend about $15 million on the project, needs superb computing capability for the problems it tackles as part of its support for the mission for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“Whether it’s a materials science problem or modeling an event, we need a lot of data and a lot of processing capability,” Gossage said. “We need to be able to see it, we need to be able to view it, we need to be able to put teams together. This is a large laboratory, deeply stocked with scientists and engineers and test labs. For the analyses we get, the problems are not small and they’re not easy.”

Since its first experience with fiber optics, Sandia envisioned being able to use multiple wavelengths in a very high bandwidth single strand reaching the farthest tech areas. But decades ago, when Sandia began putting in single-mode fiber to desks and adding underground fiber capabilities, the technology wasn’t quite mature enough to take advantage of fiber optics’ inherent multiple wavelengths and speeds.

So Sandia continued to install the fiber optics cable foundation and waited as the technology developed, and moved quickly when commercial optical networks began deploying voice, data and video to large collections of homes and offices.

“There weren’t that many unknowns for us because we had been thinking about ways to do this on a large scale for quite a while,” Gossage said. “We had already thought through what this might mean to us, what it might mean to our lifecycle costs and where the investments would be, and we were already pretty comfortable with fiber and the technologies that go with it.”

Copper versus fiber optics

Buildings with conventional copper LANs have separate networks for phones, computers, wireless, security and so on. Fiber optics puts everything in a single network cable. That eliminates a large number of power-consuming switches and routers and makes the network simpler to operate and cheaper to install. Since it requires less space, energy and maintenance costs go down.

“As we research and deploy new technologies, our main objectives are to enable the labs’ mission, decrease life-cycle costs and if possible reduce our footprint on the environment. With the deployment of passive optical networks we have been able to meet and exceed all of these objectives,” said Sandia manager Jeremy Banks.

Where a conventional LAN serving 900 customers requires a space the size of three double ovens, an optical network serving 8,000 requires a microwave oven-sized space. Where copper cable required Sandia to maintain and manage 600 separate switches in the field, optical LAN allows it to operate a data center in one building and simple, standard ports to offices. Because fiber optics reaches beyond the 100-meter radius that once was the standard from a wiring closet to a desktop, remote areas such as the National Solar Thermal Test Facility have high-speed communications for the first time.

The only copper wire for most of Sandia today is a short connection from the wall to the desktop. Everything behind the wall is fiber.

Moving away from copper wasn’t easy. It required new technology for the core communication system and made Sandia its own network provider, Gossage said. He credited a central team of about 10 people across Sandia who worked together every day throughout 2011, plus sub-teams totaling about 40 people. The effort included engineering design, information technology, network systems, computing, facilities, security and people in the field pulling cable and connecting ports.

Still to come

Sandia is recycling copper as it’s replaced, which keeps tons of valuable material out of a landfill. The estimated $80,000 for the copper will offset some of the fiber optics cost.

The labs also must turn off hundreds of switches before it can fully realize the energy savings. That will take longer because it depends on such things as staffing, Gossage said.

More change could be coming. A small trial is under way for voice-over-fiber — putting data and voice in one system rather than the two Sandia uses today. Testing shows Sandia can protect voice running through a congested circuit — what Gossage calls “a Mother’s Day test,” when everyone calls at the same time. The Gigabit Passive Optical Network standard Sandia works with can dedicate part of the bandwidth and give priority to selected traffic such as voice. So calls would go through even with heavy competition from data.

Sandia also is working with a small number of researchers who need more bandwidth than they’re getting. The labs’ needs are ahead of the market but it’s pushing for next-generation increases in speed, Gossage said.

Communication speed improves every five to eight years. With copper, each improvement required replacing large, heavy bundles of jacketed cable to re-engineer them to perform at the new speed, he said. Fiber optical cable offers a bandwidth good for 25 years or more.

“We change the wavelength, we change the modulation rate, we don’t get back in the ceiling, we don’t get back in the customer’s office,” Gossage said. “So our return on investment, our capital investment, our operational investment, the impact on our customers — everything gets better.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

J. Anthony Wingate, manager of Subsystems and Component Quality Engineering, was named Professional Engineer of the Year for Diversity Leadership. Dennis Owens, manager of Defense Systems Quality Engineering, and systems engineer Carl Rhinehart both received the Science Spectrum Trailblazer Award.

From left, Sandia’s Dennis Owens, J. Anthony Wingate and Carl Rhinehart were honored with 2013 national Black Engineer of the Year Awards. They met for this photo in the gallery of the African American Performing Arts Center & Exhibit Hall at Expo New Mexico in Albuquerque. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

BEYA is a program of the national Career Communications Group, an advocate for corporate diversity, and part of its Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) achievement program. The awards recognize the nation’s best and brightest engineers, scientists and technology experts. Wingate, Owens and Rhinehart received their awards at the 27^th BEYA conference this month in Washington, D.C. The event preceded National Engineers Week.

“These gentlemen represent the incredible talent we have at Sandia,” said Sandia’s Chief Diversity Officer Esther Hernandez. “It is so inspiring to learn of their outstanding achievements and personal stories, and to feel their passion about growing and preparing our Sandia workforce for tomorrow.”

Wingate has been a leader in affirmative action and diversity efforts at Sandia while building a distinguished career in quality engineering and management. He joined the labs in 1994 and has worked in quality infrastructure, product engineering and project management.

Wingate has received numerous awards and recognitions, but said his real reward comes from helping a minority job applicant start on the path to success. “If that person can someday be the next director, that’s what matters to me,” he said.

Sixty-four percent of new hires in Wingate’s organization in the past three years have been minorities. “I continually seek opportunities to engage with young scientists and engineers from minority backgrounds,” he said. “I believe this young, diverse talent will enhance the future of Sandia and of our nation.”

Owens joined Sandia in 2001 as a quality engineer in neutron generator production. In the 1990s, he was an early convert to the Six Sigma, ISO 9000 and quality movements. “I got into quality as a vocation because I liked the thinking. I saw the value in the prevention of defects,” he said. “The companies I worked at did not have a quality management systems model. My job became to develop the systems.”

Owens has put together internal quality audit programs at Sandia and  led Lean Six Sigma projects in launch fielding, strategic planning and lab space improvements. “Thus far, quality has been my career at Sandia,” Owens said. “Regardless of my assignment, I’ve learned to approach problem solving from a prevention mindset and it’s now just the way I think.”

Rhinehart, the first member of his family to attend college, was recruited to Sandia in 2002 from North Carolina A&T State University as a manufacturing and operations engineer in the neutron generator group. He has taken on a variety of quality engineering and project management roles. He helps with planning and managing technical activities for five departments and 45 staff members.

Mentorship and minority recruitment are integral to Rhinehart’s life. He mentors numerous staff members on quality engineering. In 2010, he began working through Sandia’s Black Leadership Committee as a recruiter of minority science and engineering job candidates.  “My objective is to open the pipeline,” he said. “It feels like I’m giving back and spreading the word about opportunities at Sandia. I want other minorities to have the opportunity I had.”

Click here for more information on diversity at Sandia Labs.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

The Facilities and Infrastructure Recapitalization Program (FIRP) was established in 2001 to reduce a long-standing backlog of deferred maintenance at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) eight sites, including Sandia. Some $1.9 billion was spent over 11 years on 900 design, construction and repair projects. The program goals were accomplished one year early.

“The NNSA created the program to make its sites leaner, more energy efficient and to ensure the vitality and readiness of its nuclear security enterprise,” said Dawn Harder, Sandia Field Office FIRP program manager. “A primary goal was to help restore, rebuild and revitalize the facilities and infrastructure at Sandia through the elimination of legacy deferred maintenance and excess space.”

The FIRP came about after the Department of Energy (DOE) and NNSA found significant deterioration of facilities that house activities of the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program. The FIRP was supported by DOE, Department of Defense, outside stakeholders, Congress and NNSA. The goal was to reduce a $2 billion maintenance and repair backlog and restore facility conditions to an acceptable level through recapitalization, restoration and modernization.

At Sandia’s three major sites in Albuquerque; Livermore, Calif.; and Tonopah, Nev., the program eliminated $142 million in deferred maintenance and 510,000 square feet of noncontaminated excess space. Sandia completed 56 recapitalization projects costing $100 million; 21 disposition projects, at $29 million; two major utility line-item projects, $62 million; and 18 infrastructure planning initiatives, $8 million.

“The FIRP has been a cornerstone for Sandia’s efforts to achieve and efficiently maintain its facilities in a condition ‘fit for mission use,’” said Art Ratzel, director of Sandia’s Facilities Management and Operations Center. “Its performance exceeded our expectations through NNSA’s strong commitment and the tremendous efforts of Field Office and Facilities Management staffs in making FIRP an unqualified success.”

NNSA’s efforts to improve its infrastructure are not ending. NNSA will continue to address old deferred maintenance needs where appropriate and establish new, modern capabilities needed to support the advances in stockpile stewardship and other program drivers that will replace outdated and obsolete capabilities.

Click here for more information.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Cool Earth Solar CEO Rob Lamkin, left, and the former vice president of Sandia's California site, Rick Stulen, stand in front of one of the company’s inflated, concentrated photovoltaic units located at the Livermore Valley Open Campus (LVOC). A new research agreement between the two organizations aims to make solar energy more affordable and accessible and demonstrates how the LVOC can foster new lab collaborations. (Photo by Randy Wong.) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The five-year Cooperative Research & Development Agreement (CRADA) calls for researchers with Sandia’s New Mexico solar energy program to help pilot, characterize and validate Cool Earth Solar’s inflated, concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) technology. The Livermore-based company’s equipment will be located on a five-acre site known as the Clean Energy Demonstration Field on the LVOC.

One of Cool Earth Solar’s units already has been set up, with dozens more planned over the next five years. The unit is connected to Sandia’s power grid, and up to 500 kilowatts of solar power could be provided to the labs by 2018.

“Sandia’s partnership with Cool Earth Solar shows that the labs are looking for new ways of doing business and collaborating with external entities,” said Andy McIlroy, Sandia’s senior manager for LVOC development efforts. “It demonstrates that we’re open to win-win opportunities that meet our national security mission and, at the same time, help our partners to move forward with technology that makes the world a better place.”

The LVOC is a 110-acre parcel that spans the eastern sides of Sandia’s California site and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Historically, both labs have been closed and self-contained, making some external alliances difficult due to administrative and security challenges. The LVOC was established in 2011 as a space for open, collaborative work in such fields as bioscience, cybersecurity, detection technologies and energy applications.

Fewer, less expensive materials equal more affordable solar power

“This agreement with Sandia and the Department of Energy represents the ‘coming out,’ the first-ever public deployment of our technology,” said Rob Lamkin, CEO of Cool Earth Solar. “We are pleased to be pioneers of both our unique solar technology as well as the Open Campus concept.”

High costs have hindered efforts to make large-scale solar a viable energy option. Cool Earth Solar’s approach, Lamkin said, has been to use inexpensive, thin-film plastic as the core material for its equipment. “For our equipment to capture the same amount of solar energy as more traditional solar equipment, we use less than half the materials in terms of weight and mass,” Lamkin said. “Then, when you factor in the fact that the little material we do use is a whole lot cheaper, that’s how we drive down the cost.”

Cool Earth Solar’s out-of-the-box approach is exciting and has the potential to meet the DOE’s SunShot program goal of grid parity by 2020, said Charles Hanley, manager of Sandia’s solar program in Albuquerque. The SunShot initiative seeks to make solar energy cost-competitive with other forms of electricity by the end of the decade.

“One of the primary goals of Sandia’s energy program and our solar portfolio in particular is to help accelerate technology development for the private sector,” Hanley said. “Cool Earth Solar’s installation at Sandia’s Clean Energy Demonstration Field is a great example of how our partnerships with the private sector support DOE’s SunShot goals.”

“Sandia’s CRADA with Cool Earth Solar is an example of how we’re supporting the U.S. solar industry to develop new technologies that will meet our SunShot targets,” added Kevin Lynn, DOE’s team lead for systems integration efforts in the SunShot Initiative.

Proximity, mission goals make partnership a natural

Though both organizations agreed that establishing a new business arrangement as part of the LVOC initiative was a challenge, Sandia and Cool Earth Solar were up to the task.

“Working with a start-up company like Cool Earth Solar has been fun and energizing,” McIlroy said. “There is a lot of verve and vitality to be found at Cool Earth Solar, and that creates a strong sense that they’re doing something important and exciting.”

“For some time now, we had hoped to find a national laboratory partner to give us a different technical perspective on our technology, help improve it and drive it toward commercialization with us,” Lamkin said. Sandia made perfect sense, he said, since the labs possess decades of solar expertise and maintain a Livermore site less than three miles from Cool Earth Solar’s offices. Lamkin credited former Sandia/California Vice President Rick Stulen for championing the partnership and shepherding it to fruition.

In addition to the Sandia /LVOC deployment, Cool Earth Solar is developing commercial sites for the future deployment of its technology in northern California and Texas. “We’ve spent years developing the technology, so now it’s time to deploy it and invite the public to come see it,” said Lamkin.

As for Sandia, McIlroy said the Cool Earth Solar deployment on the LVOC signifies the first of what he hopes will be other industry partners on the Open Campus.

“We very much want to reach a wider community of partners on the LVOC, including academic, industrial and other laboratory collaborators,” he said. “What I hope people see in the Cool Earth Solar demonstration project is that the labs are serious about exploring new ways of doing business, particularly with small businesses and start-ups that are such a strong part of the Bay Area’s culture and economic engine.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

Los Alamos High School regional winners, left to Right: Willie Zhao, Aaron Bao, Kevin Gao, Alex Swart, Alex Wang and their coach, Kathy Boerigter. (Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Students from Los Alamos High School will represent New Mexico at the Department of Energy’s National Science Bowl in April. The team took first place on Saturday, Feb. 16, at the New Mexico Regional High School Competition after besting 28 teams representing 14 New Mexican high schools.

Students answered questions related to astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, physics, math, trigonometry and calculus during the fast-paced, 10-hour, “Jeopardy” style competition. The winning team will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., to compete against top teams across the nation in late April.

The students representing Los Alamos are Willie Zhao, Aaron Bao, Alex Wang, Alex Swart and team captain Kevin Gao, coached by Kathy Boerigter. Second place was Albuquerque Academy and La Cueva High School took the third spot.

Sandia National Laboratories coordinates the annual regional competition for DOE’s Office of Science. DOE created the National Science Bowl in 1991 to encourage students to excel in math and science and pursue careers in related fields. More than 200,000 students have participated in the National Science Bowl in the 23 years since its inception.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, (505) 280-3905, shobby@sandia.gov

Sandia chemical engineer Nancy Jackson has worked in laboratories around the world to help ensure that chemicals are used safely and kept secure. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is honoring her with the 2013 Science Diplomacy Award on Friday, Feb. 15. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Left alone for years, some chemicals can quietly break down into explosive elixirs, and what was once an innocent experiment by a well-meaning scientist becomes a very real, unsecured threat. Should such chemicals fall into malicious hands, the consequences could be widespread and deadly.

In 2007, Sandia chemical engineer Nancy Jackson helped the U.S. Department of State create the Chemical Security Engagement Program to help scientists around the world, particularly in developing countries, keep chemical use safe and secure. Jackson and her team develop and implement programs for laboratories worldwide to help manage their chemical inventories and devote time to training future laboratory trainers.

As the 2011 president of the American Chemical Society and manager of Sandia’s International Chemical Threat Reduction program, Jackson has traveled and worked closely with scientists in some of the world’s most volatile regions to make their laboratories more safe and secure. For her extensive work engaging scientists around the world, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has honored Jackson with the 2013 Science Diplomacy Award, which will be presented on Friday, Feb. 15, at the AAAS annual meeting in Boston.

“Nancy has been a true pioneer in chemical threat reduction work globally. Even though the chemical threat has not received all the attention that the biological threat has, the ubiquity of dangerous chemicals and the means to misuse them makes the danger of chemical terrorism and proliferation just as clear and present as the biological threat,” said Ren Salerno, senior manager of Sandia’s International Cooperative Threat Reduction program. “The recent crisis in Syria emphasizes this reality. The work of Nancy and her department is unquestionably a critical Sandia contribution to U.S. and international security.”

The program’s goal is identifying chemicals that can cause catastrophe in the wrong hands, and making sure they stay out of those hands. One challenge facing Jackson and her team is that many laboratory chemicals are dual use, with both helpful and destructive applications. Take potassium cyanide. While cyanide is used to manufacture plastics, textiles and paper, develop photographs and remove gold from its ore, when paired with an acid, cyanide can easily be turned into a deadly gas.

“Chemicals are not like nuclear or biological threat materials. They are everywhere,” said Jackson. “You can’t lock them up; you can’t put them in Biosecurity Level 4 labs. Instead of locking them up, you have to manage them.”

Jackson and her team work with universities, small businesses and research institutions to build extensive chemical inventories so organizations can know and manage what they have. With such inventories, chemicals are less likely to go missing, and sharing resources between scientists is easier, driving down costs and wait times associated with ordering new products.

The program regularly engages scientists in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where Jackson says chemists and chemical engineers understand the importance of keeping chemicals guarded, but often don’t have the resources or training to implement security systems.

Jackson and her team have developed five-day, train-the-trainer programs for chemists and chemical engineers that teach the importance of personal protective equipment, maintaining working chemical hoods, chemical management and physical security. The goal is to educate professors and researchers so that program graduates will be aware of safety and security measures, thus sustaining the program for future graduates.

Despite the important national security mission of Jackson’s work, she said one of the most rewarding aspects of her job is building relationships, particularly with the growing population of female chemists and chemical engineers in the developing world. “It’s a delight,” Jackson said. “I love meeting these very impressive people and getting to know them, and I try to help their careers however I can. It has been a very rewarding career and I am honored to be recognized for my work.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, shobby@sandia.gov, (505) 280-3905

“These contracts replace current IT contracts that are expiring,” said Chris Slater of the Sandia Procurement group. “We are integrating multiple service contracts to create efficiencies and long-term cost savings across our IT work.”

Sandia has about 450 contract IT workers. The three new contracts, which have a similar scope of work as the expiring ones, take effect April 11, 2013. Each carries a five-year term plus a two-year option period for a potential of seven years. “There is incentive for suppliers to keep existing staff for continuity of service. They have to come in and be ready to go,” Slater said. “We made it clear in the Request for Quotations (RFQ) that retention of incumbent staff is important.”

Over the past 10 years, numerous contracts covered Sandia IT services. One spanned telecommunications, three covered desktop support and the computer help desk and multiple individual specialized contracts encompassed a variety of other IT services, including onsite programmers, software administrators, high-performance computing and cybersecurity.

Award A, an estimated $44.4 million contract for telecommunications, went to Mutual Telecom Services, headquartered in Needham, Mass. Award B was a small business set-aside, meaning only registered small businesses could bid. This work encompasses enterprise computing and corporate desktop support. The contract was awarded to The Kemtah Group of Albuquerque for an estimated $81 million. And Award C for mission computing services, encompassing a variety of other IT services and estimated at $227.5 million, went to Science Applications International Corp., headquartered in McLean, Va. The contracts require that the winning companies establish offices in Albuquerque.

Debbie Leitka of Sandia Procurement said businesses could have teamed up to bid on any of the awards during the solicitation phase.

“The contracts were awarded by best value determination where each bidder was asked to quote its most favorable terms, both from a price/cost and technical standpoint. The proposals determined to be the overall best value were selected,” Leitka said. “It was a level playing field.”

An executive summary providing information about the RFQ was posted in December 2011 on an external Sandia web page dedicated to the contracts. Links to that page were posted on Sandia’s Business Opportunities website, FedBizOpps and Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration contracting sites.

Suppliers had about two months from the date of the posting to study the executive summary and decide whether to formally declare their intent to bid. Only those suppliers who filed an intent received the RFQ when it was released in February 2012.

Members of Sandia’s procurement and technical organizations evaluated the proposals and selected the successful bidders.

Leitka said the IT contracts were restructured to gain efficiencies and long-term cost savings by integrating services. “The technical organizations wanted a more streamlined approach to IT services,” she said. “We want to integrate the IT coming through these contracting methods.”

The RFQ also required that the successful bidders improve efficiency in the way they deliver IT services and increase the levels of service in each year of the contract to achieve sustainability in performance and costs.

Slater said that with the old contracts expiring, “it was an opportunity to look at what worked and what didn’t. The technical organizations wanted to learn about what industry was doing, what efficiencies could be created, and they wanted to incorporate best practices. It was the right time to make all of that come to fruition.”

Most of the efficiencies gained will be through the reduced effort of managing three contracts instead of multiple contracts, he said.

“These contracts are structured to allow Sandia to move forward in IT,” Slater said. “It’s a foundation upon which we can evolve our IT services.”

For more information on doing business with Sandia, visit the Procurement website.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

LIVERMORE, Calif.— The internal combustion engine has been the workhorse for transportation for more than a century, but Sandia National Laboratories researchers say there is still plenty to learn about engineering it to burn cleaner and more efficiently.

The Combustion Research Facility (CRF) is an internationally recognized center of excellence for combustion science and technology whose operations are supported by the DOE Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences. The CRF is home to about 100 scientists, engineers, and technologists who conduct basic and applied research aimed at improving our nation’s ability to use and control combustion processes. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

A Sandia researcher will be among a half dozen scientists working on transportation energy issues who will present their work at a panel during the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting. The panel, Predictive Model of the Internal Combustion Engine, is scheduled Feb. 16 from 1:30-4:30 p.m. at the AAAS gathering in Boston.

“We all use it [the combustion engine], but we don’t know what’s going on inside of it,” said panelist Nils Hansen, a Sandia combustion chemist. “Once we have a detailed understanding of what’s going on, you can start to preclude things from happening like soot formation and other pollutant emissions.”

“We can now realistically conceive of having a fully predictive model of the internal combustion engine on the computer,” added Sandia’s Ahren Jasper, the session’s lead organizer. Such a model, he said, could be a “golden egg’’ for industry, as it would significantly reduce the development time and cost of new engines optimized for future fuel streams, including renewables such as biomass-derived fuels.

Combustion, Jasper said, is a multi-scale problem and thus requires a multi-disciplinary technical approach. The session’s panelists are expected to demonstrate how various aspects of combustion science are linked, and how the international combustion community is organized to solve this “big science” problem.

In late 2011, the Washington Post published an op-ed piece by Sandia’s Bob Carling, director of the internationally renowned Combustion Research Facility, titled “An engine we still need – how we can save energy with combustion technology.” Hansen said the themes of that piece – particularly, that combustion will remain a necessary technology even as advanced and renewable fuels are developed – are highly relevant to the Predictive Model session.

Speakers at the Predictive Model of the Internal Combustion Engine session (with links to their areas of combustion expertise) include:

• Katharina Kohse-Höinghaus, University of Bielefeld (Combustion Chemistry)
• Stephen Klippenstein, Argonne National Laboratory  (Current Challenges in Computational Kinetics for Predictive Modeling)
• William Green, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Chemical Kinetics and Modeling of Combustion)
• Alison Tomlin, University of Leeds (Chemical Models for Combustion)
• Nils Hansen, Sandia National Laboratories (Exploring Combustion Chemistry in Laboratory-Based Flames)
• Sibendu Som, Argonne National Laboratory (Simulations of Compression Ignition Engines with Detailed Chemistry and Spray Models)

Join the AAAS conversation on Twitter, using #AAASmtg and follow along with us @SandiaLabs.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

With that in mind, Sandia National Laboratories computer science researcher Jeremy Wendt wants to figure out how to recognize potential targets of nefarious emails and put them on their guard.

His goal is to reduce the number of visitors that cyberanalysts have to check as possible bad guys among the tens of thousands who search Sandia websites each day.

Ultimately, he wants to be able to spot spear phishing. Phishing is sending an email to thousands of addresses in hopes a few will follow a link and, for example, fall for a scam offering millions of dollars to help a Nigerian prince wire money out of his country. Spear phishing, on the other hand, targets specific email addresses that have something the sender wants.

Wendt has developed algorithms that separate robotic web crawlers from people using browsers. He believes his work will improve security because it allows analysts to look at groups separately.

Even if an outsider gets into a Sandia machine that doesn’t have much information, that access makes it easier to get into another machine that may have something, Wendt said.

Sandia National Laboratories computer science researcher Jeremy Wendt concentrates on working on a program to find potential targets of nefarious emails. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“Spear phishing is scary because as long as you have people using computers, they might be fooled into opening something they shouldn’t,” he said.

Identifying malicious intent

Sandia cybersecurity’s Roger Suppona said the ability to identify the possible intent to send malicious content might enable security experts to raise awareness in a potential target. “More importantly, we might be able to provide specifics that would be far more helpful in elevating awareness than would a generic admonition to be suspicious of incoming email or other messages,” he said.

Wendt, in the final stretch of a two-year Early Career Laboratory Directed Research and Development grant, presented his work at a Sandia poster session.

Wendt has looked into behaviors of web crawlers vs. browsers to see if that matches how computers identify themselves when asking for a webpage. Browsers generally say they can interpret a particular version of HTML — HyperText Markup Language, the main language for displaying webpages — and often give browser and operating system information. Crawlers identify themselves by program name and version number. A small number Wendt labels “nulls” offer no identification, perhaps because the programmer omitted that information, perhaps because someone wants to hide.

What Wendt is looking for is a computer that doesn’t identify itself or said it’s one thing but behaves like another and trolls websites in which the average visitor shows little interest.

Going to an Internet site creates a log of the search. Sandia traffic is about evenly divided between web crawlers and browsers. Crawlers tend to go all over; browsers concentrate on one place, such as jobs.

Crawlers, also known as bots, are automated and follow links like Google or Bing do. “When we get crawled by a Google bot, we aren’t being crawled by one visitor, we’re being crawled by several hundreds or thousands of different IP addresses,” Wendt said. An IP or Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to devices on a computer network, identifying the machine and its location.

Distinguishing bots and browsers

Since Wendt wants to distinguish bots from browsers without having to trust they’re who they say they are, he looked for ways to measure behavior.

The first measurement deals with the fact bots try to index a website. When you type in search words, the crawler looks for pages associated with those words, disregarding how they’re arranged on a page. That means a bot pulls down HTML files far more often.

Wendt first looked at HTML downloads. Bots should have a high percentage. Browsers pull down smaller percentages.

More than 90 percent of the nulls pulled down nothing but HTML — typical bot behavior.

A single measurement wasn’t enough, so Wendt devised a second based on another marker of bot behavior: politeness.

Bots could suck down webpages from a server so fast it would shut down the server to anyone else, he said. That might prompt the site administrator to block them.

So bots take turns. “They say, ‘Hey, give me a page,’ then they may crawl a thousand other sites taking one page from each,” Wendt said. “Or they might just sit there spinning their wheels for a second, waiting, and then they’ll say, ‘Hey, give me another page.’”

Some behavior is ‘bursty’

Browsers go after only one page but want all images, code, and layout files for it instantly. “I call that a burst,” he said. “A browser is bursty; a crawler is not bursty.” Bursts equal a certain number of visits within a certain number of seconds.

Ninety percent of declared bots had no bursts and none had a high burst ratio. Sixty percent of nulls also had no bursts, lending credence to Wendt’s identification of them as bots.

But 40 percent showed some bursty behavior, making them hard to separate from browsers. However, normal browser behavior also falls within set parameters. When Wendt combined both metrics, most nulls fell outside those parameters.

That left browsers who behaved like bots. “Now, are all these people lying to me? No. There could be reasons somebody would fall into this category and still be a browser,” he said. “But it distinctly increases suspicions.”

He also looked at IP addresses. Unlike physical addresses, IP addresses can change. Say you plug your laptop into the Internet at a coffee shop, which assigns you an IP address. After you leave, someone else shows up and gets the same IP address. So an IP address alone doesn’t necessarily distinguish users.

There’s another identifier: a particular browser on a particular operating system, which leads to what’s called a user agent string. There are thousands of distinct strings.

IP addresses and user agent strings can collide, but Wendt said odds are dramatically lower that two people will collide on the same IP address and user agent string within a short period such as a day. That tells him they’re probably different people.

Now he needs to bridge the gap between splitting groups and identifying targets of ill-intentioned emails. He has submitted proposals to further his research after the current funding ends this spring.

“The problem is significant,” he said. “Humans are one of the best avenues for entering a secure network.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

The simple technique coats a cell with a silica solution to form a near-perfect replica of its structure. The process may simplify a wide variety of commercial fabrication processes from the nano- to macroscale.

The work, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), uses the nanoscopic organelles and other tiny components of mammalian cells as fragile templates on which to deposit silica. The researchers then heat the cell to burn off its protein. The resultant hardened silica structures are faithful to the exterior and interior features of the formerly living cell, can survive greater pressures and temperatures than flesh ever could, and can perform some functions better than when they were alive, said lead researcher Bryan Kaehr, a Sandia materials scientist.

ZOMBIE CELL, first stage -- only moderately heated, the cell is now pure silica and needed a gold coating for a scanning electron microscope to image it. (Image courtesy of Bryan Kaehr) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“It’s very challenging for researchers to build structures at the nanometer scale,” said Kaehr. “We can make particles and wires, but 3-D arbitrary structures haven’t been achieved yet. With this technique, we don’t need to build those structures — nature does it for us. We only need to find cells that possess the machinery we want and copy it using our technique. And, using chemistry or surface patterning, we can program a group of cells to form whatever shape seems desirable.”

UNM professor and Sandia Fellow Jeff Brinker added, “The process faithfully replicates features from the nanoscale to macroscale in a robust, three-dimensionally stable form that resists shrinkage even upon heating to over 500 degrees Centigrade [932 degrees Fahrenheit]. The refractoriness of these delicate structures is amazing.”

The unusual but simple procedure may serve as a model for creating hardier classes of nanoscopic products.

Because a cell is populated by a vast range of proteins, lipids and scaffolding, its interior is ready-made to model catalysts, funnels, absorbents and other useful nanomachinery, said Kaehr, a former Sandia Truman Fellow.

Catalysts that evolve in cells are enzymes that have to retain a certain shape for their chemistry to work. Since structure is important to function, stabilizing a catalyst in the shape it evolved is important, Kaehr said. Heat-hardened silica would stabilize and protect the still-present protein as it did its work.

UNM post-doctoral student Jason Townson said the most immediate use for silicification may be as a simple way to preserve the structure of organic materials for imaging.

“Formerly, for internal preservation and subsequent imaging, a cell would be fixed in formaldehyde or some other preservative. But many of these methods are labor-intensive,” Townson said. “This method is simple. The preserved cells will never get sloppy in decay. And when we cracked open the resulting structure, we were blown away by how well the cell was preserved, down to the minor groove of the cell’s DNA.”

Heating the cell to still higher temperatures (greater than 400 degrees C) evaporates the organic material of the cell — its protein — and leaves the silica in a kind of three-dimensional Madame Tussauds wax replica of a formerly living being. The difference is that instead of modeling the face, say, of a famous criminal, the hardened silica-based cells display internal mineralized structures with intricate features ranging from nano- to millimeter-length scales.

The construction process is relatively simple: Take some free-floating mammalian cells, put them in a petri dish and add silicic acid.

Through the action of methanol, a byproduct of the acid, the cell’s lipid layers — the protective casings that keep the cell intact — are softened and made porous enough for the silica to flow in at about the temperature of the human body.

The silicic acid, for reasons still partially obscure, enters without clogging and in effect embalms every organelle in the cell from the micro- to the nanometer scale.

If the cell isn’t heated, the silica forms a kind of permeable armor around the protein of the living cell. This may support it enough to act as a catalyst at temperatures and pressures undreamed of by nature.

“Once we’ve used silica to stabilize the cellular structure, it can still carry out reactions and, more importantly, that reaction is stable enough to work at high temperatures,” Kaehr said. “The method is also a means to take a soft, potentially valuable biological material and convert it to a fossil that will stay on our shelves indefinitely.”

ZOMBIE CELL, ADVANCED -- This cell was pyrolized to 900 C in the absence of oxygen, leaving a cell of graphitic carbon and silica. Because carbon is conductive, the cell – practically identical to its protoplasmic original – doesn’t need to be coated in gold to produce an SEM image. (Image courtesy of Bryan Kaehr) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Ordinarily, preserving something organic means freezing it, which is energy-intensive, he said. Instead, “We’re doing rapid fossilization: quickly converting a protoplasmic cell into a hard structure that will stand the test of time.”

Experiments showed the cell can be used as a reverse mold from which, at 900 degrees C, a porous carbonized structure results from heating cell protein in a vacuum. In other words, in the same way that burning wood in air leaves a residue of structureless soot, the zombie heating method results in a high-quality carbon structure. Subsequent dissolution of the underlying silica support decreased the cell’s electrical resistance by approximately 20 times. Such materials would have substantial utility in fuel cells, decontamination and sensor technologies.

That such extraordinary results can be achieved by silicifying cells indicates many soft cellular architectures could be “feedstock for most materials processing procedures, including those requiring high temperatures and pressures,” according to the technical paper.

Other porous material structures, relying on titanium instead of silica, have been formed using the organic template technique. Other metal oxides, said Kaehr, are a possibility. These would have more complex structural functions or could serve as catalysts.

The work follows the efforts of a number of scientific groups, including Kaehr’s, that have built gel-like structures, copied them with silica and then burned off the gel to create, in effect, large sponges.

“Now we can change the biological shape and calcify (heat) it, so for the first time we get new irregular structures,” Kaehr said.

Summing up, Kaehr offers what may be the first distinction in scientific literature between a mummy cell and a zombie cell: “King Tut was mummified,” he said, “to approximately resemble his living self, but the process took place without mineralization [a process of fossilization]. Our zombie cells bridge chemistry and biology to create forms that not only near-perfectly resemble their past selves but can do future work.”

The work was supported by DOE’s Office of Science. Co-authors are Brinker, Brian Swartzentruber of Sandia and the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, and, from UNM, Robin Kalinich, Darren Dunphy and student Yasmine Awad.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

Sandia microsystems engineer Kent Pfeifer, left, and Taos businessman Dan Daily work on the circuitry for Daily's Midiwing musical instrument. The MidiWing can be played by anyone regardless of physical ability. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Taos, N.M., musician Dan Daily can do all that. But he knows plenty of people who can’t. “My mom had a daycare center for severely disabled children when I was young. Those children impressed me,” Daily said. “They were pretty much regular people but with disabled bodies. That stuck with me.”

It inspired him to come up with a way for anyone to make music on an electronic instrument that got a boost with technical help from a Sandia National Laboratories researcher.

Daily, raised in a musical family in Chicago, went on to learn 20 instruments, from woodwinds such as flute, saxophone and clarinet to keyboard and bass. He earned a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s in music education from Indiana State University.

But he never forgot the challenged kids cared for by his mom, a registered nurse. “When I realized how difficult traditional instruments are to play, I thought there had to be a way to make things easier and more accessible for people without the gifts I had been given,” he said.

Daily had a feeling electronics might bridge the gap between people with fine motor control and those without. Electronic instruments require the same techniques and coordination as regular ones, but Daily found he could separate the way notes are selected from how the instrument sounds. “With traditional instruments, note selection is intricately connected to the way the instrument is devised,” he said. “With electronics you can divorce those.”

MidiWing created for disabled musicians

Daily created a new instrument consisting of a microcontroller-based system that sends signals through a USB connection to another electronic device, such as a sound module or computer, which then produces sound. He named it MidiWing, a nod to the revolutionary MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) protocol, a set of commands that allows electronic musical instruments, performance controllers, computers and related devices to connect and communicate with each other.

MidiWing is a small box containing circuitry with several inputs that connect to switches and sensors, such as a joystick, mouse, slider or fader, that produce sound when moved. “You can plug in whatever control is appropriate to the person’s physical condition,” Daily said. “It sounds like any number of different instruments. The range of pitches can be narrowed or expanded, so the device can be made easier or more challenging as the person uses it and gets more familiar.”

He started work on MidiWing in 2000, six years after moving to Taos. His first prototype and pilot projects were completed in 2004.

Then Daily hit a wall. The microprocessor chip he used was discontinued and he didn’t have the resources to find another for the next prototype. “I was in a bad situation,” he recalled.

Daily turned to the New Mexico Small Business Assistance (NMSBA) program, which pairs entrepreneurs with scientists at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. The state-funded program established in 2000 by the New Mexico Legislature helps small businesses get free technical support from the labs. It has provided $29.8 million in assistance to 1,876 companies in 33 counties.

NMSBA connects inventor with Sandia microsystems engineer

Daily joined forces with Kent Pfeifer, a Sandia microsystems engineer who coincidentally has a background in music. Pfeifer plays trombone, piano and banjo, and was in his high school marching band. “I do understand music,” Pfeifer said. “I know how scales should sound and how notes are produced.”

Pfeifer helped Daily build a new prototype that uses an advanced, much more capable chip. “The idea was to build an instrument that has a whole bunch of different types of interfaces with the ability to run off a mouse, joystick or other kind of device that can be configured to the abilities of somebody with a disability,” Pfeifer said. “You can play it with your mouth, your feet or a single hand.”

Daily said Pfeifer took the concept and ran with it. “The implementation is all new,” he said. “MidiWing has a lot more inputs and can be configured in a number of different ways. There are more ways to control the instrument.”

The advanced microcontroller circuitry inside the MidiWing musical instrument can calculate the many different frequencies or pitches that produce complex musical sounds from the position of a joystick, mouse or other input. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Pfeifer reprogrammed and modernized MidiWing with advanced microcontroller circuitry that made it smaller and more functional. “MidiWing works with the synthesizer software in a computer,” he said. “A USB cable sends a series of hex commands built around the MIDI standard. The software in the computer interprets those and turns them into sounds.”

MidiWing can calculate the many different frequencies or pitches that produce complex musical sounds from the position of the joystick or other input. The instrument simulates frequencies that are normally produced by the technique of the musician, for example, by the pressure of a player’s lips on a brass instrument. “We know mathematically the frequency difference between note steps. We can write an equation,” Pfeifer said. “That’s programmed into this.”

Pfeifer was more than just an adviser, Daily said. “He was pivotal. It was an incredible collaboration because Kent is a musician,” he said. “The key to the whole project was that he understood what I was trying to do from a musician’s standpoint. He was perfect. He has a music background and designs microcontroller products. I can’t imagine how it could have gone better.”

Pfeifer and Daily work together a few hours a month and are close to having an inexpensive product that can be manufactured for schools, hospitals, therapy and rehab centers and other places where people want to make music. “My motivation is to bring music-making to more people,” said Daily, who founded a company, Musicode Innovations. “I’ve tested MidiWing mostly with children and disabled people. Children are perhaps the most successful. They are able to play far beyond what other music programs have ever produced. In a short amount of time they sound great.”

MidiWing honored as outstanding innovation

MidiWing earlier this year was named one of 10 NMSBA projects that delivered outstanding innovations through the program during 2011. Some 340 small businesses participated last year.

Pfeifer said he enjoys the MidiWing as a musician. “I come into the lab sometimes and just play it,” he said. “Then I’ll think, ‘Ah, I can make a change,’ and start programming. I want to make it even better.”

View videos of people playing the instrument at http://www.youtube.com/midiwing.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

The FLC said the award recognized the excellence of work during 2012 by Hommert, Sandia’s president and laboratories director, and the entire Sandia tech transfer program. The FLC also honored Sandia and UOP, a Honeywell company, with the 2013 Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer for their work in bringing an innovative radioactive waste cleanup technology to the private sector.

Sandia President and Laboratories Director Paul Hommert has promoted technology transfer through a variety of programs. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“Dr. Hommert has been a strong advocate for the overarching Department of Energy strategic objectives calling for innovation to strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness and improve the quality of life through science and engineering breakthroughs,” Jackie Kerby Moore, Sandia’s manager of Technology and Economic Development and the labs’ representative to the FLC, said in nominating Hommert as Director of the Year. “This is accomplished by maintaining a strong technology partnerships program with industry, academia and other national laboratories.”

Kerby Moore said Hommert has been instrumental in building the strategic relationships necessary to foster technology transfer and commercialization.

“Tech transfer is a Sandia mission requirement. Achieving excellence in our commercialization strategy and management is key to our strategic objectives,” Hommert said. “We are trusted by the taxpayers to do research and we owe it to them to be strategic about intellectual property and the role it can play in technology transfer. We want to leverage research dollars for economic growth. We have much to offer the country.”

Hommert said he is honored and humbled by the FLC award and what it represents. “This recognition is not just for me but for the many Sandians who work tirelessly to make the results of our research available to government, industry and academia for the U.S. public good,” he said.

Eye on industrial partnerships

One of Hommert’s priorities was to develop an intellectual property initiative, rolled out in March 2012. It promotes IP management throughout the lifecycle of a project, and asks Sandia researchers to think about potential industrial partners early in the process.

The IP initiative works with ongoing technology transfer programs such as the Entrepreneurial Separation for Technology Transfer (ESTT), which allows employees to leave the labs to start up new technology companies or help expand existing ones; the Sandia Science & Technology Park, a 300-acre master-planned research park adjacent to the laboratories with 33 companies and 2,500 employees; the New Mexico Small Business Assistance (NMSBA) program, which provided Sandia technical help to 196 small companies in 2012; licensing roundtables; and Cooperative Research & Development Agreements (CRADA).

Last year, Sandia became an early leader in DOE’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Initiative, which enables small companies to use the SBIR/STTR funding mechanism to leverage technology developed at DOE national laboratories. Also in 2012, Sandia held its first Research & Technology Showcase featuring cutting-edge technology and providing information on doing business with the labs.

And Sandia’s Intellectual Property Management, Alliances and Licensing Department is taking part in the White House’s Startup America Initiative to give young companies quick, affordable license option agreements.

Tech transfer at Sandia produced royalty receipts of $4.48 million in fiscal year 2012, a labs record. In fiscal years 2011 and 2012, Sandia won eight R&D 100 awards, five FLC national awards and seven FLC regional awards.

Peter Atherton, senior manager of Sandia’s Industry Partnerships, said Hommert has provided leadership and personal involvement in the labs’ technology transfer efforts. “He opened the first Sandia Science & Technology Showcase event that attracted nearly 400 people,” he said. “This award is especially timely considering Paul’s kickoff of the IP lifecycle initiative. We were very proud to nominate him.”

Fukushima: an international impact

Sandia researcher Tina Nenoff, pictured here with colleague Dave Rademacher, demonstrated that CSTs could capture radioactive cesium in seawater. The technology is being used in the Fukushima clean-up effort. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The award for Excellence in Technology Transfer recognizes the Sandia team behind the development and commercialization of CSTs, or crystalline silico-titanates: Bianca Thayer of intellectual property licensing, Geochemistry Department Manager Mark Rigali and chemist Tina Nenoff.

CSTs — inorganic, molecularly engineered ion exchangers that can remove high-level radioactive contaminants such as cesium from wastewater — played a role when the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear reactor complex was damaged in an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, and seawater was pumped in to cool the reactors. The water was contaminated with cesium and could not be released back into the ocean.

Honeywell UOP licensed the Sandia technology in the mid-1990s and revised the license last year to become the exclusive U.S. manufacturer of CSTs. The company had worked with Sandia through a CRADA to produce a commercial-scale manufacturing procedure for the technology.

Nenoff, who had experience developing and working with CSTs in the 1990s, was called upon to test the material for removal of cesium in seawater after the Fukushima disaster. She worked nearly around the clock for 10 days, concluding that CSTs outperformed other materials in removing cesium from seawater.

Since then, Honeywell UOP products with CST technology have successfully treated more than 40 million gallons of contaminated water at Fukushima.

“We are especially proud when Sandia’s technology transfer initiatives have a major impact. In this case, the impact is international,” Kerby Moore said.

The awards ceremony will be April 25 at the FLC national meeting in Westminster, Colo.

The FLC is a nationwide network of more than 300 members that provides the forum to develop strategies and opportunities for linking laboratory mission technologies and expertise with the marketplace.

The FLC Awards Program annually recognizes federal laboratories and their industry partners for outstanding technology transfer efforts. Since its establishment in 1984 the FLC has presented awards to nearly 200 federal laboratories, becoming one of the most prestigious honors in technology transfer.

Click here for more information on Sandia’s licensing and technology transfer programs.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

When it passed the $5 million mark, Sandia became the first company to donate that amount in a single campaign to UWCNM. “The results from the campaign are truly astounding,” said Anthony Thornton, Sandia’s 2012 Employee Caring Program (ECP) campaign chairman. “Everyone at Sandia Labs should be extremely proud.”

Sandia’s employees in Livermore, Calif., added $236,227, making the total employee/retiree giving between both sites $5,744,944.

Of Sandia’s total giving, $1,489,990 was designated to the Community Fund, an increase of $63,753 over the previous year. The fund supports a range of programs that address families, education, health, hunger, senior citizens, the homeless and the disabled in Bernalillo, Sandoval, Torrance and Valencia counties.

Deputy Laboratories Director and Executive VP for Mission Support Kim Sawyer, chairwoman of UWCNM’s 2012-13 $28.15 million campaign, said the response from Sandia employees and retirees this year “continues to demonstrate our strong culture of giving.”

Ed Rivera, UWCNM’s president and CEO, said Sandia’s generosity is an inspiration to the community.  Since the ECP was launched in 1957, Sandia has been the single largest supporter of the organization’s annual campaign. Sandia employees have contributed more than $76 million.

“And every year it gets better. What Sandia accomplished this year is unheard of,” said Randy Woodcock, UWCNM’s vice president and chief strategic officer. “I’ve never seen a company of this size increase this much in one year.”

Click here for more information on Sandia’s community involvement programs.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

U.S. small businesses received $472.7 million in Sandia contracts, with the New Mexico share totaling $255.9 million, or 64 percent.

Sandia's annual Economic Impact report breaks down the Labs' spending and spotlights its role in the New Mexico economy. (Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.) Click on the thumbnail to download the report as a PDF (6.6 MB) or here for a high-resolution image.

“I am proud to say that fiscal year 2012 stood out as another consecutive year where Sandia exceeded its overarching small business goal and, in addition, all but one of its sub-tier small/socio-economic goals,” said Don Devoti, manager of Sandia’s Small Business Utilization Program. “Sandia’s commitment to identify and contract with qualified, capable small business suppliers continues to push new frontiers.”

Sandia reaches out to local businesses through a variety of programs. It holds public forums with suppliers and civic leaders to discuss contracting opportunities, and lists contracts on its Business Opportunities Website. It supplies small and diverse business owners with information on doing business with Sandia and seeks qualified suppliers.

The 2012 Sandia National Laboratories Economic Impact on the State of New Mexico report breaks down Sandia’s spending and spotlights its role in the state’s economy. The 2012 data is based on Sandia’s fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2011, and ending Sept. 30, 2012. The report reflects Sandia’s continued commitment to small business.

Here are some numbers showing Sandia’s overall economic impact in 2012:

• $1.4 billion was spent on labor and non-contract-related payments.
• $896.3 million went to contract-related payments.
• $66.4 million was sent to the state of New Mexico for gross receipts taxes.
• $65 million was spent through procurement card purchases.

The Small Business Act mandates that federal contractors use small businesses, including those that are small disadvantaged, owned by women or veterans, and service-disabled veterans, and small businesses in impoverished areas – called Historically Underutilized Business (HUB) zones. Sandia’s Small Business Utilization Department oversees the mandate and negotiates small business subcontracting goals with the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“Our goal for small disadvantaged businesses will double from 5 percent in FY12 to 10 percent in FY13,” Devoti said. “We have increased our woman owned small business goal from 10 percent to 11 percent, our veteran owned small business goal from 3 percent to 4 percent, and our service disabled veteran owned small business goal from 2 percent to 3 percent.

“The entire procurement organization, including my small business team, is driven to achieve these tougher goals by providing New Mexico small business suppliers with increased contracting opportunities at the laboratories and by continuing to implement innovative, transparent and relevant work processes and approaches.”

While Sandia’s Procurement organization stewards small-business contracting opportunities, Sandia President and Laboratories Director Paul Hommert echoed the labs’ full support of the Small Business Act. “Sandia National Laboratories has a long and distinguished record of encouraging and partnering with highly qualified, diverse small business suppliers who assist us in achieving our national security mission,” he said. “We are fully committed to continuing this track record.”

Sandia’s total small business expenditures for fiscal year 2012 and New Mexico breakouts:

“We value the relationships forged with our current small business suppliers and within the New Mexico business community and look forward to developing new and enduring partnerships as we go forward,” Devoti said.

Sandia also helps the state’s economy through the New Mexico Small Business Assistance (NMSBA) program established by the state Legislature in 2000 to help companies receive technical support from the labs. In 2011, the Sandia NMSBA provided nearly $2.4 million in technical assistance to 194 New Mexico small businesses in 22 counties. Since 2000, it has provided more than $22.2 million in assistance, according to the report.

The 33 companies in the Sandia Science & Technology Park, a 300-acre master-planned research park adjacent to the laboratories, employ about 2,500 people at an average annual wage of $74,949. Investment in the park is more than $351 million. Since it opened in 1998, the park has generated $1.89 billion in spending on taxable goods and services and contributed $73.4 million in gross receipts taxes to the state and $10.4 million to the city.

Sandia employees and retirees gave more than $4.6 million in 2012 to the United Way of Central New Mexico as the largest corporate contributor to the agency. They logged more than 100,000 volunteer hours in 2012. And they donated more than 2,500 books, a truckload of school supplies, 450 holiday gifts and 500 pairs of new shoes to the community in 2012.

For more information and to view past reports, visit the Economic Impact webpage.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Sandia National Laboratories' Mark Boslough rebuts a speculative hypothesis about comets leading to the end of the Clovis culture in North America. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“There’s no plausible mechanism to get airbursts over an entire continent,” said Boslough, a physicist. “For this and other reasons, we conclude that the impact hypothesis is, unfortunately, bogus.”

In a December 2012 American Geophysical Union monograph, first available in January, the researchers point out that no appropriately sized impact craters from that time period have been discovered, nor have any unambiguously “shocked” materials been found.

In addition, proposed fragmentation and explosion mechanisms “do not conserve energy or momentum,” a basic law of physics that must be satisfied for impact-caused climate change to have validity, the authors write.

Also absent are physics-based models that support the impact hypothesis. Models that do exist, write the authors, contradict the asteroid-impact hypothesizers.

The authors also charge that “several independent researchers have been unable to reproduce reported results” and that samples presented in support of the asteroid impact hypothesis were later discovered by carbon dating to be contaminated with modern material.

The Boslough trail

Boslough has a decades-long history of successfully interpreting the effects of comet and asteroid collisions.

His credibility was on the line on in July 1994 when Eos, the widely read newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, ran a front-page prediction by a Sandia National Laboratories team, led by Boslough, that under certain conditions plumes from the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with the planet Jupiter would be visible from Earth.

The Sandia team — Boslough, Dave Crawford, Allen Robinson and Tim Trucano — were alone among the world’s scientists in offering that possibility.

“It was a gamble and could have been embarrassing if we were wrong,” said Boslough. “But I had been watching while Shoemaker-Levy 9 made its way across the heavens and realized it would be close enough to the horizon of Jupiter that the plumes would show.” His reasoning was backed by simulations from the world’s first massively parallel processing supercomputer, Sandia’s Intel Paragon.

On the one hand, it was a chance to check the new Paragon’s logic against real events, a shakedown run for the defense-oriented machine. On the other, it was a hold-your-breath prediction, a kind of Babe Ruth moment when the Babe is reputed to have pointed to the spot in the center field bleachers he intended to hit the next ball. No other scientists were willing to point the same way, partly due to previous failures in predicting the behavior of comets Kohoutek and Halley, and partly because most astronomers believed the plumes would be hidden behind Jupiter’s bulk.

That the plumes indeed proved visible started Boslough on his own trajectory as a media touchstone for things asteroidal and meteoritic.

It didn’t hurt that, when he stands before television cameras to discuss celestial impacts, his earnest manner, expressive gestures and extraterrestrial subject matter make him seem a combination of Carl Sagan and Luke Skywalker, or perhaps Tom Sawyer and Indiana Jones.

Standing in jeans, work shirt and hiking boots for the Discovery Channel at the site in Siberia where a mysterious explosion occurred 105 years ago, or discussing it at Sandia with his supercomputer simulations in bold colors on a big screen behind him, the rangy, 6-foot-3 Sandia researcher vividly and accurately explained why the mysterious explosion at Tunguska that decimated hundreds of square miles of trees and whose ejected debris was seen as far away as London most probably was caused neither by flying saucers drunkenly ramming a hillside (a proposed hypothesis) nor by an asteroid striking the Earth’s surface, but rather by the fireball of an asteroid airburst — an asteroid exploding high above ground, like a nuclear bomb, compressed to implosion as it plunged deeper into Earth’s thickening, increasingly resistive atmosphere. The governing physics, he said, was precisely the same as for the airburst on Jupiter.

Among later triumphs, Boslough was the Sandia component of a National Geographic team flown to the Libyan Desert to make sense of strange yellow-green glass worn as jewelry by pharaohs in days past. Boslough’s take: It was the result of heat on desert sands from a hypervelocity impact caused by an even bigger asteroid burst.

In the present case

In the Clovis case, Boslough felt that his ideas were taken further than he could accept when other researchers claimed that the purported demise of Clovis civilization in North America was the result of climate change produced by a cluster of comet fragments striking Earth.

In a widely reported press conference announcing the Clovis comet hypothesis in 2007, proponents showed a National Geographic animation based on one of Boslough’s simulations as inspiration for their idea.

Indiana Jones-style, Boslough responded. Confronted by apparently hard asteroid evidence, as well as a Nova documentary and an article in the journal Science, all purportedly showing his error in rebutting the comet hypothesis, Boslough ordered carbon dating of the major evidence provided by the opposition: nanodiamond-bearing carbon spherules associated with the shock of an asteroid’s impact. The tests found the alleged 13,000-year-old carbon to be of very recent formation.

While this raised red flags to those already critical of the impact hypothesis, “I never said the samples were salted,” Boslough said carefully. “I said they were contaminated.”

That find, along with irregularities reported in the background of one member of the opposing team, was enough for Nova to remove the entire episode from its list of science shows available for streaming, Boslough said.

“Just because a culture changed from Clovis to Folsom spear points didn’t mean their civilization collapsed,” he said. “They probably just used another technology. It’s like saying the phonograph culture collapsed and was replaced by the iPod culture.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

He also has been audited for buying such things as party bubble juice on his government procurement card.

“You buy 20 party bubble machines, they kind of wonder why. You buy 50 gallons of party bubble juice, and they really wonder why,” he said.

Richard Simpson has a pretty interesting job.

Like many of Sandia’s technicians and technologists, Simpson has a broad range of technical skills “to where I can contribute in numerous ways to most any project.” A Sandian for 27 years, he’s been involved in some experiments from conception, design and fabrication to test and analysis, and in others for only a specific expertise.

There are good days and not-so-good days in field testing, such as freezing one February morning waiting for a test to go off. “There’s times when we’re digging a trench for instrumentation lines. … Or, oops, this fitting over here leaks, followed by then conducting a once-in-a-lifetime internationally recognized large-scale experiment,” he said. “So it goes from totally unglamorous to very exciting and technological.”

Over the years, he recalls helping with Sandia’s reactor safety experiment programs and rocket propellant fire tests. Last year, it was obtaining slabs of a Cape Canaveral launch pad and nearby asphalt for upcoming studies into how burning rocket propellant impacts surfaces in a launch accident scenario. Because every region uses different aggregate in cement batches, Sandia project leaders wanted concrete from Cape Canaveral to make sure their tests accurately represent the likely fire environment.

Simpson went to Florida where a buddy who worked in the area gave him a name to call. The contact turned out to be the chief of civil engineering at the Cape, and within minutes he had permission to cut up part of a retired launch pad. “Nothing beats starting at the top,” Simpson said.

He worked with NASA, the Department of Energy, United Launch Alliance, the Air Force and others at Sandia and Cape Canaveral to negotiate agreements, set up heavy equipment and complete training and final approvals. He found someone to cut 4- by 4-foot by 6-inch slices of concrete from the launch pad and others to package and transport it. He also got samples of asphalt from a road around the complex. “I asked them for permission, ‘Can I cut the end of your road off there?’” Simpson said.

The bubble experiments helped improve computer models of jet fuel fire tests.

Principal Technologist Richard Simpson adjusts an igniter assembly at a lake Sandia built a few years ago to conduct the world’s largest liquefied natural gas fire tests ever done on water. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“Sandia had developed great models of fire, but in a computer model you must have boundary conditions,” Simpson said, marking an imaginary boundary with his hands. “You have to tell the computer where to stop its computations; otherwise your fire’s going all over here” — waving his hands out of bounds.

But fire is subject to wind, and experts wanted to measure the swirling wind patterns in three dimensions in an area 20- by 20- by 1-foot thick, far larger than a conventional flow visualization field. “We wanted to be at a very large scale, so the engineers thought ‘bubbles,’” Simpson said.

He decided to modify something off-the-shelf for Sandia’s needs. In this case, that led to a battery of party bubble machines on towers in a canyon where Sandia does burn tests. Then he shone a large spotlight, the kind the Olympics uses to follow ice skaters, into a large spinning mirror he built. The mirror reflected back a foot-thick wall of white light so flow patterns were visible to 3-D cameras shooting the region of interest.

“Stuff was happening way beyond that, which was captured on the wide-view cameras,” Simpson said. “We had bubbles all over the canyon.”

Tests went off between midnight and 4 a.m. when wind conditions were ideal and the background was black. “So in the middle of the night I’m up there spinning up the large 1,000 rpm mirror, turning on the light, creating this wall of white light, starting up the party bubble machines. … Quite a beautiful sight,” he said.

Because he’s developed specialized camera techniques, much of his work today is macro, time-lapse and high-speed video. Project engineers call him when they need imagery in a thermally harsh environment, such as documenting experiments in Sandia’s solar furnace or weapons component burns. For such situations, he fabricated housings that cool his cameras.

One video shows a test item engulfed in flames. “We actually had a camera in this environment, right down in the bottom of a 1,000-degree Celsius test cell,” Simpson said.

Click on the thumbnail to view footage of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas fire tests ever done on water. (Video courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories)

He shows off a composite video of another test to study radiant energy and determine the hazard distance around a large natural gas fire on water. He worked with numerous groups to set up imaging, including the Kirtland Air Force Base Special Operations Command, which provided two helicopters to fly photographers and Sandia videographers to document the tests on a pool of water. He also coordinated with Sandia photometrics experts to stage high-definition and high-speed cameras at various points on the ground.

A cold snap froze the pool two nights before the large test, and technicians had to go out in a rowboat to break up the ice.  Simpson tried to help by breaking up ice along one edge, taking the opportunity to shoot some video of the technicians power-rowing their craft through an ice field.

Simpson also came up with a way for the photometric team’s cameras to measure the height of the flames. “We had to have a calibration image for them,” a giant yardstick to scale the camera lenses in advance. Anything higher than 500 feet has to be cleared with the Federal Aviation Administration, so Simpson came up with a 499-foot tethered balloon array with an 8-foot diameter yellow balloon at the top and smaller red balloons attached at 100-foot divisions. “I talked to the (FAA) guy on the phone; he was OK with it. He goes, ‘Nope, 499, I don’t even want to talk to you,’” Simpson said.

Then there’s the beer with Paul Tibbets. Simpson helped when what’s now the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History hosted the 509th Composite Group reunion on the 50^th anniversary of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Tibbets asked whether Simpson planned to come to the crew’s suite for a drink afterward. Simpson remembers his response as “Yes, sir, General.” At one point everyone grew quiet while watching television coverage of the anniversary, complete with a classic World War II photo of the crew next to the Enola Gay. “Seeing these guys 50 years ago, and standing next to them, I was just so humbled and honored to be there,” Simpson said.

He recalled some griping once during the hard work of setting up a test. “I go, guys, guys … later on you’re going to look back on it and you’re going to say, ‘That was pretty cool.’ That’s it with a lot of the programs. It’s rewarding, very rewarding, to know the data that you’re producing has national and at times worldwide significance in the scientific and engineering communities.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

In his new role, Rottler will lead Sandia’s Energy, Climate, and Infrastructure Security Strategic Management Unit. Rottler also is currently vice president of Sandia’s Science and Technology Research Foundations Division.

Sandia National Laboratories Chief Technology Officer Steve Rottler has been selected to head Sandia's California site. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“This management change will maintain continuity and operational stability during the pending contract competition and help ensure a leadership team that supports the workforce as we continue to deliver on our commitments,” said Paul Hommert, Sandia president and labs director.

Rottler has held a number of increasingly important leadership roles since he joined Sandia as a member of the technical staff in 1985, including vice president of Weapons Engineering and Product Realization and chief engineer for Nuclear Weapons. He also led nuclear warhead system engineering, the integration and development of high performance electronic systems and organizations and programs responsible for the research, development and application of advanced computational and experimental techniques in the engineering sciences.

Rottler received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate, all in nuclear engineering, from Texas A&M University.

“Everyone at Sandia owes a tremendous debt of gratitude and appreciation to Rick Stulen for his significant contributions to the laboratories and the nation,” Hommert said. “I wish him the very best in his retirement.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — If a nuclear device were to unexpectedly detonate anywhere on Earth, the ensuing effort to find out who made the weapon probably would be led by aircraft rapidly collecting airborne radioactive particles for  analysis.

Sandia National Laboratories researchers prepare pods that, airborne, will track radiation to its source and analyze particulates and gases to identify a nuclear bomb's origins. (Photo by Randy Montoya). Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — equipped with radiation sensors and specialized debris-samplers — could fly right down the throat of telltale radiation over a broad range of altitudes without exposing a human crew to hazards.

A Sandia National Laboratories-developed airborne particulate-collection system demonstrated those kinds of capabilities in the blue skies above Grand Forks Air Force Base in Grand Forks, N.D., in late September. Dubbed “Harvester” for obvious reasons, the system “tasted” the atmosphere with two particulate sampling pods. A third pod would provide directional guidance for a real event by following the trail of gamma radiation.

The three pods, with additional hardware, software and ground-control equipment, are expected take their place on aircraft in the Air Force’s investigatory arsenal in the next few years.

When they do so, they will have traversed the infamous technological “Valley of Death,” in which many promising researched and developed ideas die before reaching production.

The successful Grand Forks demonstration was part of a formal Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) that mated the Harvester modular pods to the long wings of a Department of Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection-provided MQ-9 Reaper UAV. (The Reaper is a more powerful cousin of the better-known Predator.)

A researcher checks air flow in the Harvester particulate sampling pod. (Photo by Randy Montoya.) Click on the thumbnail for a high -resolution image.

While the tests did not include any radioisotope releases, the pods were able to collect and identify naturally occurring radioisotopes of lead and bismuth produced from the radioactive decay of atmospheric radon. In addition, radioactive beryllium-7 produced from cosmic ray-induced break-up (spallation) of naturally occurring carbon-14, also showed up on the filters, providing a uniform measure for debris distribution.

The modular pods eliminate the need for costly, permanent aircraft modifications that would limit the number of aircraft platforms on which Harvester can be flown.

“There’s a high likelihood the Air Force will make Harvester operational in 2014 to augment its current manned aircraft collection capability,” said Sandia project lead Joe Sanders. “For maximum responsiveness, we continually engaged with the Air Force to address its technological and operational needs throughout the project.”

The Harvester’s Directional Gamma Radiation Sensor (DGRS) helps guide the aircraft toward the radioactive plume using four large sodium iodide radiation detectors and a complex processing algorithm. The Harvester equipment operator informs the pilot, located far away in a UAV ground control station, to fly toward the plume’s “hot spot.”

“The operator will see a vector that shows peak plume intensity up and to the right, let’s say,” Sanders said. “It’s the equivalent of a guide saying, ‘You’re getting warmer.’”

Air passes through the samplers, each about the size of a small snowmobile, as the Reaper cruises at 200 mph. This rams particles into filter paper like light hitting a photographic plate, causing the particles to stick to the filter fibers. A separate radiation sensor analyzes the filter in real time to estimate the type and quantity of radioactive particles collected. More extensive examination of the filters occurs after the aircraft has landed.

The radiation sensor (smaller pod) and Harvester sampling pods ready for a UAV test flight at a U.S. air base. (Photo by Joe Sanders) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Because gas analysis can complement particle analysis, Sandia is developing a third type of pod called the Whole Air Sampling Pod (WASP) to demonstrate the feasibility of collecting multiple, large-volume air samples that can be analyzed for radioactive gases. Radioxenons, radioisotopes of the noble gas xenon, if detected, can provide a tell-tale indication of a nuclear detonation.

“While not small, the 9-foot-long, 650-pound WASP is designed to be compatible with an MQ-9 Reaper UAV,” Sanders said. “WASP has not yet been flight-tested but has performed well in the laboratory, and the DoD’s interest in modular gas sampling is growing. We look forward to demonstrating the WASP technology, and expect that it will also cross the Valley of Death.”

Harvester was developed by Sandia with support from the Albuquerque office of National Technical Systems, an international engineering firm. The early research and development phase was funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Nonproliferation Research and Development. The later development and qualification phase was funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Rapid Fielding Office as part of the JCTD.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact:  Neal Singer,  nsinger@sandia.gov,  (505) 845-7078

Micro-algal fuels might be one way to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign energy. Such fuels would be renewable since they are powered by sunlight. They also could reduce carbon dioxide emissions since they use photosynthesis, and they could create jobs in a new industry. President Barack Obama, speaking in February at the University of Miami, advocated for investments in algae fuel development, saying they could replace up to 17 percent of the oil the United States now imports for transportation.

“Even if algae are not the end-term solution, I think they can contribute to getting us there,” Ruffing said. “Regardless of however you look at fossil fuels, they’re eventually going to run out. We have to start looking to the future now and doing research that we’ll need when the time comes.”

She has been studying the direct conversion of carbon dioxide into biofuels by photosynthetic organisms under a three-year Truman Fellowship that ends in January. She presented her project at a poster session in August and published her work on one strain, “Physiological Effects of Free Fatty Acid Production in Genetically Engineered Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942,” as the cover article in the September 2012 issue of Biotechnology and Bioengineering.

Ruffing considers her studies as proof-of-concept work that demonstrates engineering cyanobacteria for free fatty acid (FFA) production and excretion. She wants to identify the best hydrocarbon targets for fuel production and the best model strain for genetic engineering, as well as gene targets to improve FFA production.

She is using cyanobacteria — blue-green algae — because they are easier to genetically manipulate than eukaryotic algae, the natural “oil”-producing photosynthetic microorganisms more commonly used for algal biofuels, and because cyanobacteria can be engineered to create a variety of target fuels. Genetically engineered cyanobacteria excrete FFA and allow fuel to be collected without harvesting the cyanobacteria. This lowers the requirement for nitrogen and phosphate and reduces costs.

But current yields from engineered strains are too low for large-scale production.

Truman Fellow Anne Ruffing looks at a flask of cyanobacteria with precipitated fatty acid floating on top. She has engineered two strains of cyanobacteria to produce free fatty acids, a precursor to fuels, as she studies the direct conversion of carbon dioxide into biofuels by photosynthetic organisms. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Ruffing favors cyanobacteria because fuel from engineered cyanobacteria is excreted outside the cell, in contrast to eukaryotic algae, in which fuel production occurs inside the cell.

In general, this is how the process works: Eukaryotic algae grow in a pond to the density needed, then producers must get rid of the water, collect the cells and break them open to get the fuel precursor inside. This precursor is isolated and purified, then chemically converted into biodiesel. Cyanobacteria excrete the fuel precursor outside the cell, so a separation process can remove the product without killing the cells. That eliminates the need to grow a new batch of algae each time, saving on nitrogen and phosphate.

While other research efforts have focused on metabolic engineering strategies to boost production, Ruffing wants to identify what physiological effects limit cell growth and FFA synthesis.

“You can’t really hope to continue to engineer it to produce more of the fatty acids until you address these unforeseen effects,” she said. “As much as you want to do the applied side of things, creating the strain, you can’t get away from the fundamental biology that’s necessary in order to do that.”

Much of our fundamental understanding of photosynthesis comes from cyanobacteria, but it’s only been in the past decade or so, with advances in gene manipulation and recombinant DNA technology, that they’ve been considered for fuel production, Ruffing said.

The strains she engineered for FFA production show reduced photosynthetic yields, degradation of chlorophyll-a and changes in light-harvesting pigments, Ruffing said. She saw some cell death and lower growth rates overall, and suspects the toxicity of unsaturated FFA and changes in membrane composition are responsible.

Now she’s looking at what genes are changing when cyanobacteria produce fatty acids. She’s creating mutants by knocking out certain genes or introducing or overexpressing genes to see how that affects the cell and fatty acid production.

“So I’m engineering the cell, then I’m trying to learn from the cell how to work with the cell to produce the fuel instead of trying to force it to produce something it doesn’t want to produce,” she said.

She’s producing FFA from Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 and Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002, chosen as so-called model organisms that have been studied for several decades and for which tools exist to manipulate their genes. She also is working with the two strains and a third, Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, for biofuel toxicity screening.

Ruffing hopes to continue working on strain development after the fellowship ends.

“It is possible that there’s a natural strain out there that could be a better option, so this is still pretty early research,” she said. “There’s a lot of exploration to do.”

For more information, click here.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In the stratosphere of high-performance supercomputing, a team led by Sandia National Laboratories is designing an operating system that can handle the million trillion mathematical operations  per second of future exascale computers, and then create prototypes of several programming components.

Called the XPRESS project (eXascale Programming Environment and System Software), the effort to achieve a major milestone in million-trillion-operations-per-second supercomputing is funded at $2.3 million a year for three years by DOE’s Office of Science. The team includes Indiana University and Louisiana University; the universities of North Carolina, Oregon and Houston; and Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories. Work began Sept. 1.

“The project’s goal is to devise an innovative operating system and associated components that will enable exascale computing by 2020, making contributions along the way to improve current petaflop (a million billion operations a second) systems,” said Sandia program lead Ron Brightwell.

Scientists in industry and in research institutions believe that exascale computing speeds will more accurately simulate the most complex reactions in such fields as nuclear weapons, atmospheric science and chemistry and biology, but enormous preparation is necessary before the next generation of supercomputers can achieve such speeds.

“System software on today’s parallel-processing computers is largely based on ideas and technologies developed more than twenty years ago, before processors with hundreds of computing cores were even imagined,” said Brightwell. “The XPRESS project aims to provide a system software foundation designed to maximize the performance and scalability of future large-scale parallel computers, as well as enable a new approach to the science and engineering applications that run on them.”

Current supercomputers operate through a method called parallel processing, in which individual chips work out parts of a problem and contribute results in an order controlled by a master program, much like the output of instruments in an orchestra is controlled by a conductor. Chip speed itself thus plays a less important role than the ability to synchronize individual results, since the method relies on the addition of chips for greater traction in solving harder problems in a reasonable amount of time.  

But merely adding more chips to a supercomputer “orchestra” can make the orchestra unwieldy, the conductor’s job more difficult and, in the end, impossible.

In addition to such programming difficulties, massive arrays of processors generate excess heat that wastes energy and increase the chances some will fail. Designing convenient locations to store data so it’s immediately available to processors is another problem.

The conundrum is, in short, that an exascale computer using current technologies could have the unwanted complexity of a Rube Goldberg contraption that uses the energy of a small city and demands round-the-clock upkeep.

To reduce these problems and start researchers on the road to solutions, the multi-institution XPRESS effort will address specific factors known to degrade fast supercomputer performance. These include “starvation,” the insufficiency of concurrent partial problem-solving at particular processing locations. This hinders both efficiency and scalability because it can require more parallelism. Information delays, known as latency effects, need to be reduced through a combination of better locality management, reduction of superfluous messaging and the hiding of information unnecessary to the problem. Overhead limits the interpretation of granularities that can be effectively unearthed through inference. This reduces scalability. Waiting — because the same memory is needed by several processors — also causes slowdowns.

The team brings together researchers with expertise not only in operating systems, said Brightwell, but also other system software capabilities, such as performance analysis and dynamic resource management, that are crucial to supporting the features needed to effectively manage the complexities of future exascale systems.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer  nsinger@sandia.gov  (505) 845-7078

“Sandia has experience on the facilities side and a tremendous wealth of knowledge on the R&D side,” said Jack Mizner, manager of Facilities Partnerships and Planning at Sandia. “We’ve been trying to figure out for a long time how to connect the two. We think we’ve finally made the connection.”

Sandia mechanical operations engineer Casiano Armenta checks out a heat exchanger that’s part of the labs' free-cooling system. Free cooling has helped Sandia cut energy usage by more than 250 billion BTUs the past six years and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The goal is to institutionalize conservation and expand science and technology research to make Sandia a leading sustainability research and development lab. The labs would be a resource for businesses, governments and institutions that want to use Sandia technology in their own sustainability efforts. They can work with Sandia through collaborative research agreements, technology licensing and other partnerships.

“Recognition as a top-rank sustainability R&D lab will bring us more business,” said Sustainability Innovation Foundry organizer Howard Passell, an ecologist in Sandia’s Earth Systems Analysis group. “Sustainability is already one of the most important efforts in science and technology in the world, and will just become more so.”

Passell said the science and technology of sustainability are growing globally and at Sandia in fields such as climate, alternative and renewable energies, carbon sequestration, micro and smart grids, energy and water conservation, transportation, urban planning, infrastructure and the security of ecosystems around energy, water and food supplies.

“We believe sustainability will be increasingly important as population and resource consumption go up and resource availability goes down,” Passell said. “We want to make Sandia a world leader in sustainability science and technology, both institutionally through our conservation footprint and through application of our research to develop tools that can be used all over the world.”

Chemist Margaret Ochs, another organizer, said government and industry are looking for ways to embrace sustainability. “Sandia should be a leader in demonstrating and researching effective ways for institutions to become sustainable,” she said.

Sandia is on track to meet an ambitious goal of cutting energy intensity in buildings 30 percent by 2015, using a 2005 baseline, Mizner said. Strategies include free cooling — using cold, dry outside air in late fall, winter and early spring to chill water for air conditioning — and sophisticated controls on lighting, air flow, heating and cooling. Water usage has been reduced significantly through such efforts as replacing Sandia’s steam plant with centralized boilers. And eight buildings, or more than 10 percent of the labs’ total square footage, are Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Mizner said foundry projects could lead to even greater energy savings. “We are trying to be a model for the Department of Energy and the federal government of how you can run effective mission-critical operations and still be sustainable,” he said.

The foundry’s first funded project is Institutional Transformation, a computer simulation of the costs and benefits of different energy and water conservation scenarios for buildings at Sandia in New Mexico and California. “The idea is that buildings in developed countries consume a lot of energy and water. Usage will be forced down by energy and other resources shortages,” Passell said. “So how do you transform infrastructure to lower the footprint when you have 700 buildings across two sites and hundreds of square miles? How do you go about doing it in a cohesive, thoughtful way?”

He said the project will produce a comprehensive strategy for future development and identify where investments are needed to shrink Sandia’s energy footprint and improve sustainability.

The foundry will also develop proposals, workshops, papers, collaborations and projects to raise the profile of sustainability at Sandia and create links between sustainability and national security. “By creating a foundry central to our work on energy, water and food resources that relate to sustainability, we will draw more attention from potential sponsors to the concentration of work here,” Ochs said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

The rocket was a target for the Navy’s newest interceptor missile, the Standard Missile-3 Block IB. It was launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility’s (PMRF) tenant, the Kauai Test Facility (KTF).

Established at the height of the Cold War, KTF celebrated its 50^th anniversary this year.

Sandia National Laboratories' Kauai Test Facility lies at the western tip of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The 130-acre site wraps up its 50th year of operations this year. (Photo by Heather Clark) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Together, KTF and Sandia provide design development, system engineering, integration, testing and demonstration of advanced technologies, payloads and systems, said Vincent Salazar, senior manager of Sandia’s Missile & Air Defense Department.

“KTF has evolved into a national asset that is having a tremendous impact and provides incredible support for the ever-changing national security missions Sandia Labs is focusing on,” Salazar said.

A 130-acre site on the western tip of the Hawaiian island of Kauai operated by about two dozen people, KTF has launched more than 430 rockets since the facility was built in 1962, a year after the then-Soviet Union began full-scale atmospheric tests despite the Nuclear Testing Moratorium of 1958.

“The United States was caught, frankly, flat footed,” David Keese, director of Sandia’s Integrated Military Systems Center said, recounting the site’s history at an anniversary celebration. “We didn’t have any nuclear device carriers that could launch those into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, we didn’t have any sampling rockets so we could sample those effects and we didn’t have a launch facility that could do all that.”

To even up the playing field, the Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor to today’s Department of Energy, established KTF, then known as the Barking Sands site. (The name came from the sound the nearby coral sands make underfoot.)

KTF ensured that the U.S. was ready to resume nuclear testing until the program ended in 1976. During this time, Sandia became a national leader in small-rocket technology development. KTF also launched research, or sounding rockets, to study high altitude winds and to test designs and combinations of rocket motors, nose cones and fins. In the 1980s, KTF began supporting missile defense, a mission that continues today.

Eric Hedlund, test director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Program and a KTF customer for a launch this summer, said two Strypi rockets launched from KTF in 1995 proved Aegis BMD could detect, track and engage medium-range ballistic missiles. Over the last 17 years, KTF has launched more than 50 rockets to support missile defense tests.

“Without the facility, the instrumentation and especially the people and expertise here, we would not have been a successful program,” he said.

During the launch, Sandia employees ran through three days of practice countdowns in the facility’s main operations center to prepare for the final launch of the single-stage guided missile to provide the Navy’s target.

Most people think of countdowns as a television voiceover saying, “10, 9, 8 …,” but they are much more. In each of the practice runs and in the final countdown, Sandia’s team must complete more than 500 steps to launch the missile in conjunction with PMRF and the Navy.

Reuben Martinez, test director for the launch, and Margaret Scheffer, the Sandia test officer, have jobs that involve major multitasking. They monitor 15 communications networks, or loops, chattering simultaneously. Sometimes they must problem-solve within seconds or risk delaying a launch, and they communicate with multiple agencies.

A target for the Navy's newest interceptor missile crosses the night sky after taking off from a vertical launcher at the Pacific Missile Range Facility's tenant, Sandia's Kauai Test Facility. (Photo by Scott Walkington) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“It’s a stressful job, but it’s exciting,” Martinez said.

Once the rocket takes off, KTF’s telemetry system receives thousands of data points from the rocket that will be analyzed and turned into graphic displays that help controllers quickly determine whether the rocket is flying along its intended flight path, he said. They use that information in real time — often processing it in milliseconds and making decisions based on it in seconds — to recommend whether to continue the mission. Telemetry data also is used after flights for further research to make changes when things don’t go the way they should, Martinez said.

As the latest rocket took off from the vertical launch pad, relief washed over the KTF and Sandia employees involved in preparation for the test, Martinez said.

The rocket flew straight. As a voice called out “Mark India!” to let PMRF know the Navy had successfully tested its missile, knocking the rocket from the sky, cheers erupted from a crowd of employees who had helped with the launch watching from a nearby field.

The 50^th anniversary launch went “smooth, … very smooth,” KTF’s manager Steve Lautenschleger said.

It’s all in a day’s work for the KTF staff. “You feel instantly excited that it’s over. Then you can breathe,” Scheffer said. “Then you start thinking about starting work on the next one.”

For more information, visit KTF’s website.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Heather Clark, hclark@sandia.gov, (505) 844-3511

You’d be wrong.

Nedra Bonal of Sandia’s geophysics and atmospheric sciences organization is nearing the end of a two-year study, “Improving Shallow Tunnel Detection From Surface Seismic Methods,” aimed at getting a better look at the ground around tunnels and learning why seismic data finds some tunnels but not others.

Her eventual goal is to come up with a seismic detection process for the border and other areas where tunnels pose a security threat. Bonal’s project is funded by Sandia’s Early Career Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

Most tunnels are found by tips from people rather than by scientific methods, Bonal said.

Researchers deploy instruments for a seismic data acquisition survey parallel to a border fence in California. The photo shows some acquisition equipment, including an SUV-mounted accelerated weight drop to generate seismic waves. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“It would be great if we could use this to do a better job with tunnel detection, so you could scan an area and know if there is or is not a tunnel and find it and stop it,” she said.

If researchers discover what it takes to pinpoint tunnels, the next step would be to develop streamlined seismic methods that would be more practical for the Border Patrol and military.

The study arose from earlier work at Sandia detecting shallow tunnels. Bonal said she was surprised when standard refraction and reflection processing techniques Sandia used could not successfully pinpoint some tunnels.

Researchers speculate the difficulty might be what’s called a halo effect around a tunnel, in which fracturing and other geological anomalies create diffuse boundaries and hide the tunnel. The earlier, broader research produced several successes in tunnel detection, but was not focused specifically on what happens in the area where tunnel and earth meet, which might help explain why tunnels can be detected in some cases but not others.

Bonal is looking at whether seismic waves are strongly impacted by fracturing or saturation of pores in rock or soil, as well as varying pressures at different depths. Physical processes change from shallow depths to deeper depths, but it isn’t clear just where that change occurs, she said.

In addition, the halo effect is both asymmetrical and complex.

“It depends on the geology or the soil as well as the seasonal variation, rain events and the relation to the water table,” Bonal said. “So it’s a pretty complex regime just from the hydrology standpoint.”

More research is needed, but asymmetry may turn out to be an advantage because an asymmetric area might show up better than a symmetrical one, she said. “These anomalous areas are what we may identify as tunnels in the data,” she said.

Bonal began her project by figuring out what gaps existed in current scientific knowledge, then modeling real-world scenarios based on collected data that would affect hydrology models and in turn, seismic waves: an area’s soil and other geology, the depth of rock fracturing around a tunnel in a particular environment, the probable tunnel size, its relation to the water table and seasonal variations in that relationship.

“We try to get some bounds to this problem,” she said. “If we can’t see it in the best-case scenario, then there’s really no point in trying to see it in more subtle factors that may affect the seismic waves.”

The team ran the hydrology models to get some results, then converted those results into seismic velocities that could be plugged into Sandia’s 3-D elastic seismic wave propagation simulation code, Bonal said. These results will produce synthetic seismograms that will be compared to field data from the real environment and can be used to develop other processing techniques. That will in turn produce data that’s expected to look like what’s collected in the field.

“We can then compare the effects of a tunnel versus no tunnel and changes in fracturing and saturation of the tunnel halo versus no changes to assess their impact on seismic waves,” she said.

The standard used to show the relationship of saturation in pores in rock or earth to seismic velocities is an oil industry standard called the Biot-Gassmann theory. However, few experiments have tested that theory at shallow depths where border tunnels are commonly dug, Bonal said.

“The few that have been done have shown that the Biot-Gassmann theory tends to overestimate the velocities for those unconsolidated near-surface materials where the pressures perhaps aren’t as great” as at depths where the oil industry operates, she said.

The very near surface behaves one way, but at some point behaviors change because of greater pressures and other factors, she said. The Biot-Gassmann theory holds well at greater depths where pressure is more intense and the rock is more consolidated, while another theory, Brutsaert, describes what happens very close to the surface.

“But there’s sort of a middle regime where I’m looking where I’m not real sure either one of them works as well as they need to,” Bonal said. She expects to have the modeled data results soon to compare with seismic data collected from previous experiments to help resolve the issue.

Experimentally verifying at what depth or in what materials competing theories work best lies outside the scope of her LDRD, but Bonal hopes to work on those puzzles in a future project. “I think there are still plenty of questions we have that need to be answered but I am very excited about the progress made so far. I have been able to detect a tunnel that I previously had not seen by other analyses,” she said.

For more information, click here.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

Sandia National Laboratories has launched a hiring program with the goal of helping those wounded warriors get into the workforce and develop career-based skills and experience.

Cheston Bailon of Shiprock, N.M., was the first injured veteran hired under Sandia's Wounded Warrior Career Development Program. Bailon was a U.S. Marine deployed to Iraq and now works at Sandia in information technology. (Photo on left courtesy of Cheston Bailon; photo on right by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“We want to give back to those who have given so much to our country,” said James Peery, director of Sandia’s Information Systems Analysis Center and supporter of the Labs’ Wounded Warrior Career Development Program (WWCP). “They’ve earned the right to work here.”

Four people have been hired so far and three more have begun the process.

The program helps combat-injured veterans catch up to their peers who entered the civilian workforce instead of military service. “It can be hard for someone who’s been in the infantry or behind a rifle to develop technical skills and a resume,” said H.E. Walter II, a Sandia security specialist and co-chair of the Wounded Warrior Working Group, part of the Labs’ Military Support Committee. “They are trained, experienced leaders, but their skills don’t always translate into a civilian resume.”

Under the WWCP, successful applicants are hired for one to three years with the potential for permanent employment. An applicant can have been out of the military for any length of time. A college degree is not required, but those hired are expected to pursue higher education while working at Sandia.

“We are looking for highly motivated people who want to continue serving the nation and national security and have a passion to continue to improve themselves in skills and education,” Peery said. “Through their job, they gain training and experience while making contributions to national security.”

A key component of the program is mentorship. Wounded Warrior hires are assigned executive, technical and veteran mentors who help them adjust to the civilian workforce. Mentors serve as role models and peers the veterans can learn from and identify with. “The executive is there for career counseling, the technical [mentor] to get skills up to speed and the veteran to help with assimilation to civilian life,” Peery said. “It helps to have someone who’s been there.”

The employee “graduates” in one year to become a mentor to new WWCP hires, but still has access to mentors. “You never really lose your mentors,” Walter said. “Once in the program, always in the program. There are all kinds of additional roles to be a part of.”

Sean Christopher of Albuquerque joined Sandia's Physical Security Services in March 2012 under the Wounded Warrior Career Development Program. He served in Afghanistan with the National Guard. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The program is modeled after one at Oracle that focuses on helping wounded veterans who joined the military after high school catch up with their peers who went to college. “They lost ground because they served our country,” Peery said.

Wounded veterans interested in working at Sandia can go to the woundedwarrior.sandia.gov website, click on “View All Jobs” and enter the keyword “Wounded.” That will bring up current Wounded Warrior job openings.

Peery envisions bringing six to 10 combat-injured veterans to Sandia each year. “For every hour I put into this program, the Wounded Warriors give me 10 back,” he said. “These are people who have faced a bullet, likely lost buddies and survived horrific conditions. They bring to us incredible passion, loyalty, honor, commitment, sacrifice, integrity and maturity beyond their years.

“They bring a presence unlike most people, having gone through that experience of serving our country without question and putting their lives on the line every day. They get up every day and want to do more. I’m inspired by their desire to get back in the game. We have so much to learn from them.”

For more information, visit the Wounded Warrior Career Development Program. To contact the program send an email to woundedwarrior@sandia.gov.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

A team including Sandia National Laboratories will receive $120 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to establish a new research hub to develop batteries and other energy storage technologies.

The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), an Argonne National Laboratory-led collaboration of leading researchers and entrepreneurs from DOE national laboratories, universities and industry, will focus on rapid research, development and commercialization of revolutionary, clean electrochemical energy storage technologies for electric vehicles and the nation’s electric grid.

JCESR partners aim to perform breakthrough basic research while working closely with JCESR’s industrial partners to convert new knowledge into market-ready, clean energy storage technologies. The hub seeks to reduce dependence on foreign oil by improving batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles and to provide energy storage solutions to improve the reliability and efficiency of the electric grid and integrate renewable energy into the nation’s electrical system.

“JCESR’s aggressive goal is to develop revolutionary energy storage technologies with five times the energy density of today’s systems at one-fifth the cost in five years,” said JCESR Director George Crabtree. “To meet this 5-5-5 goal, the partnership took a fresh look at the conventional battery development process and decided to focus on three storage approaches that promise to take us beyond current lithium-ion limitations, overcome manufacturing barriers and reduce the investment risk for American industry.”

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., supported Sandia’s role in the application to DOE earlier this year. “Sandia is a cornerstone of New Mexico’s leadership in clean energy technology,” he said. “The combination of energy storage, renewable energy and electric vehicles holds great promise in reducing our dependence on foreign oil, cutting pollution and saving consumers money.”

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said: “Our ability to shift more dramatically to homegrown, renewable energies depends in part on development of the next generation of energy storage technologies. I am glad that Sandia National Laboratories has been selected to participate in this extremely important research project.”

Sandia materials scientist Kevin Zavadil will serve as principal investigator for one approach that will focus on advanced metal-anode based batteries, such as metal-air concepts. A rechargeable metal-air battery stores and releases energy through the reversible electrochemical transformation of oxygen, supplied by air, and a reactive metal to and from a solid or dissolved oxide product. Metal-air batteries utilize oxygenas one of the electrochemically active materials in the battery, replacing solid or liquid electrodes found in more conventional batteries.

“The promise of a five-fold increase in energy density for rechargeable metal-air batteries has long been recognized but never realized because of a lack of understanding of the reaction pathways involved,” Zavadil said.

Zavadil said Sandia will apply advanced diagnostics and its expertise in materials science to help the JCESR team determine how to manipulate reactions to achieve breakthrough energy storage densities.

Travis Anderson, an inorganic chemist at Sandia, will contribute to a second storage approach seeking major performance improvements in non-aqueous redox flow batteries.

Flow batteries convert chemical energy into electricity by pumping a solution of free-floating charged metal ions from an external tank through an electrochemical cell. They can be rapidly charged and discharged for many cycles, making them valuable for grid storage applications. Sandia will explore a new family of liquid salt electrolytes, known as RAILs or redox active ionic liquids, that could lead to cost-effective flow batteries that store five times more energy than today’s flow batteries.

Sandia researcher Christopher Apblett will be investigating new architectures and flow batteries and building prototypes of those designs.

“As new electrode chemistries are developed with improved energy and power density, we will take those materials and incorporate them into new battery architectures that maximize the advantage that the new materials provide,” Apblett said.

About JCESR

The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is a major public-private partnership that integrates U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories (Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), major research universities (Northwestern University; University of Chicago; University of Illinois-Chicago; University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and the University of Michigan) and leading industrial companies (Applied Materials Inc., Clean Energy Trust, Dow Chemical Co. and Johnson Controls Inc.) to help advance cutting-edge energy storage and battery technologies that can be used to improve the reliability and the efficiency of the electrical grid, to better integrate clean, renewable energy technologies as part of the electrical system, and for use in electric and hybrid vehicles that will reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

JCESR is the latest of DOE’s four Energy Innovation Hubs. Each hub addresses a specific national energy challenge. DOE will provide JCESR with $24 million a year for five years, depending on congressional appropriations. To see more about Sandia’s energy storage work, explore Sandia’s energy storage website. See DOE’s news release here.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Holinka, slholin@sandia.gov, (505) 284-9227

Mark Herrmann, Sandia National Laboratories fusion researcher (Photo by Lloyd Wilson) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

In September, the American Physical Society elected him a Fellow, an honor limited to 0.5 percent of the society’s membership in any given year. The citation, formally presented at the recent annual meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics, reads: “For innovative technical advances and exceptional leadership in the areas of inertial confinement fusion target design and magnetically driven high-energy-density science.” The citation will be published in the March 2013 issue of APS News.

Herrmann also was selected by Fusion Power Associates (FPA) to receive its 2012 Excellence in Fusion Engineering Award, to be presented at that group’s annual meeting Dec. 5-6 in Washington, D.C. Herrmann was recognized for his, “many technical contributions to inertial fusion capsule design, his leadership of the Sandia high-energy-density physics program and his earlier contributions to magnetic fusion while at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.”

FPA is a nonprofit research and educational foundation that provides information on fusion and fusion research. Its awards are presented annually to individuals in the early stages of their careers “who have shown both technical accomplishment and the potential to become exceptionally influential leaders in the fusion field.”

Herrmann expressed gratitude for the honors. “I have been incredibly fortunate to work with exceptional mentors and fabulous scientists during my career. This recognition by the leaders in my field means a lot to me.”

For more information, visit: http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov,  (505) 845-7078

This artist-enhanced photo shows the locations of future Regional Test Center sites at Sandia's National Solar Thermal Test Facility where industry can test large-scale photovoltaic systems. Site 0 will be the first completed site. (Image by Vicente R. Garcia) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories is advancing viable, low-carbon power through collaborating on five U.S. Regional Test Centers (RTCs) where industry can assess the performance, reliability and bankability of large-scale photovoltaic energy systems.

“With the trend in the solar industry toward larger systems and greater capital investment – substantial amounts of money are going into this field – the financial community is increasingly scrutinizing how well these systems operate,” said Charles Hanley, manager of Photovoltaic and Distributed Systems Integration at Sandia. “The RTCs will provide enhanced monitoring and improved performance prediction capabilities for new technologies being introduced to the market.”

Photovoltaic (PV) modules convert solar radiation into electrical current using solar cells containing semiconductor material. Demand for renewable energy has produced an industry around the manufacture and installation of solar cells, photovoltaic arrays and other components, such as inverters, trackers and racking systems. Demand has also produced a need to build investor confidence in larger PV systems by assessing performance over time in different climates.

Sandia has a long history of measuring and modeling performance of PV systems, from single panels to multi-megawatt arrays, the kinds of systems found on residential rooftops and small businesses. “Sandia works in partnership with the U.S. solar industry to advance the state of the art in system integration and system optimization,” Hanley said.

Sandia researchers a few years ago developed the idea of an incubator for commercial-scale PV systems up to 500 kilowatts or a megawatt, the size found on big-box stores or schools. The Labs’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF) was quickly identified as a perfect site for such a PV testbed.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Energy was working with industry and stakeholders to determine their most pressing needs. The agency hosted a workshop in Berkeley, Calif., on PV manufacturing attended by the CEOs of module manufacturers and members of the financial community.

“It was clear from the workshop that the broad community wants better ways to quantify technical aspects to support the bankability of PV systems,” said Jennifer Granata of Sandia’s solar group.

Bankability is a measure of a project’s risk to an investor. The lower the risk the more bankable it is, thereby lowering associated financing costs. The technical risk must be quantified to make PV systems more commercially viable.

“The RTCs will develop protocols and conduct testing and analysis on the systems that can give investors some concrete data with which to assess the risk,” Granata said.

She said the PV world until now did not have full and independent standardized processes for monitoring and evaluating large systems. The country’s few other PV test sites accommodate only small systems.

The workshop attendees asked DOE to develop test locations for large arrays where PV manufacturers could try out new designs and systems and get reliable data. “It fit with the Sandia idea on system incubators,” Granata said. “We had ideas on how this could work.”

Sandia and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo., were asked by DOE for proposals for what the agency named Regional Test Centers. Granata led a team effort to develop a Sandia proposal for testing infrastructure and a validation plan to measure and evaluate performance and reliability.

DOE decided to fund physical and data monitoring infrastructures and validation plans at five locations in different climates, with Sandia and NREL working together on the overall project management. Sandia manages four of the five locations with local partners: Albuquerque; Orlando, Fla., Burlington, Vt.; and Las Vegas, Nev. The fifth location is Denver, managed by NREL.

In the SunShot Summit video, researchers involved in the Regional Test Centers project talk about how it will advance the goals of the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot initiative. (Video courtesy of DOE)

The sites are in varying stages of development, from early planning to ready-to-go. Each will put in infrastructure up to one megawatt, so multiple different-sized systems can be tested. At Sandia, the project has started on eight acres at the NSTTF with an option to expand by another 30 acres. Infrastructure includes a road, communications equipment and the electrical lines for monitoring systems, transformers and switches.

“Most of the work is underground,” Granata said. “Companies can come in and put a PV system in place. AC goes right to the grid.”

Granata said key components of the RTCs are the processes, standards and guidelines for validating large PV systems. Experts from the participating sites have developed a validation plan with step-by-step processes to assess and quantify system performance.

“The Regional Test Centers, with lab expertise, can provide an independent, third-party perspective, and test beyond the standard protocols to improve our understanding,” Granata said.

RTCs are a part of the DOE’s SunShot Initiative, a collaborative national effort to make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade. The DOE wants to encourage widespread, large-scale adoption of renewable solar energy technology and restore U.S. leadership in the global clean-energy race.

Hanley said the RTCs are an important part of the effort. “This will produce improvements in performance monitoring that can greatly reduce the uncertainty around investing in large-scale projects and therefore help keep the dramatic growth in this market on track,” he said.

For more information, view the RTC fact sheet.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

The retired Sandia National Laboratories physicist, who passed away this month at age 92, was dubbed “Mr. Clean” by TIME Magazine at the time, but the travel, scientific presentations and accolades didn’t change the unassuming scientist, who was always modest about the invention that revolutionized manufacturing in electronics and pharmaceuticals, made hospital operating rooms safer and helped further space exploration.

Sandia President and Labs Director Paul Hommert remembered Whitfield as a Sandia pioneer.

Cleanroom inventor Willis Whitfield, who passed away this month at age 92, steps out of a mobile cleanroom at Sandia National Laboratories, which could be transported to remote sites. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“Willis Whitfield represented the very best of Sandia. An exemplary researcher, a physicist who became an engineer’s engineer, Willis lived in that sweet spot where the best technical work is always done, at the intersection of skill, experience, training and intuition,” Hommert said. “His breakthrough concept for a new kind of cleanroom, orders of magnitude more effective than anything else available in the early 1960s, came at just the right time to usher in a new era of electronics, health care, scientific research and space exploration. His impact was immense; even immeasurable.”

Gil Herrera, Sandia’s director of microsystems science, technology and components, also remembered Whitfield’s contribution to the work Herrera oversees at Sandia today.

“When Willis invented the cleanroom, he did so to improve the reliability of miniature mechanical components for Sandia systems. Little did he know his invention would enable the semiconductor industry, and thereby enable all modern electronics, computers and information technologies,” Herrera said.  “It has also enabled breakthroughs in biotechnology, nanotechnology, health sciences and healthcare.”

Today, cleanrooms and clean benches based on Sandia’s design are used in the manufacture of precision mechanical assemblies for systems designed at the national security laboratory, Herrera said.

Whitfield, the son of Texas cotton farmers who learned to do for themselves by fixing their own equipment, was asked to solve a manufacturing problem for Sandia, so he invented the laminar-flow cleanroom. With slight modifications, it is still the standard.

“He built it, found out no one had done it that way before, and said, ‘I don’t understand why [no one had invented it]. It’s so simple,’” recalled his son, Jim Whitfield, who was a young child at the time. “I heard someone ask him how long did it take him to think of that idea and he said, ‘Five minutes, I just did the obvious thing.’”

Sandia historian Rebecca Ullrich said it wasn’t quite that easy.

Solving a problem

In 1959, nuclear weapons components — mainly mechanical switching parts — were becoming smaller and microscopic dust particles were preventing Sandia from achieving the quality the laboratories needed, so Whitfield’s supervisors asked his group to find a solution, Ullrich said.

While Whitfield might have come up with the idea quickly, months of research led up to that moment of discovery, Ullrich said. Whitfield discovered the practice at the time was to tightly seal cleanrooms, wear protective clothing and vacuum often. Still, the airflow was turbulent in existing cleanrooms and particles introduced were not removed. These measures didn’t create the necessary conditions for manufacturing close-tolerance parts, she said.

Whitfield looked at blowers, vents, grading and the cost per square foot to build his invention, so it would be something people could afford.

By the end of 1960, Whitfield had his initial drawings for a 10-by-6 cleanroom. His solution was to constantly flush out the room with highly filtered air. In that first model, Whitfield designed a workbench along one wall. Clean air entered the room from a bank of filters that were 99.97 percent efficient in removing particles larger than 0.3 microns. For example, cigarette smoke blown in one side comes out the other as clean air, according to a 1962 Sandia Lab News article.

The air is circulated in the room at a rate of 4,000 cubic feet or about 10 changes of air per minute, an amount of air movement that is barely perceptible to the workers inside. The linear speed of air is slightly more than 1 mph, which is about the same as that felt walking through a still room.

In a later modification, the air was passed down over the work area instead of across, getting an assist from gravity in carrying troublesome particles into the floor, which was covered with grating. Filters underneath clean the air and it is circulated back around to re-enter the room. The constant flow of clean air performs a sweeping function.

When the first cleanroom was tested “the dust counters went to nearly zero. We thought they were broken,” Whitfield said in a 1993 videotaped interview at Sandia.

Whitfield lived long enough to see his invention mark its 50th anniversary this year. He pauses during a tour of a cleanroom in Sandia's Microsystems Engineering Sciences and Applications (MESA) complex. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The laminar-flow cleanroom created a work environment that was more than 1,000 times cleaner than the cleanrooms in use at the time.

According to tests at the time, the laminar-flow cleanroom’s work area contained an average of 750 dust particles one-third of a micron in size or larger per cubic foot of air. (A micron is equal to 40-millionths of an inch.) That’s compared to average dust counts of more than 1 million particles per cubic foot of air in one of the best conventional cleanrooms in use at the time.

Bringing the cleanroom to the world

Whitfield gave his initial paper on what was then called the “ultra-cleanroom” at the Institute of Environmental Sciences meeting in Chicago in 1962.

After the meeting and publicity, Whitfield’s phone never stopped ringing, Ullrich said. “Industry jumped all over it.”

But at a standing-room-only talk about a year later at the American Society for Contamination Control in Boston, manufacturers challenged the invention’s claims, accusing Whitfield of perpetuating a hoax, Ullrich said.

Jim Whitfield remembers his father’s story about that meeting: “The numbers he was showing were unbelievable. At this conference, people were telling him that can’t be right. Then, one of his colleagues [from Bell Labs] got up and said he thought Whitfield was wrong. His numbers are 10 times too conservative. So, he knew at that point that it was a dramatic shift in the technology.”

Others recognized it too, and within a couple years, $50 billion worth of cleanrooms had been built worldwide.

“When you have something that everyone wants, they come to you,” Whitfield said in the 1993 interview. “The desperate need for this accelerated the gap between development and production drastically.”

RCA and General Motors Co. were early adopters of the cleanroom, and the invention revolutionized the pharmaceuticals and microelectronics industries, Ullrich said.

Bataan Memorial Methodist Hospital in Albuquerque, which later became Lovelace Medical Center, was the first hospital to use laminar-flow cleanrooms in its operating rooms to prevent infections, Ullrich said. And the Houston hospital today known as the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center built 22 cleanrooms to prevent infections in leukemia patients undergoing chemotherapy, Whitfield said in 1993.

Whitfield eventually worked with NASA to provide planetary quarantines during missions to the moon and Mars and spacecraft sterilization techniques, Ullrich said.

But fame did not change Whitfield.

“He’s a nice guy, very honest, very straightforward,” Ullrich said. “He’s very modest about it. His values mean he’s going to do the right thing. He makes sure other people share credit for things.”

The cleanroom design also made it possible for Sandia to standardize cleanrooms for the first time in 1963 for the federal government.

Whitfield lived to see his invention turn 50 this year, but was unable to give an interview, so his son spoke for him, saying, “I’m sure in his heart, he feels very satisfied that he’s made such a big and positive impact on society.”

For more information, visit the Nanosystems and Microdevices Research Foundation website.

Additional photos available on Sandia’s Flickr site.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Heather Clark, hclark@sandia.gov, (505) 844-3511

The machine is considered multiphase because it can study shock wave propagation through a mixture of gas and solid particles.

Steve Beresh, Sean Kearney and Justin Wagner, left to right, are part of a team that developed Sandia’s multiphase shock tube. The 22-foot-long machine, which uses various diagnostics, makes it possible to study how densely clustered particles disperse during an explosion. For a high-resolution image, click on thumbnail. (Photo by Randy Montoya)

Shock tubes — machines that generate shock waves without an explosion — have been around for decades. What makes Sandia’s unique is its ability to study how densely clustered particles disperse during an explosion. That’s important because better understanding of the physics during the first tens of microseconds of a blast leads to better computer models of what happens in explosions.

“Not having this correct in those codes could have implications for predicting different explosives properties,” Wagner said.

Understanding how particles move and react in the early part of a blast will help Sandia respond to such national security challenges as improving explosives, mitigating blasts or assessing the vulnerability of personnel, weapons and structures.

The project started when Steve Beresh of Sandia’s aerosciences department and Sean Kearney of the Labs’ thermal and fluid experimental sciences asked a since-retired colleague what he’d like to measure that he hadn’t been able to. He started talking about some of the physics missing from the models used for predicting explosives, “and Sean and I looked at each other and said, ‘We think we could do that,’” Beresh said.

They came up with the idea of a multiphase shock tube that would enable researchers to study particle dispersal in dense gas-solid flows.

The machine was fired for the first time in April 2010. Experiments and diagnostics are complicated, so team members are still gathering data they eventually will incorporate into codes used at Sandia and elsewhere.

“It’s clear that we’ve learned some things that weren’t known before,” Beresh said. “Those physics are important to a code.”

The stainless steel and aluminum shock tube, about 22 feet long, is divided into a high-pressure or driver section that creates the shock wave and a low-pressure or driven section, with a diaphragm between the two. Pressure builds up in the cylindrical driver section and when it gets high enough, the diaphragm ruptures. Spherical particles loaded into a hopper above the low-pressure section flow into the shock tube before the diaphragm breaks, creating a dense particle curtain that’s hit by the shock wave.

The project, initially funded under Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, hired Wagner to oversee the machine’s design and building. “When we hired Justin we had an empty room and a blank sheet of paper. Now we have a shock tube that is different from what anybody else in the world has,” Beresh said.

Particles in an explosion start out tightly packed. As the explosive process continues, they disperse and quickly become widely spaced. But the physics of the densely packed particles at the start of the explosion are crucial to everything that comes later.  They are not yet fully understood, and thus limit current models, Wagner and Beresh said.

“The important thing about the shock tube is it generates a planar shock wave,” Wagner said. “We study the interaction of the shock wave with a dense field of particles to understand the physics relevant to explosives processes.”

Sandia’s machine uses such diagnostics as high-speed pressure measurements, high-speed imaging and flash X-ray to measure gas and particle properties, and it’s adding laser-based diagnostics, team members said.

“We can get different things from the X-ray diagnostics, different things from the laser-based diagnostics, different things from temperature and pressure measurements, and by piecing all of that together we get a better view of the physics that are occurring in the shot,” Beresh said.

The machine’s unique diagnostic capabilities demonstrate Sandia’s ability to collaborate. The team particularly singled out the X-ray expertise offered by Enrico Quintana and Jerry Stoker’s group in the experimental mechanics/non-destructive evaluation & model validation organization. Elton Wright of geothermal research also made sizeable contributions.

The diagnostics required to get useful information from the machine are difficult and expensive, Wagner said. “There’s a reason why it hasn’t been done thoroughly in the past,” he said.

A lot of data for modeling comes from explosions, but it’s difficult to isolate what happens in each part of a blast, Kearney said. “Whereas if you do an experiment like this you can delve deeper into what is really happening,” he said. “But it’s just one piece of the puzzle and they’re all important.”

For more information, visit the Engineering Sciences Experimental Facilities website.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

But when it’s crucial that something be really round, federal labs and agencies can turn to the Department of Energy’s Primary Standards Laboratory (PSL), operated by Sandia. The PSL is often the last word on measurements, particularly in the world of nuclear weapons.

The image of project lead Hy Tran is reflected in a polished quartz ball that is the standard for roundness. The Primary Standards Laboratory at Sandia uses a specialized instrument to measure roundness deviation against the roundness standard, which has been certified to national standards to be round within about 20 nanometers. Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image. (Photo by Randy Montoya)

Measurement and calibration are critical because they affect the quality of published scientific and technical data, conclusions drawn from that data and certification of product-to-performance requirements. Sandia’s calibrations largely trace to reference standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for just about anything that can be measured.

“It doesn’t matter what the discipline is, whether it’s voltage or mass or pressure or temperature, you have to quantify it and it has to meet some type of standard” of accuracy, said PSL distinguished technologist Jim Novak.

Take, for example, the standard for roundness, or deviation from a circle. The PSL uses a specialized instrument to measure roundness deviation against a roundness standard, a polished quartz ball nestled in a padded box. That ball, certified to national standards, is round within about 20 nanometers.

“You can’t measure the actual diameter of a circle in here, but we can measure how far off that circle is from being a perfect circle,” said project lead Hy Tran. “We are capable of resolving a tenth of a nanometer from this piece of equipment. … The resolution is exquisite” — to the point that if the quartz ball were Earth size, the instrument could detect hills and valleys about 1¼ inch high.

Most measurements and calibrations are based on comparison.

“You’re always comparing with a standard,” said the PSL’s Bud Burns. “You have a standard, you know what that uncertainty is and you compare an unknown with that standard.”

There’s a gray area with measurements, and instruments are calibrated to keep those uncertainties within acceptable tolerances, Novak said. Over the decades, new instruments and techniques have shrunk the uncertainties.

There are basically two types of measurement standards: those based on an artifact and those that are intrinsic. Measurements often are based on an artifact — something physical such as that polished quartz ball that could vary in the tiniest way from another object based on it. An intrinsic standard, on the other hand, means a measurement can be reproduced anywhere on the planet with the same result because it relies on inherent and reproducible properties of a phenomenon or substance.

The 45,000-square-foot PSL building at Sandia includes 30,000 square feet of specially designed lab space for measurements and calibrations representing more than 100 metrology disciplines — physical and mechanical quantities such as gas flow, acceleration or vacuum standards; radiation, including alpha radiation, laser pulse energy, neutron pulse and solar power; electrical quantities such as DC and AC voltage and current; and microwave electrical quantities. To ensure accurate calibrations, temperature and humidity are rigidly controlled in each PSL lab and the building is shielded from radio frequency waves and electromagnetic radiation and isolated from vibration. Even gravity has been calculated at specific locations within some individual labs because of its importance to precise calibrations.

The PSL has unique capabilities to support the nuclear weapons complex, including pulsed neutrons for neutron generators, microwave devices for radar systems and gas leak measurements for components that must retain seal integrity at different temperatures and pressures, such as from sea level to space.

It also tests how proficiently other DOE laboratories perform their own measurements, based on standards provided by Sandia. If a particular laboratory’s core capability is measuring DC voltage, the PSL sends it a voltage source. The PSL knows what the voltage is, and it’s up to the other lab to measure it. Then the PSL checks to see that the results are what they should be, Novak said.

Sandia has performed calibrations since the 1950s. In 1968, the Atomic Energy Commission, a DOE precursor, designated Sandia to maintain the Primary Standards Laboratory for the weapons complex. That makes the PSL the technical arm of the National Nuclear Security Administration for measurements, Novak said.

For more information on the PSL, visit http://www.sandia.gov/psl/.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

Paul Taylor and John Ludwigsen of Sandia’s Terminal Ballistics Technology Department and Corey Ford, a neurologist at UNM’s Health Sciences Center, are in the final year of a four-year study of mild TBI funded by the Office of Naval Research.

The team hopes to identify threshold levels of stress and energy on which better military and sports helmet designs could be based. They could be used to program sensors placed on helmets to show whether a blast is strong enough to cause TBI.

These computer simulations contain a computer model of a human's head viewed from above looking down (top row) and from the side (bottom row). The images show the deposition of compressive energy in the brain during frontal, rear and side blasts. These models combined with University of New Mexico's clinical observations are being used to identify energy thresholds that should lead to better military and sports helmet designs. (Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Many TBI sufferers experience no or subtle immediate symptoms that may keep them from seeking medical attention. The sensors could alert them to a potential problem.

“Our ultimate goal is to help our military and eventually our civilian population by providing guidance to helmet designers so they can do a better job of protecting against some of these events we are seeing clinically and from a physics perspective,” said Taylor, Sandia’s principal investigator on the project. “To do that we’ve got to know what are the threshold conditions that correlate with various levels of TBI.”

The study is the only TBI research that combines computer modeling and simulation of the physical effects of a blast with analyses of clinical magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of patients who suffer such injuries, Taylor said.

Immediately following blast waves, soldiers can suffer brief losses of consciousness, but more damage evolves weeks later, Ford said. The symptoms — headaches, memory loss, mood disorders, depression and cognitive problems — can prevent sufferers from working, he said.

Taylor is applying shock wave physics to understand how sensitive brain tissue is affected by waves from roadside bombs or blunt impacts within the first 5-10 milliseconds. That’s before a victim’s head moves any significant distance in response to the blast.

“This stuff is over before you have any chance to react and probably before you even knew it happened to you,” Taylor said. Humans’ fastest reaction times as teenagers are 75-100 milliseconds.

Ford says levels of energy transmitted into the brain by a blast wave “could be part of the injury mechanism associated with TBI and the mechanism by which it happens may not be mitigated by traditional methods of protecting the head with a helmet.”

At Sandia, researchers created a computer model of a man’s head and neck. The model includes the jaw — another first in TBI research — because a lot of blasts come from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at ground level, sending waves traveling at the speed of sound through the jaw and facial structure before they reach the brain, Taylor said.

Sandia’s team used the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project, which was  established in 1989 to build a digital image library of volumetric data representing complete, normal adult male and female anatomy.

Paul Taylor, right, and John Ludwigsen, center, both researchers with Sandia’s Terminal Ballistics Technology Department, and Corey Ford, a neurologist at the University of New Mexico's Health Sciences Center, discuss their research on traumatic brain injuries. The researchers are comparing supercomputer simulations of the physical effects of blast waves on the brain with Ford's analyses of patients who have suffered such injuries. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high- resolution image.

Using images of the male, whose age was close to that of most military personnel, Taylor, with Ford as a medical consultant, created geometric models of the seven tissue types in the human head — scalp, bone, white and gray brain matter, membranes, cerebral spinal fluid, and air spaces. Over a year, they catalogued each of the tissue types seen in about 300 “slices” of the cadaver’s head, dividing what they saw into one-millimeter cubes and assigning each a tissue type for the computer simulation.

Taylor also imported digitally processed, computed tomography (CT) scans of various helmet designs into the simulations to assess the protective merits of each against blast loading.

In a typical blast simulation, 96 processors on Sandia’s Red Sky supercomputer take about a day to process a millisecond of simulated time and at least 5 milliseconds are required to capture a single blast event, Taylor said.

The 3-D simulations are visualized using two-dimensional multi-colored images of a man’s head that record an enormous amount of data. Taylor and Ford have focused on three types of energy entering the brain that may cause TBI: compressive isotropic energy associated with crushing; tensile isotropic energy that tends to expand parts of the brain and could lead to cavitation; and shear energy that causes distortion and tearing of soft tissue. The pressure and stress within the brain show up as colors moving in slow motion through and around the brain cavity on videos created from the simulations.

On the clinical side, Ford studied 13 subjects who suffered mild TBI after IEDs exploded near them. Some were stunned, most lost consciousness at least briefly, and most cannot hold a job, he said.

The research partners hope to recruit more patients, especially military veterans, who were exposed to blasts that did not penetrate the skin and who suffered a loss of consciousness, Ford says. Candidates must have no other history of significant blunt traumas.

A battery of tests measured the subjects’ memory, language and intelligence. These results were correlated with changes in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from the patients. The 3-D fMRI studies can detect and map networks in the brain used for processes like movement, vision and attention. By comparing this data with those of a control group, Ford identified a subgroup of networks displaying abnormal brain activity in the patients. These results were then compared with energy deposition maps predicted by the computer simulations.

The research showed that certain regions of patients’ brains are hyperactive, perhaps because they are compensating for adjacent, damaged areas of the brain that were hit with high energy from the blasts. The hyperactive regions are those that experienced the least shear and tensile energies, according to the computer simulations, which can be used to predict where the hyperactivity will likely occur, they say.

The studies also showed problems with how the patients used visual information, which corresponded to their complaints about having difficulty with attention spans, Ford said.

“This is our way to validate what the simulation shows with the clinical reality,” he said.

Click on the thumbnail to view footage of a simulated traumatic brain injury. (Or view in HD on YouTube.)

Once Taylor and Ford determine exactly how and where the wave energy deposited in the brain gives rise to injuries, they can provide thresholds of stress and energy levels that cause TBI for consideration by helmet designers, Taylor said.

“I want us to be able to understand the physical mechanisms that lead to TBI. It would also be useful if we could make the connection between blast loading and blunt impact trauma,” Taylor said. “Once we understand that we can be more comprehensive in how we protect both our warfighters and athletes against these sorts of injuries.”

For more information about Sandia’s Defense Systems & Assessments work, click here.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Heather Clark, hclark@sandia.gov, (505) 844-3511

The Molten Salt Test Loop is the only test facility in the country that can provide real power plant conditions and collect data about the interactions of pressure, temperature and flow rates. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – A recent overhaul of the Department of Energy’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility, operated by Sandia National Laboratories, is dramatically improving researchers’ ability to understand and use concentrating solar power.

The $17.8 million upgrade to the NSTTF adds state-of-the-art test capabilities, and the resulting research is expected to lead to more solar power use on the electric grid.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funded the nine-part project of new additions and upgrades to the one-of-a-kind test center, much of which had not been updated since it was built in 1976. The improvements include adding a new $10 million Molten Salt Test Loop (MSTL), an optical methods laboratory and other critical testing capabilities, upgrading the parabolic trough test platform and replacing the original heliostat mirrors aimed at the iconic Solar Tower. These upgrades will help with Sandia’s goal of fostering more use of low-carbon power sources.

Concentrating solar power uses mirrors to focus the sun’s heat onto a receiver, which captures thermal energy that can either generate electricity immediately, or store it to use later when the sun isn’t shining. Concentrating solar power receivers increasingly use molten salt to store heat generated by the sun. Molten salt is cheap, abundant and easy to obtain and it stores thermal energy for long periods, which provides greater flexibility for the electric grid.

Private companies are taking notice of the expanding technology, but need a way to test components before investing up to $1 billion to build a concentrating solar power plant. Before designing a plant, users want to understand how the system will operate with liquid salt at about 600 degrees Fahrenheit. They need to understand how the interaction of pressure, temperature and flow rate will impact how the system operates. The MSTL is the only test facility in the nation that can provide real power plant conditions and collect data to help companies make commercial decisions.

Sandia mechanical technologist John Kelton sifts through a bucket of salt beads before they are melted for use in the Molten Salt Test Loop. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“It really gives a complete picture of how the system will work on-sun,” said David Gill, who leads thermal energy storage research at Sandia and oversaw the test loop construction.

On the north side of the 200-foot tall solar tower, 218 large mirrors known as heliostats are arranged over five acres and can be angled to reflect and focus the sun’s light on a point at the top of the tower. The resulting high temperatures are ideal for testing heat shields and researching solar power tower components and systems. All of the 5,700 mirrored panels on the heliostats were original to the 1976 construction. Glass and reflective technology have changed significantly in the past three decades, and $3.8 million of the ARRA investment was spent to replace the heliostat fields. The new glass increases average reflectivity from 83 percent to 96 percent. The new facets, paired with new canting and alignment techniques, increased the total field thermal power by from 5 MW_t to 6 MW_t. In addition, monitoring devices were installed on the heliostats to analyze the effects of wind and vibration, vital data that will be used to design and build more efficient heliostats.

“The field facet replacement has given this facility new life,” said Sandia researcher Cheryl Ghanbari, who was involved in nearly every aspect of the overhaul. “These upgrades enable us to more effectively support our DOE mission, which is to provide flux and power to concentrated solar experiments.”

As power towers increase in popularity and grow in scale, there is a growing need to test heliostat capabilities at a longer range. To address that need, a long-range heliostat target was designed and built. This target will be used to measure the power and beam characteristics of heliostats up to one mile from the tower, leading to improved design and construction methods for focusing accuracy.

All 218 heliostats at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility received new, high-tech glass facets as part of the upgrade. The glass is more reflective and produces hotter beams and more power. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Concentrating solar power systems rely on the precision of their components, and quality control is essential. A new optical test lab at the NSTTF capitalizes on Sandia’s strength in characterizing optical elements and concentrators to help researchers and industry and builds on Sandia’s past work in finding ways to rapidly measure trough alignment, developing new methods for full-scale, rapid dish alignment, and enforcing quality control of facets coming off the assembly line. The optical lab addresses industry limitations and supports concentrator designers and optical element manufacturers for all three technologies: trough, dish and power tower.

The DOE also purchased a new mobile test system to assist companies that are not able to bring their systems or components to Sandia. With such a system, Sandia researchers can conduct thermal and optical measurements and tests at industry sites, and provide on-site solutions to a customer’s needs in most cases.

“We are thrilled to have these new testing capabilities and upgrades,” said concentrating solar power ARRA project manager Bill Kolb. “The testing and analysis we can now support will have a direct impact on our nation’s ability to respond to our energy security challenges.” 

For more information on Sandia National Laboratories’ energy work, see the Energy, Climate, & Infrastructure Security website http://energy.sandia.gov/.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, shobby@sandia.gov, (505) 280-3905

The funds will be divided among nine assistance groups to support the needs of New Mexico’s veterans: Operation Homefront; New Mexico Veterans Integration Project; YWCA Henderson House; Metropolitan Homelessness Project; Rio Grande Valley Blue Star Mothers; Kirtland Air Force Base Family Services; What Would You Give; and the American Red Cross for services for the military.

Sandia’s Military Support Committee and Community Involvement team worked together to identify organizations that meet the greatest needs of local veterans. Recipients were selected after a rigorous screening process, and the organizations had to directly, immediately and measurably impact individuals. Sandia organizers visited each organization and met with program leaders before making funding decisions.

“During this very special time of the year when we celebrate and honor America’s veterans for their service, patriotism, love of nation and willingness to sacrifice for all, it’s especially gratifying that Sandia and Lockheed Martin are demonstrating their support with these donations. This year, the needs are greater than ever, and we are pleased help meet more of those needs,” said retired Air Force Col. Michael W. Hazen, vice president of Infrastructure Operations for Sandia.

“I’m delighted that Sandia and Lockheed Martin have chosen to support our Henderson House program with a portion of this funding,” said Andrea Nash, interim president and CEO at the YWCA Middle Rio Grande, which runs the Henderson House, the first transitional facility of its kind in the nation for homeless women veterans and their children. The program offers female veterans education and job and life skills training to help them move back into permanent housing.

“Studies show that women veterans are more likely than non-veterans to face homelessness, unemployment and poverty, and they are twice as likely as their male veteran counterparts to become homeless. This funding will allow us to continue our efforts to help these most vulnerable members of our veteran community,” Nash said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, shobby@sandia.gov, (505) 280-3905

Northrop Grumman is a longtime R&D partner of Sandia Labs. Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The umbrella CRADAs, which enable Sandia and its partners to pursue multiple projects in a variety of categories, are with Northrop Grumman Information Systems and General Electric Global Research.

“These are strategic agreements that envision long-term partnerships,” said Brooke Garcia, a Sandia business development specialist who helped negotiate the CRADAs.

Sandia has had a standard CRADA, which covers a specific scope of work, with Northrop Grumman Information Systems since 2007. Sandia also has CRADAs with the company’s Aerospace Systems and Electronic Systems divisions.

“Northrop Grumman is a longtime Sandia partner,” Garcia said.

The new Information Systems CRADA covers a wide range of potential research designed to enhance defense systems technologies through collaborative R&D in engineering sciences, modeling and simulation, intelligence systems and infrastructure and nuclear security. The agreement includes evaluating energy and climate factors domestically and abroad. The primary goal of the collaboration is to improve national security.

“The collaboration so far has been extremely successful,” said Alex Tappan, a Sandia researcher who has done Northrop Grumman project work.

Potential research categories included in the CRADA are engineering sciences for defense systems and technologies; modeling and simulation for defense systems and technology; intelligence systems and assessments; energy, climate and infrastructure security; international, homeland and nuclear security; and advanced manufacturing and technology maturation.

“Northrop Grumman looks forward to many collaborative opportunities and a long and productive working relationship with Sandia,” said Eric Sepp, a Northrop Grumman program manager.

General Electric Global Research will work with Sandia on energy systems. Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The GE agreement replaces a decade-old umbrella CRADA that expired last year. “Rather than extend the old one, we took the opportunity to negotiate an updated agreement that supports current missions as well as mutual goals for future innovation,” Garcia said.

The agreement states that Sandia and GE will “cooperatively engage in analytical studies, research and development of a diverse set of energy-related topics with a goal of accelerating the understanding and development of new energy systems required to transition away from a hydrocarbon-based economy to carbon-neutral energy sources.”

The scope of the partnership takes in a variety of technical categories including combustion; thermal management; aerodynamics; systems engineering, economic and life-cycle analyses; computational simulations; energy storage; sensors and optical diagnostics; fossil energy; renewable energy; nuclear energy; and advanced materials.

The CRADA helps bolster Sandia’s support of DOE research and development aimed at moving the United States toward a new energy economy, Garcia said. The Labs’ goal is to ensure a secure and sustainable energy supply, safe and resilient delivery infrastructure and clean and efficient use of energy resources.

The agreement says Sandia and GE as partners can leverage the Labs’ expertise in systems-based science and engineering with GE’s skill in energy systems to accelerate understanding and development of new energy systems. GE brings to the collaboration a business-driven perspective to evaluate the likelihood of success or failure of energy alternatives.

“Sandia’s robust and broad-based energy program includes a multitude of innovative research and development programs that can be leveraged in pursuit of the goals of the nation and GE,” the agreement says.

For more information on Sandia’s Energy, Climate and Infrastructure Security programs, visit: www.http://energy.sandia.gov/.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

The workshop will take place just before the Fifth International Conference on the Integration of Renewable and Distributed Energy Resources (IRED) Dec. 4-6, in Berlin. The bi-annual IRED conference brings together leading international experts in renewable energy and distributed energy resources (DER) for interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration.

Abraham Ellis, Sandia engineer and IRED conference co-chairman, said the workshop and conference are unique because of their multidisciplinary focus.

“Large-scale integration of renewables and DER is a complex issue that requires the attention and engagement of all stakeholders,” said Ellis.

He said the workshop will examine the experiences of utility operations that generate high percentages of electricity from photovoltaics. The session includes discussions of technical challenges, regulations and technological implications of evolving grid codes.

Ellis said the larger conference brings together experts at the forefront of research, demonstration, policy, market and regulatory issues that challenge the integration of distributed and renewable energy resources into the electric grid. Participants will share the successes and challenges related to deployment of smart grid and renewables in the electric power system, as well as technology and research advances that support the notion of resiliency of the electrical grid and energy infrastructure.

“Sharing the technical expertise, best practices and lessons learned from operating distributed systems under high PV penetration is critical to inform the evolution of technology and accelerate the adoption of appropriate standards and best practices,” said Ellis.

Conference participants also will share research and lessons learned, compare policies and programs and collaboratively investigate potential solutions for technical, market and regulatory barriers to high-penetration DER.

Registration or invitation is required to attend the workshop. Please email Lindsey Rogers at EPRI (lirogers@epri.com) for workshop registration. Visit the IRED website for more information and for conference and workshop registration.

The IRED conference was first held in 2004 in Brussels, Belgium. Subsequent conferences were held in Napa Valley, Calif. (2006); Nice, France (2008); and Albuquerque, N.M. (2010).

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Holinka, slholin@sandia.gov, (505) 284-9227

“Sandia has a long and rich history of serving our communities, and we are proud to continue that tradition,” said Kim Sawyer, deputy labs director and executive vice president for mission support at Sandia.

This year, Sandia will be sorting and packaging food for Roadrunner Food Bank, decorating pumpkins with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, conducting nanochemistry experiments with students at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, landscaping the grounds of Sandia Base Elementary School, and repairing and extending a fence at Shandiin Child Development Center. In addition, the Sandia Women’s Action Network will sort clothing for Barrett House Attic Thrift Shop.

And, during the first part of October, Sandians have the opportunity to donate items and funds to a drive for care packages for the Rio Grande Valley Blue Star Mothers. Then, 10 Sandians will sort and package the donated items for U.S. troops.

Make a Difference Day is the nation’s largest volunteering event and is known as “the national day to help others.” Nationwide, the event is the fourth Friday and Saturday of October, but Sandia volunteers decided to make the most impact by extending their efforts through the entire month.

Make a Difference Day is celebrated in nearly every city and state across the country, and last year, more than 3 million Americans joined together in the spirit of service. Sandia partners with several businesses in Albuquerque to help, and this year, 2,000 people are expected to join the effort in Albuquerque and the surrounding area.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, shobby@sandia.gov, (505) 280-3905

The FLC’s Far West/Mid-Continent regional awards recognized Sandia’s technology transfer work with crystalline silico-titanates (CSTs), biomimetic membranes, the i-Gate Innovation Hub and DAKOTA software.

“It is always gratifying when the Federal Laboratory Consortium shines a light on the amazing work that is taking place at Sandia National Laboratories,” said Jackie Kerby Moore, Sandia’s representative to the FLC. “They recognized the entire spectrum of our work, from technology development to technology transfer, as well as the economic impact that technology transfer creates.”

Honeywell UOP products with Sandia Labs CST technology successfully treated more than 40 million gallons of contaminated water at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after it was damaged in an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. (Photo courtesy of Sandia Science & Technology Park) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Radioactive contaminant removal with CSTs

The Excellence in Technology Transfer award went to people involved in development and commercialization of CSTs — Bianca Thayer of Sandia’s intellectual property licensing group, Geochemistry Department Manager Mark Rigali and chemist Tina Nenoff.

CSTs are inorganic, molecularly engineered ion exchangers that can remove high-level radioactive contaminants such as cesium from wastewater. UOP, a Honeywell company, licensed the Sandia technology in the mid-1990s and revised the license last year to become the exclusive U.S. manufacturer of CSTs.

CSTs played a role when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan was damaged in an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, and seawater was pumped in to cool the reactors. The water was contaminated with cesium and could not be released back into the ocean.

Nenoff, who had experience developing and working with CSTs in the 1990s, was called upon to test the material for removal of cesium in seawater. She worked around the clock for 10 days, concluding that CSTs outperformed other materials in removing cesium from seawater.

Since then, Honeywell UOP products with CST technology have successfully treated more than 40 million gallons of contaminated water at Fukushima.

The biomimetic membrane is a revolutionary advance in the field of membrane technology for water filtration. The technology developed at Sandia Labs can increase access to clean water by dramatically reducing energy use and costs. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Biomimetic water filtration                

The Notable Technology Development award recognized Sandia nanobiologist Susan Rempe and her team’s work with biomimetic membranes, a revolutionary advance in the field of membrane technology for water filtration.

Nearly half the world’s population lacks adequate access to clean, fresh water. Desalination plants pass saltwater through membranes that remove salts and create drinkable water. But membrane technology has advanced slowly over the past 30 years.

The biomimetic membrane, inspired by the way the human body filters water, uses self-assembly and atomic layer deposition. It is designed for water purification using reverse osmosis technology, which removes impurities with applied pressure powered by electrical energy. The technology received an R&D 100 Award in 2011.

“We made a synthetic membrane that mimics the nanoscale design features of natural water purification channels,” Rempe said. “By doing so, our initial membranes achieved a 10-fold improvement in water purification efficiency compared with state-of-the-art RO membranes.”

Biomimetic membranes can increase access to clean water by dramatically reducing energy use and costs.

iGate labs-industry partnership

The Outstanding Partnership award recognized the i-GATE regional public-private partnership in California, an organization that supports small businesses and helps maximize the economic potential of green transportation and clean-energy technologies. i-GATE (Innovation for Green Advanced Transportation Excellence) creates a link between national laboratories and entrepreneurs, industry, venture capital, universities and economic development resources to accelerate the commercialization of energy technologies and grow a cohesive innovation ecosystem.

The i-Gate National Energy Systems Technology (NEST) incubator opened in June 2011 to help small companies work with advanced transportation or renewable energy technologies that can leverage technical assistance from Sandia National Laboratories’ site in California or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The i-GATE NEST has helped create 62 direct and 118 indirect jobs.

The award recognized Bruce Balfour, i-GATE president and a member of Sandia’s Technical Business Development group; Rob White, city of Livermore Economic Development director and CEO of i-GATE; Louis Stewart, deputy director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development; and Buck Koonce, director of Economic Development for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Open-source software checks simulation accuracy

The fourth FLC award was an honorable mention for Notable Technology Development that went to DAKOTA software and the project lead, Sandia computer scientist Brian Adams. Sandia’s Design Analysis Kit for Optimization and Terascale Applications (DAKOTA) is an open-source software tool that helps researchers adjust and assess the accuracy of computational simulations developed to solve scientific problems.

DAKOTA helps researchers assess how well their simulations represent the problem and learn how they can be optimized to produce the most realistic, reliable predictions. The software answers such questions as how reliable or variable a system is and what models or parameters best match experimental data.

DAKOTA shortens design cycles and cuts development costs. It is used extensively at national laboratories to solve a range of energy and national security-related problems and to conduct research with academic, government and industrial partners.

“This year, we were honored for our technology-transfer successes across the globe, as well as closer to home,” Kerby Moore said. “Whether our impact was in Japan or our own Livermore community, our technologies and our people are making a difference.”

The FLC is a nationwide network of more than 300 members that provides a forum to develop strategies and opportunities for linking laboratory technologies and expertise with the marketplace.

The FLC Awards Program annually recognizes federal laboratories and their industry partners for outstanding technology transfer efforts. Since its establishment in 1984, the FLC has presented awards to nearly 200 federal laboratories, becoming one of the most prestigious honors in technology transfer.

For more information on technology transfer and working with Sandia Labs, visit: www.sandia.gov/working_with_sandia/technology_partnerships/index.html.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Steve Castillo, 2012 HENAAC winner. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M — A radar systems manager at Sandia National Laboratories who is committed to encouraging youths to pursue science and technology careers has been named 2012 Engineer of the Year by the Hispanic Engineering National Achievement Awards Conference (HENAAC).

Steve Castillo, manager of Sandia’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems Engineering & Decision Support group, has received HENAAC’s highest accolade, which recognizes leadership and technical or scientific achievements.

Castillo received the Engineer of the Year award at the organization’s annual conference in Orlando, Fla. HENAAC was established in 1989 to honor the contributions of outstanding Hispanic American science, engineering, technology and math professionals.

“We are very pleased that Steve is being recognized for his outstanding technical and professional achievements. He exemplifies the innovation and skills that have shaped Sandia as a place that is providing solutions to the nation’s most pressing challenges. And just as important, he demonstrates the qualities that help make Sandia the learning, engaging and inclusive environment that it is,” President and Labs Director Paul Hommert said. “I know that I speak for all Sandia employees when I say that we are proud of him.”

Presenting the award on behalf of HENAAC was Marillyn Hewson, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Electronic Systems business area and chair of the Sandia Corporation board of directors. “At a national laboratory regarded worldwide for its science and engineering work, Dr. Castillo represents the best of the best,” Hewson said. “During his impressive career, he has been an innovative researcher, inspiring college professor and effective academic administrator.”

Castillo, who grew up in Belen, N.M., joined Sandia in 2011 following a 24-year career in academia. Prior to joining Sandia, Castillo was executive vice president of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and a professor and dean at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces.

As a Sandia manager, Castillo is contributing to the technical vision for Sandia’s radar and decision support systems efforts, initiated the development of a mentoring and training program for engineers new to his group and is contributing to an Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance program that is having an impact on combat military personnel.

“I really enjoy the demanding, fast pace of the work in [my group], the high quality of the technical staff I get to work with and the tremendous national security mission impact our systems have,” he said.

Castillo obtained a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from NMSU. After working at the AT&T Bell Lab facility in Denver, he earned a Master of Science degree and doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Castillo became a professor at NMSU and, in 2004, was appointed dean of the NMSU College of Engineering.

Steve Castillo with Marillyn Hewson, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Electronic Systems business area and chair of the Sandia Corporation board of directors. (Photo courtesy of Lockheed Martin Corp.) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

During his career there, he taught more than 3,000 students, and graduated eight doctoral and 22 graduate students, while remaining deeply involved in research. He was lead author or contributor on scores of technical papers, focusing on electromagnetic theory, electromagnetic interference problems, numerical solution of electromagnetic problems, high performance computing and computational linear algebra.

And Castillo continues to volunteer his time to work with young people and encourage them to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

“I tell any young person that a career in STEM will give them the opportunity to be involved in the creation of wealth and a better standard of living for our society or even provide for the security of our country, and at the same time, pay them well enough to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle,” he said.

Castillo serves on the engineering, math and science board of directors of the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers/Advancing Hispanic Excellence in Technology and was a member of the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation Advisory Group to encourage under-represented groups to pursue engineering degrees.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Heather Clark, hclark@sandia.gov, (505) 844-3511

The award is bestowed upon a group or team of Department of Energy employees (federal and contractor) who together accomplished significant achievements on behalf of the department. Individuals and teams are selected by the secretary of energy for the awards.

The team members, including Lipinski, received their awards  Thursday via VideoTeleConference and satellite broadcast of DOE’s 35th Anniversary celebration and Secretarial Honor Awards Ceremony.

NASA’s $2.5 billion MSL rover, the largest and most sophisticated vehicle to visit the Red Planet, is powered by a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or MMRTG. The generator turns heat from the decay of 10.6 pounds of plutonium dioxide into 110 watts of electricity to move the rover and run a suite of 10 instruments, which can do things like find water 32 feet below the surface and analyze chemical composition of rocks three car-lengths away.

While the MMRTG significantly increases the rover’s range and lifetime from previous rovers, which relied on solar panels, launching nuclear material, such as the marshmallow-sized plutonium pellets in the generator, requires diligent attention to safety.

The DOE chose Sandia in 2006 to conduct the safety analysis for all nuclear missions. Lipinski is the team leader for Sandia’s safety analysis report.

Between late June and late November of 2011, the Mars Science Laboratory Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator team delivered the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator for NASA’s  Mars Science Laboratory mission, which launched on Nov. 26, 2011.

Sandia provides probabilities of risk to the decision makers, who decide whether to launch.

“We look at the probabilities of all the different accidents that could happen. Because each event can happen at a particular time and a different way, we simulate the trajectory of a launch,” Lipinski said as the Mars Science Laboratory began its eight-month journey. “There are parameters that represent those times and ways, and we randomly select each of these every time we run the code. We run the code more than a million times, so we build up a large statistical database.”

The team also implemented a documented safety analysis for three temporary nuclear facilities at Kennedy Space Center; implemented a rigorous unreviewed safety question process for DOE, Kennedy Space Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory procedures; and participated in radiological contingency planning and implementation for launch.

“The whole team that worked on this did a spectacular job pulling together everything needed for the phenomena modeling,” Lipinski said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Holinka, slholin@sandia.gov, (505) 284-9227

Until now, wind farm owners and operators had no way to compare their output with the output of similar operations. To benchmark the reliability of the U.S. wind turbine fleet and identify major causes of failures and downtime, the DOE commissioned Sandia in 2010 to build the Continuous Reliability Enhancement for Wind, or CREW, database. This is the first effort to compile a comprehensive, operator-independent dataset that accurately reflects the performance of the U.S. wind fleet.

Every year, Sandia Labs surveys the database and publishes the results to help benchmark the industry. This year, the more than 800 wind turbines studied are either producing electricity or are available to produce electricity 97 percent of the time, up from 94.8 percent in 2011.

“With better understanding of how major turbine systems are performing, wind operators can focus on improving those areas that will drive increased reliability and efficiency,” said Sandia researcher and CREW team lead Alistair Ogilvie.

In 2008, a DOE collaborative published “20% Wind Energy by 2030.” The report suggests that by 2030, wind could supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, compared to less than 1 percent in 2007 and 3 percent in 2011. The report also discussed industry-wide risks related to lower-than-expected reliability and growing costs of operations and maintenance.

“Our assignment from DOE is to objectively characterize the national fleet,” said Valerie Peters, CREW lead reliability analyst. “We’re looking across technologies, locations and companies to create benchmarking statistics for the entire U.S. wind turbine fleet.”

Major turbine systems include a set of three blades, rotor, shaft, generator and gearbox, and all of those components might break or otherwise need maintenance. Sandia’s team is working to determine which components are the most vulnerable and help industry address those concerns to prevent downtime. The costs associated with a turbine going offline add up quickly. The owner not only loses productivity, but the cost of hiring a crane for repairs can be upward of $250,000. Since only a few cranes in the nation are large enough to handle turbine heights and component weights, it may be months before the turbine is up and running again.

Four wind plant owner/operators are participating in the development phase of the CREW project: EDF Renewable Energy (formerly enXco Service Corporation), ShellWind Energy, Wind Capital Group and Xcel Energy. The CREW team taps into turbines’ existing Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) industrial control systems, and Sandia researchers are able to collect high-resolution data from key operating parameters such as wind speed, ambient temperatures, blade angles, component temperatures and torques. Every few seconds, a wind turbine’s SCADA system captures a complete picture of how the turbine and its components are performing, compared to a defined operating environment.

Each plant is providing SCADA data to Sandia through a software tool developed by Strategic Power Systems (SPS). SPS developed the automated data collection software originally to collect high-volume data from steam and gas turbines. SPS reengineered its Operational Reliability Analysis Program, or ORAP®, tool to ORAPWind®, which collects data from wind turbines and creates detailed event logs for all non-operating time, in addition to daily summaries of operating time.

Sandia’s CREW database contains data for more than 800 turbines, which have generated two terabytes of raw data, about 20 percent as large as the entire print collection of the Library of Congress. Sandia’s Enterprise Database Administration Team is processing this enormous dataset into a usable database that can readily support a wide range of rapid queries.

The gathered data is used for various analyses, including public benchmark reporting and DOE reports. The DOE uses its reports to guide research and development investments by identifying critical issues and strategies to improve wind technologies.

The annual public benchmark report characterizes the operations and maintenance experience of the U.S. fleet, using aggregated reliability and performance metrics that lets owner/operators compare their plant against the CREW fleet.

“We’re excited about the results so far and look forward to the next few years as we make an important contribution to our industry to improve reliability through a component-level focus,” Ogilvie said. “It’s an important project that will help encourage increased use of a low-carbon power source, and it could not have succeeded without the outstanding support and leadership of the wind industry and DOE. Together we can share our expertise to help shape the future of the nation’s wind energy generation.”

The CREW Database Wind Turbine Reliability Benchmark and other Sandia wind energy publications are available on Sandia’s website at http://energy.sandia.gov/crewbenchmark.

For more information on Sandia National Laboratories’ energy work, see the Energy, Climate, & Infrastructure Security website http://energy.sandia.gov/

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, shobby@sandia.gov, (505) 280-3905

Sandia's David Fritz holds two Android smartphones, representing the virtual network of 300,000 such devices that he and other researchers are using to advance understanding of malicious computer networks on the Internet. (Photo by Dino Vournas) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Sandia cyber researchers linked together 300,000 virtual hand-held computing devices running the Android operating system so they can study large networks of smartphones and find ways to make them more reliable and secure. Android dominates the smartphone industry and runs on a range of computing gadgets.

The work is expected to result in a software tool that will allow others in the cyber research community to model similar environments and study the behaviors of smartphone networks. Ultimately, the tool will enable the computing industry to better protect hand-held devices from malicious intent.

The project builds on the success of earlier work in which Sandia focused on virtual Linux and Windows desktop systems.

“Smartphones are now ubiquitous and used as general-purpose computing devices as much as desktop or laptop computers,” said Sandia’s David Fritz. “But even though they are easy targets, no one appears to be studying them at the scale we’re attempting.”

The Android project, dubbed MegaDroid, is expected to help researchers at Sandia and elsewhere who struggle to understand large scale networks. Soon, Sandia expects to complete a sophisticated demonstration of the MegaDroid project that could be presented to potential industry or government collaborators.

The virtual Android network at Sandia, said computer scientist John Floren, is carefully insulated from other networks at the Labs and the outside world, but can be built up into a realistic computing environment. That environment might include a full domain name service (DNS), an Internet relay chat (IRC) server, a web server and multiple subnets.

A key element of the Android project, Floren said, is a “spoof” Global Positioning System (GPS). He and his colleagues created simulated GPS data of a smartphone user in an urban environment, an important experiment since smartphones and such key features as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are highly location-dependent and thus could easily be controlled and manipulated by rogue actors.

The researchers then fed that data into the GPS input of an Android virtual machine. Software on the virtual machine treats the location data as indistinguishable from real GPS data, which offers researchers a much richer and more accurate emulation environment from which to analyze and study what hackers can do to smartphone networks, Floren said.

This latest development by Sandia cyber researchers represents a significant steppingstone for those hoping to understand and limit the damage from network disruptions due to glitches in software or protocols, natural disasters, acts of terrorism, or other causes.  These disruptions can cause significant economic and other losses for individual consumers, companies and governments.

“You can’t defend against something you don’t understand,” Floren said. The larger the scale the better, he said, since more computer nodes offer more data for researchers to observe and study.

The research builds upon the Megatux project that started in 2009, in which Sandia scientists ran a million virtual Linux machines, and on a later project that focused on the Windows operating system, called MegaWin. Sandia researchers created those virtual networks at large scale using real Linux and Windows instances in virtual machines.

The main challenge in studying Android-based machines, the researchers say, is the sheer complexity of the software. Google, which developed the Android operating system, wrote some 14 million lines of code into the software, and the system runs on top of a Linux kernel, which more than doubles the amount of code.

“It’s possible for something to go wrong on the scale of a big wireless network because of a coding mistake in an operating system or an application, and it’s very hard to diagnose and fix,” said Fritz. “You can’t possibly read through 15 million lines of code and understand every possible interaction between all these devices and the network.”

Much of Sandia’s work on virtual computing environments will soon be available for other cyber researchers via open source. Floren and Fritz believe Sandia should continue to work on tools that industry leaders and developers can use to better diagnose and fix problems in computer networks.

“Tools are only useful if they’re used,” said Fritz.

MegaDroid primarily will be useful as a tool to ferret out problems that would manifest themselves when large numbers of smartphones interact, said Keith Vanderveen, manager of Sandia’s Scalable and Secure Systems Research department.

“You could also extend the technology to other platforms besides Android,” said Vanderveen. “Apple’s iOS, for instance, could take advantage of our body of knowledge and the toolkit we’re developing.” He said Sandia also plans to use MegaDroid to explore issues of data protection and data leakage, which he said concern government agencies such as the departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

Watch a video of Sandia’s researchers discussing and demonstrating the MegaDroid project.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

The awards recognize DOE national laboratories and sites nationwide for outstanding accomplishments in sustainability, specifically in managing pollution, waste, energy, water and vehicle fleets.

Sandia’s award in the comprehensive energy management category was for its efforts to deploy virtual servers, which have reduced energy use and costs and prevented pollution through reductions in equipment purchases, operations and disposal.

In April, the project also received a National Nuclear Security Administration Pollution Prevention Best in Class award.

Typical physical computer servers are 10 to 15 percent efficient, yet require 100 percent power and cooling.

Over four years, Sandia moved to large-scale server virtualization through a “virtual first” policy, maximizing energy efficiency. More than 700 virtual servers were deployed, spanning six network partitions and multiple Sandia sites.

Sandia’s current hardware can have up to 100 virtual servers on each individual physical host server. By combining physical host servers into virtualization clusters using commercial software, host servers work together to balance the loads on virtual servers, resulting in applications operating nearly 100 percent of the time. The design also incorporates a reserve margin so in the event of a crash other servers will pick up the slack, making the entire system more reliable.

Server virtualization led to estimated total hardware savings of $3.4 million and net electricity savings of roughly 7.6 billion BTUs a year for additional cost savings of more than $200,000 annually. Server virtualization also eliminated the need to periodically upgrade and dispose of old servers.

John Zepper, director of Sandia’s Computing and Network Services Center, and Laura Lenberg of the Infrastructure Computing Services department accepted the award Thursday at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.

“Today’s Sustainability Award winners are leading by example, showing what’s possible when employees bring creativity, innovation and dedication to their efforts to make the Department of Energy more sustainable,” said Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman. “The efforts undertaken by these individuals and teams are helping the department to deliver on President Obama’s sustainability goals, while inspiring others both inside and outside of government to start investing in cost-saving clean energy technologies.”

Ralph Wrons of Sandia’s Pollution Prevention program said the project “is a perfect example of cost austerity by saving on computer purchases, energy costs, and computer disposal costs, with the likelihood of increasing savings every year that the Labs depends upon server-hosted information, which could be a long time.” Sandia’s Pollution Prevention program works on electronics stewardship with many Labs organizations, including procurement, computer support and property management.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Holinka, slholin@sandia.gov, (505) 284-9227

Tracking down the source of fresh food contamination can be difficult and time-consuming. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Uncovering the sources of fresh food contamination could become faster and easier thanks to analysis done at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC).

The study, in the International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, demonstrates how developing a probability map of the food supply network using stochastic network representation might shorten the time it takes to track down contaminated food sources. Stochastic mapping shows what is known about how product flows through the distribution supply chain and provides a means to express all the uncertainties in potential supplier-customer relationships that persist due to incomplete information.

If used on a larger scale, such methods also might assess the vulnerability of food supplies to wide-scale, deliberate contamination.

Tracking down the source of fresh food contamination can be difficult and time-consuming. Sandia analyst Stephen Conrad said difficulties in adequately characterizing connections and product flows among producers, distributors and suppliers can contribute to significant uncertainty in assessing the risk of foodborne illness.

“This is often a serious problem when there is an outbreak of food poisoning in a particular region and the healthcare authorities cannot quickly trace the source of the outbreak,” Conrad said.

When an outbreak occurs, epidemiologists must interview affected people to track down where foodborne exposures happened. Often those interviews take place weeks after the exposure, leading to inaccurate or incomplete information and making it difficult to pinpoint a likely food culprit. Once the tainted food has been identified, investigators must trace up through the food distribution supply chain to locate the source of contamination.

“Epidemiologists involved in trace back start behind the eight ball,” Conrad said. “They attempt to reconstruct the pathway the contaminated food has traveled through the distribution network well after the fact.”

Even at the supply chain level, investigating how food moves through the system is daunting. Conrad said supply chains vary widely from one food marketing system and agricultural sector to another. Some supply chain parts change frequently. Even within a single agricultural sector, some parts may be characterized by enduring supplier/customer relationships, while others may be market-based and highly transitory.

Even industry insiders may not understand the supply chain map. Many only know “one up and one down” — that is, they know only their direct supplier and direct customer. Some information about customers and suppliers can be proprietary and therefore hard to get, Conrad said.

Stochastic food chain mapping could prevent more healthy food from being lost to outbreak concerns. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

In 2011, sprouts were the focus of a serious E. coli outbreak in Europe, but tracing contaminated products to their source proved difficult.

Sandia researchers applied the stochastic mapping technique to test data from the fresh sprout sector in a single state in the U.S., using a case study of the edible seed sprout distribution system as the basis of their computational model.

“Stochastic network representation provides the ability to incorporate and express the uncertainties using probability maps,” Conrad explained. “The method enables effective risk analysis and designing robust food defense strategies.”

Future work for the team will include scaling the analysis up to the company or industry level as well as mapping commodity flows into, out of and within a geographic region.

Ultimately, NISAC intends to work with partners in business and federal and state agencies to ascertain whether the agencies have a business case for adopting the method. If there is, the team will seek to help achieve wide acceptance of using data analysis to assess risk.

Building on techniques and knowledge developed at NISAC over the past four years, the work was initiated with funding from Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and continued with funding from the Department of Homeland Security.

“If stochastic mapping was widely used now, perhaps outbreaks, such the recent ones involving salmonella, could be more quickly tracked down and contained. Quicker containment would benefit not only consumers but also the farmers who grow fresh food for our nation and who can be severely impacted economically by uncertainties and market restrictions on sales of their products caused by delays in pinpointing an outbreak’s source,” Conrad said.

For more information, visit Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems (CASoS) Engineering Initiative website, or the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC).

The International Journal of Critical Infrastructures article, “The value of utilizing stochastic mapping of food distribution networks for understanding risks and tracing contaminant pathways,” written by Conrad, W.E. Beyeler and T.J. Brown, appeared in Volume 8 of the 2012 publication.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Holinka, slholin@sandia.gov, (505) 284-9227

Sandia’s David Borns is providing technical evaluations in weekly teleconferences about possible causes and remedies for a 300-foot-wide sinkhole there.

This Aug. 3 aerial shot released by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources shows the sinkhole near Bayou Corne, La., which has grown since it first began forming in August. Sandia researcher David Borns is part of a group of experts providing technical evaluations about possible causes and remedies for the sinkhole. (Photo courtesy of Louisiana Department of Natural Resources) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image

“We try to be of support to adding expertise to federal and local governments when they’re faced with understanding technical issues that impact their resources,” said Borns, a geotechnology and engineering manager.

Authorities have been trying to determine whether the sinkhole was caused by the collapse of an abandoned brine mining cavern along the margin of the Napoleonville Salt Dome or by something else. The operator of that cavern has drilled a borehole into the cavern at a depth of 3,500 feet to learn whether the cavern is the cause. The results of the drilling will determine what the technical evaluation committee recommends, Borns said.

The sinkhole opened up overnight on Aug. 2 off the western edge of the salt dome near Bayou Corne. It was reportedly originally about 300 feet deep, but Borns said only one part was that deep; the rest was about 50 feet deep.

“There were some broad impacts to the area,” he said. “A nearby community was evacuated, this big sinkhole formed, and it forced the closure of a two major natural gas pipelines.”

The USGS, which is known for its seismic expertise, already had been keeping an eye on the area because of harmonic tremors that began in June, along with gas bubbling up at seven different locations in the wetlands of Bayou Corne and nearby Grand Bayou.

“What they were seeing was some sort of fluid movement through fractures, which they thought might be the natural gas that was bubbling up in the bayou,” Borns said.

Authorities first thought the source might be a broken pipeline, but all pipelines checked out. Then they started exploring whether something was happening within the caprock or surrounding sediments where natural gas comes from. The harmonic tremors continued for about six weeks but stopped after the sinkhole formed. Since then, only small seismic events continue to be recorded near the cavern under investigation, Borns said.

The cavern was developed for brining operations, in which companies dissolve salt to extract chlorine for use as a precursor for petrochemicals, he said.

On Aug. 22, the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness formally asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu for help from Sandia. The Labs previously worked on cavern collapse and sinkhole formation problems on Weeks Island, La. Borns said Sandia experts are called in once or twice a year to study similar concerns.

The USGS had suggested the state of Louisiana include Sandia on technical conference calls based on the Labs’ expertise in salt and salt caverns. Sandia began working on salt formations in the 1970s, when it began investigating the geomechanical response of salt caverns as a potential medium for underground nuclear weapons testing, Borns said. About the same time, some authorities proposed using underground nuclear shots in salt to create storage caverns for natural gas, he said.

Sandia’s studies of salt mechanics led to decades of research on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has two locations in Louisiana and two locations in Texas, and on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, which stores radioactive waste from defense programs in rooms excavated in ancient salt beds near Carlsbad, N.M.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

Texas Tech proposes to create a micro-rheometer to measure very thin quantities of liquid, like that found in knee joints. (Image courtesy of Texas Tech University) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

This year’s contest attracted engineering students from nine universities, nearly double the number of competitors in 2011. The increase was due in part to participation by Mexican universities.

The student designs are blueprints to build mechanical devices in the micrometer size range, to be powered by tiny amounts of electricity.

MEMS devices are omnipresent in modern society. They help inkjet printers and laser disk players to function, probe biological cells, enable high-tech machinery, route telecommunications and much more. New uses for the devices — inexpensive to construct and to operate — continue to be discovered. Some devices are smaller than the thickness of a human hair (about 70 micrometers).

Texas Tech students, who last year won with an ingenious, dust-sized dragonfly with surveillance possibilities, this year designed a micro-rheometer device able to measure the behavior of very thin quantities of liquid, like the synovial fluid in knee joints. The method requires much smaller samples compared to macro-scale rheometers, the standard tool.

“It is much easier, and usually less painful, to obtain small quantities of bodily fluids from patients,” the students wrote in their project description. The project used an advanced design process called SUMMiT V™, created and supported by Sandia, that enables the joining of five layers of silicon to form a complicated device.

Carnegie Mellon students, who last year designed a highly sensitive microvalve for more control over very small fluid flows, this year made use of the relatively large change in mass that occurs when a microdevice adsorbs even a small amount of material. The increase significantly alters any vibrational frequencies of the system. Characterizing adsorbed material this way can say a lot very quickly about what surface changes might occur in the structure under observation. For example, water vapor on MEMS devices may reduce the fatigue strength of polysilicon MEMS, while hydrocarbons adsorb onto microrelay contacts, increasing their electrical resistance.

The MEMS University Alliance, which now has more than 20 members, is part of Sandia’s outreach to universities to improve engineering education. It is open to any U.S. institution of higher learning and select Mexican universities.

The alliance provides classroom teaching materials and licenses for Sandia’s special SUMMiT V™ design tools at a reasonable cost, so universities that lack fabrication facilities can develop a curriculum in MEMS.

Carnegie Mellon students, who last year designed a highly sensitive microvalve for more control over very small fluid flows, this year made use of the relatively large change in mass that occurs when a microdevice adsorbs even a small amount of material. (Image courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Sandia executives, led by Steve Rottler, chief technology officer and vice president of Science and Technology and Research Foundations, and Microsystems director Gil Herrera helped encourage Mexican universities’ participation in the contest, University Alliance Design Competition, by traveling to Mexico to sign memorandums of understanding to promote MEMS science and technology there.

Competing schools this year included the Air Force Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, Central New Mexico Community College, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional of Mexico City, Carnegie Mellon University, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, Texas Tech University, Universidad de Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez, Universidad de Guadalajara, Universidad de Guanajuato, University of Oklahoma, University of Utah and Universidad Veracruzana.

“The Mexican universities were highly competitive with the U.S. universities,” said Keith Ortiz, Sandia manager of MEMS Technologies, who along with Gil Herrera hosted the student presentations. “We were impressed by their creativity and use of technology.” 

The contest process takes nine months. It starts with students developing ideas for a device, followed by creation of an accurate computer model of a design that might work, analysis of the design and, finally, design submission. Sandia’s MEMS experts and university professors review the design and determine the winners.

Sandia’s state-of-the-art Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications (MESA) fabrication facility then creates parts for each of the entrants. The design competition capitalizes on Sandia’s confidence in achieving first-pass fabrication success, which restricts the entire process to a reasonable student time-frame.

Fabricated parts are shipped back to the university students for lengthy tests to determine whether the final product matches the purpose of the original computer simulation.

The University Alliance coordinates with the Sandia-led National Institute for Nano Engineering (NINE), providing additional opportunities for students to self-direct their engineering education, and the Sandia/Los Alamos Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), a Department of Energy Office of Science center with the most up-to-date nanotechnology tools.

Travel by students and professors to the awards ceremony was made possible by grants from the International Society for Optics and Photonics. Carnegie Mellon professorial oversight was provided by Maarten de Boer. Texas Tech students were supervised by faculty adviser Tim Dallas.

For more information regarding the University Alliance and the design competition, contact Stephanie Johnson at srjohns@sandia.gov.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

Nielson garnered one of the magazine’s “Brilliant 10” awards for helping lead the Sandia effort to create solar cells the size of glitter.

Greg Nielson, Sandia photovoltaic researcher. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Past Brilliant 10 honorees have gone on to win the Fields Medal (considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics) and MacArthur Foundation “genius” awards. Nielson and the other 2012 award winners will be featured in the October issue of Popular Science, available in late September.

“Greg Nielson and his team have created a new class of photovoltaic technology,” said the Sandia application in support of Nielson’s nomination. “The tiny pieces, each the size of a piece of glitter, sharply contrast with the so-called ‘bricks’ used by the photovoltaic industry.”

Sandia Labs Director Paul Hommert added, “This recognition of Greg’s groundbreaking contributions is testimony to his innovative spirit. It also reflects our broader Laboratory commitment to nurturing outstanding scientific achievement.”

According to Sandia’s application, the size of the solar glitter — each about the width of a human hair — offer major advantages over traditional solar cells. They are easily formed in the hundreds of thousands using widely available, commercial computer-chip fabrication techniques.

“The unique approach converts sunlight to electricity more efficiently. It increases the total power output available per unit area,” the application continues. “It significantly lowers the cost for solar power. Most remarkably, the cells can be built into flexible products like tents, bags or clothing, or embedded directly into more sturdy structures to become the outer shell of cell phones, tablets or laptops. This is because the tiny units can be formed into three-dimensional structures with very sharp curves and corners, yet still be made of high-efficiency photovoltaic cells. No other PV technology possesses this capability.”

Indications that Nielson was a high achiever came early. At the age of 7, he had read all the children’s books in the Bountiful, Utah, public library. His mother, a strong supporter of education, talked the librarian into granting Nielson an adult card so he could learn more about the natural world he saw around him.

His dad, now semi-retired and working five hours a week at the Ace Hardware in Bountiful, is so proud of his son’s achievements that he relays news of them to store customers.

In high school, Nielson took a class from a physics teacher who had made millions with an invention that heated pop bottles and stretched them at state fairs. “He taught for the fun of it,” Nielson says, “and every day or so he’d make up some experiment.”

Those experiments included blowing up a car battery, filling a 15-foot-diameter weather balloon with helium and launching it and rolling bowling balls off the school roof in attempts to hit a target below.

“The experiments wouldn’t have been OSHA-approved, but they influenced me significantly,” Nielson said.

Because of the influence of his physics teacher, Nielson signed up for mechanical engineering when he went to college at Utah State. “I’m not that interested in discovering new scientific theory,” he explained. “It’s when I hear of a problem that needs an engineering solution that my mind goes crazy. I love coming up with a solution.”

As an undergraduate at Utah State, he leaped ahead to work as a research assistant, testing rockets that combined solid fuel with liquid/gas oxidizers. The hybrid process enabled rocket propulsion mechanisms to be turned on and off, rather than burn without pause to the end of their solid-fuel lives.

After earning master’s and doctoral degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he came to Sandia as one of the first Truman Fellows, the Laboratories’ highest honor for incoming researchers. There, he realized that current solar photovoltaic generators “were using a lot of silicon they didn’t need. With my background in microsystems, I saw they could save by a factor of 10 in materials cost.”

He credits his volunteer experience leading youth groups, Boy Scouts and a church congregation for the “steady pressure,” as he puts it, he provides to move his projects forward.

“Another help,” he said, “is that many people feel strongly about solar and gravitate toward our project. They believe they are making a difference and I believe they are.”

Steve Rottler, Sandia’s chief technology officer, said, “This award confirms what those of us who work with Greg already know — he is an incredibly gifted engineer who is developing an innovative solution to a complex challenge facing society. We are very proud of Greg and the accomplishments of his team.”

Joseph H. Simmons of the University of Arizona wrote, “Sandia’s microscale photovoltaics are one with the most innovative approach and the best chance for a paradigm-shifting success.”

Wrote Stephen J. Fonash of Pennsylvania State University, “I have seen few truly new visions for improving solar cell costs and efficiency; Sandia’s microscale photovoltaics is the most recent one I place into this special category.”

Wrote Jeffrey H. Hunt, an American Physical Society and Boeing Technical Fellow, “(Solar) applications to mobile ground units, airborne platforms and space assets continue to depend on engineering the power to fit the system, rather than logically fitting the power to the application requirements. . . . The glitter cells are the only technology capable of bridging this important technical gap.”

Find more on Sandia’s microsystems-enabled photovoltaics work here.

Nielson’s photovoltaic work has been supported by the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technology Program and Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research & Development program. Support for his nomination for the “Brilliant 10” came from a variety of sources.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer nsinger@sandia.gov (505) 845-7078

Sandia researchers Alex Tappan (left) and Rob Knepper watch the detonation of a critical thickness experiment. The experiment typically uses less explosive material than the size of one-tenth of an aspirin tablet to determine small-scale detonation properties. The bench-top experiment is so small, researchers can stand next to the firing chamber with eye and ear protection. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

“Despite the fact explosives are in widespread use, there’s still a lot to learn about how detonation begins and what properties of the explosive define the key detonation phenomena,” said Alex Tappan of Sandia’s Explosives Technology Group.

Explosives are typically studied by pressing powders into pellets; tests are then done to determine bulk properties. To create precise samples to characterize PETN at the mesoscale, the researchers developed a novel technique based on physical vapor deposition to create samples with varying thicknesses. That allowed them to study detonation behavior at the sub-millimeter scale and to determine that PETN detonation fails at a thickness roughly the width of a human hair. This provided a clue into what physical processes at the sub-millimeter level might dominate the performance of PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate).

Years of work went into the process, Tappan said.

The idea is that by understanding the fundamental physical behavior of an explosive and the detonation process, researchers will improve predictive models of how explosives will behave under a variety of conditions.

Right now, “if we want to model the performance of an explosive, it requires parameters determined from experiments under a particular set of test conditions. If you change any of the conditions, those models we have for predictions don’t hold up any more,” said Rob Knepper of Sandia’s Energetic Materials Dynamic and Reactive Sciences organization.

Physical vapor deposition works like this: Researchers put PETN powder in a crucible inside a vacuum chamber and heat it so the PETN evaporates. Above the crucible is a flat substrate of plastic, ceramic or metal, and the PETN vapor deposits on that, producing explosive films.

Click on the thumbnail to view video footage of the PETN experiment.

Such pristine samples allow the team to study the initiation and detonation behavior of explosives, Tappan said.

“By varying deposition conditions, we’re starting to get a handle on how the deposition conditions affect the microstructure and how microstructure affects detonation behavior,” Knepper added.

The tests use less explosive than what’s inside a .22-caliber bullet, and researchers wearing safety glasses and ear protection can stand next to the experiment in a protective enclosure, Tappan said.

“A typical experiment weighs about a tenth of an aspirin tablet,” he said. “If that tablet is 325 milligrams, we’re shooting about 32.5 milligrams. These are not huge.”

The team did multiple shots to determine at what point detonation fails.

“As size (thickness) decreases further and further, at some point the detonation will slow down and eventually fail,” Tappan said.

Tappan, Knepper and co-authors Ryan R. Wixom, Jill C. Miller, Michael P. Marquez and J. Patrick Ball presented a paper at the 14^th International Detonation Symposium in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 2010. In the paper, “Critical Thickness Measurements in Vapor-Deposited Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate Films,” they wrote that the work represented the first highly resolved measurements of detonation failure in high-density PETN.

It adds new information for a very old explosive.

“What we brought to the table is a new experiment that allowed samples to be made that are small enough to measure this critical thickness property,” Tappan said. “Other research been done on PETN in a different form or when it had a binder added to it. This is the first time these data have been done on the critical detonation geometry for pure, high-density PETN.”

In the past, diameter information was obtained through experiments using high-aspect-ratio cylinders of pressed pellets of differing diameters. But it’s difficult to press pellets with diameters smaller than 1 to 2 mm with precise density.

The work began under a three-year Laboratory Directed Research and Development grant that ended in 2001. It’s now funded through a combination of internal and external programs.

The research falls under the umbrella of Sandia’s Microenergetics Program, which Tappan said uses novel techniques to produce small-scale explosive samples to study ignition, combustion and detonation phenomena. It began as a collaboration among researchers in Sandia’s Explosives Technology Group, Manufacturing Process Science and Technology Group, Engineering Sciences Center and Microsystems Science and Technology and Components Center.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Magnetically imploded tubes called liners, intended to help produce controlled nuclear fusion at scientific “break-even” energies or better within the next few years, have functioned successfully in preliminary tests, according to a Sandia research paper accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters (PRL).

Sandia researcher Ryan McBride pays close attention to the tiny central beryllium liner to be imploded by the powerful magnetic field generated by Sandia’s Z machine. The larger cylinders forming a circle on the exterior of the base plate measure Z’s load current by picking up the generated magnetic field. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

To exceed scientific break-even is the most hotly sought-after goal of fusion research, in which the energy released by a fusion reaction is greater than the energy put into it — an achievement that would have extraordinary energy and defense implications.

That the liners survived their electromagnetic drubbing is a key step in stimulating further Sandia testing of a concept called MagLIF (Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion), which will use magnetic fields and laser pre-heating in the quest for energetic fusion.

In the dry-run experiments just completed, cylindrical beryllium liners remained reasonably intact as they were imploded by huge magnetic field of Sandia’s Z machine, the world’s most powerful pulsed-power accelerator. Had they overly distorted, they would have proved themselves incapable of shoveling together nuclear fuel — deuterium and possibly tritium — to the point of fusing them. Sandia researchers expect to add deuterium fuel in experiments scheduled for 2013.

“The experimental results — the degree to which the imploding liner maintained its cylindrical integrity throughout its implosion — were consistent with results from earlier Sandia computer simulations,” said lead researcher Ryan McBride.“These predicted MagLIF will exceed scientific break-even.”

A simulation published in a 2010 Physics of Plasmas article by Sandia researcher Steve Slutz showed that a tube enclosing preheated deuterium and tritium, crushed by the large magnetic fields of the 25-million-ampere Z machine, would yield slightly more energy than is inserted into it.

A later simulation, published last January in PRL by Slutz and Sandia researcher Roger Vesey, showed that a more powerful accelerator generating 60 million amperes or more could reach “high-gain” fusion conditions, where the fusion energy released greatly exceeds (by more than 1,000 times) the energy supplied to the fuel.

These goals — both the near-term goal of scientific break-even on today’s Z machine and the long-term goal of high-gain fusion on a future, more powerful machine — require the metallic liners to maintain sufficient cylindrical integrity while they implode.

The liner is intended to contain fusion fuel like a can holds peanut butter, and push it together in nanoseconds like two semicylindrical shovels compacting snow together.

An element of drama is present because the metallic liner doing the compressing is also being eaten away as it conducts the Z machine’s enormous electrical current along its outer surface. This electrical current generates the corresponding magnetic field that crushes the liner, but under the stress of passing that current, the outer surface of the liner begins to vaporize and turn into plasma, in much the same way as a car fuse vaporizes when a short circuit sends too much current through it. As this happens, the surface begins to lose integrity and becomes unstable. This instability works its way inward, toward the liner’s inner surface, throughout the course of the implosion.

“You might say: The race is on,” said McBride. “The question is, can we start off with a thick enough tube such that we can complete the implosion and burn the fusion fuel before the instability eats its way completely through the liner wall?

“A thicker tube would be more robust in standing up to this instability, but the implosion would be less efficient because Z would have to accelerate more liner mass. On the flip side, a thinner tube could be accelerated to a much higher implosion velocity, but then the instability would rip the liner to shreds and render it useless,” he continues. “Our experiments were designed to test a sweet spot predicted by the simulations where a sufficiently robust liner could implode with a sufficiently high velocity.”

By following the dimensions proposed by the earlier simulations, the physical test proved successful and the liner walls maintained their integrity throughout the implosion.

Radiographs taken at nanosecond intervals depicted the implosion of the initially solid beryllium liner through to stagnation — the point at which an implosion stops because the liner material has reached the cylinder’s central axis. The images show the outer surface of the imploding liner distorting until it resembles threads on a bolt. However, the more crucial inner surface remains reasonably intact all the way through to stagnation.

Said McBride’s manager Dan Sinars, “When Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion was first proposed, our biggest concern was whether the instabilities would disrupt the target before fusion reactions could occur. We had complex computer simulations that suggested things would be OK, but we were not confident in those predictions. Then McBride did his experiments, using liners with the same dimensions as our simulations, and the outcomes matched. We are now confident enough to take the next steps on the Z facility of integrating in the new magnetic field and laser preheat capabilities that will be required to test the full concept. Consequently, we intend to take those first integration steps in 2013.”

Slated for December are the first tests of the final two components of the MagLIF concept: laser preheating to put more energy into the fuel before magnetic compression begins, and the testing of two secondary electrical coils placed at the top and bottom of the can. Their magnetic fields are expected to keep charged particles from escaping the hot fuel horizontally. This is crucial because if too many particles escape, the fuel could cool to the point where fusion reactions cease.

Sandia researchers intend to test the fully integrated MagLIF concept by the close of 2013.

“This work is one more step on a long path to possible energy applications,” said Sandia senior manager Mark Herrmann.

The liner implosion experiments also served to verify that simulation tools like the popular LASNEX code are accurate within certain parameters, but may diverge when used beyond those limits — information of importance to other labs that use the same codes.

McBride will give an invited talk on his work this fall at the American Physical Society’s annual Division of Plasma Physics meeting in Providence, RI. He is also preparing an invited paper for Physics of Plasmas to explain the PRL results in greater depth.

The work was funded by Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact:  Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

A national poll of energy professionals was jointly prepared by Sandia National Laboratories and OurEnergyPolicy.org.

LIVERMORE, Calif.— U.S. energy policy should simultaneously pursue security of its energy supply, economic stability and reduced environmental impacts, says a national poll of energy professionals jointly prepared by Sandia National Laboratories and OurEnergyPolicy.org.

The findings of the national poll, “The Goals of Energy Policy,” show that the vast majority — more than 85 percent — of the 884 energy professionals surveyed prefer policymaking that pursues all three goals at once.

The poll asked the experts to allocate 100 points, representing a 100 percent policymaking effort, across three commonly accepted energy policy goals: the environment, economics and energy supply security. Participating respondents included representatives of public utilities, oil and gas organizations, energy engineering groups and other professional energy associations. Participating organizations were made up primarily of energy professionals and had no overt political or policy agendas related to the three policy goals.

“Creating and implementing energy policy is challenging on many fronts. We hope these results can serve as a useful starting point for those interested in building consensus for an effective energy policy,” said Dawn Manley, deputy director of chemical sciences at Sandia.

Matthew Jordan, program director of OurEnergyPolicy.org, said, “Many surveys tend to simplify, rather than clarify, public opinion on energy policy by asking either-or questions. Thinking about energy policy this way is just not leading to results. It may be that the way we talk about energy policy is limiting our ability to develop viable policy options. Our country can and should pursue multiple energy-related goals simultaneously.”

Manley added, “There is a growing recognition of the requirement to balance our nation’s need for plentiful, low-cost energy with an inherent responsibility to steward the natural environment and to help grow our economy. Surveys like this can help provide strategic direction, guidance and focus for the energy community.”

The Sandia-OurEnergyPolicy.org survey asked the following questions:

• How should the U.S. allocate its efforts across the following three energy policy priorities?
• Energy supply security: Assure a supply of energy for the U.S. that protects our national security interests.
• Economics and job creation: Assure a cost for energy that sustains U.S. economic stability and growth.
• Environment and climate: Minimize the environmental impacts of energy supply, distribution and use.
• Is another energy policy priority needed?
• If yes, how would you allocate 100 points across the three original priorities and the fourth, self-selected priority?

The results:

• On average, respondents allocated 36.9 points to energy supply security, 32.3 points to economics and job creation and 30.7 points to environment and climate.
• Single-issue advocates were rare, with just 3.1 percent of respondents allocating all of their effort toward one goal.
• Single-issue adversaries were also few, with less than 15 percent of respondents completely devaluing any one goal.
• Male respondents tended to emphasize energy supply security more heavily with increasing age and to de-emphasize the environment with age.
• Female respondents prioritized the environment most highly, regardless of age.
• Energy supply security rated highest among respondents from Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas; environment and climate was given the highest priority in the Pacific and New England regions; and compared with other regions, economics and job creation was a higher priority in the Midwest.
• Forty-two percent of respondents offered another energy policy goal. Of these, the three most commonly identified were reducing consumption, fostering technological innovation and improving energy efficiency.

Results are presented in a report by Sandia National Laboratories and OurEnergyPolicy.org, which is available on both organizations’ websites. Sandia and OurEnergyPolicy.org plan to continue their work on the national energy policy discourse with follow-up surveys and studies on related topics.

OurEnergyPolicy.org’s mission is to facilitate substantive, responsible dialogue on energy policy issues and be a resource for the American people, policymakers and the media, including a robust repository of energy policy materials. By bringing together energy experts in productive national discourse, OurEnergyPolicy.org enhances the potential of adopting and implementing effective energy policy. OurEnergyPolicy.org does not have or endorse any specific political, programmatic, policy or technological agendas.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia media relations contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

OurEnergyPolicy.org media contacts: Claire Buchan, Claire@clairebuchan.com, (202) 257-2329, Alison Harden, aharden@granite-is.com, (202) 436-5565

Sandia’s Susan Stevens-Adams wears a cap dotted with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that are injected with gel to make sure they have good contact. EEGs are used as part of a study into memory and memory training. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Research at Sandia National Laboratories has shown that it’s possible to predict how well people will remember information by monitoring their brain activity while they study. 

A team under Laura Matzen of Sandia’s cognitive systems group was the first to demonstrate predictions based on the results of monitoring test volunteers with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors. 

For example, “if you had someone learning new material and you were recording the EEG, you might be able to tell them, ‘You’re going to forget this, you should study this again,’ or tell them, ‘OK, you got it and go on to the next thing,’” Matzen said. 

The team monitored test subjects’ brain activity while they studied word lists, then used the EEG to predict who would remember the most information. Because researchers knew the average percentage of correct answers under various conditions, they had a baseline of what brain activity looked like for good and poor memory performance. The computer model predicted five of 23 people tested would perform best. The model was correct: They remembered 72 percent of the words on average, compared to 45 percent for everyone else. 

The study is part of Matzen’s long-term goal to understand the Difference Related to Subsequent Memory, or Dm Effect, an index of brain activity encoding that distinguishes subsequently remembered from subsequently forgotten items. The measurable difference gives cognitive neuroscientists a way to test hypotheses about how information is encoded in memory. 

She’s interested in what causes the effect and what can change it, and hopes her research eventually leads to improvements in how students learn. She’d like to discover how training helps people performing at different levels and whether particular training works better for certain groups. 

The study, funded under Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program (LDRD), had two parts: predicting how well someone will remember what’s studied and predicting who will benefit most from memory training. 

Matzen presented the results of the first part of the study in April at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in Chicago. She presented preliminary findings on the second part this summer to the Cognitive Science and Technology External Advisory Board, made up of representatives of universities, industry and laboratories who advise the investment area team managing the LDRD portfolio. 

The second part tested different types of memory training to see how they changed participants’ memory performance and brain activity. One of Matzen’s goals is to find out whether recording a person’s brain activity while they use their natural approach to studying can predict what kind of training would work best for that person. 

She’s still analyzing those findings, but said preliminary results are encouraging. The computer model from the earlier study was used to predict who would perform best on the memory tasks, and the high performers did even better after memory training. 

“That’s promising because one of the things we want to do is see if we can use the brain activity to predict how people react to the training, whether it will be effective for them,” Matzen said.  

A next step would be “to use more real-world memory working tasks, such as what military personnel would have to learn as new recruits, and see if the same patterns apply to more complex types of learning,” she said. 

About 90 volunteers spent nine to 16 hours over five weeks in testing for the memory training techniques study. Their first session developed a baseline for how well they remembered words or images. Most then underwent memory training for three weeks and were retested. 

A control group received no training. A second group practiced mental imagery strategy, thinking up vivid images to remember words and pictures. The final group went through “working memory” training to increase how much information they could handle at a time. Matzen said that averages about seven items, such as digits in a phone number. 

Monitored by electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, Sandia researcher Laura Matzen sits in a soundproof booth watching a screen that flashes words or images for one second. Matzen has been studying whether signals from the brain can predict whether people will remember something and whether training helps them remember. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Each volunteer, shut into a sound-proof booth, watched a screen that flashed words or images for one second, interrupted with periodic quizzes on how well the person remembered what was shown. 

“It’s designed to be really difficult because we want lots of room to improve after memory training,” Matzen said. The test was divided into five sections, each about 20 minutes long followed by a break to keep volunteers alert. 

Each section tested a different type of memory. The first, middle and last sections consisted of single nouns. During quizzes, volunteers hit buttons for yes or no, indicating whether they’d seen the word before. The other two sections combined adjectives and nouns or pairs of unrelated drawings, with volunteers again tested on what they remembered. The image section tested associative memory — memory for two unrelated things. Matzen said that’s the most difficult because it links arbitrary relationships. 

When performance was compared before and after training, the control group did not change, but the mental imagery group’s performance improved on three of the five tasks. 

“Imagery is a really powerful strategy for grouping things and making them more memorable,” Matzen said. 

The working memory group did worse on four of the five tasks after training. 

Volunteers trained on working memory — remembering information for brief periods — improved on the task they’d trained on, but training did not carry over to other tasks, Matzen said. 

She believes it boils down to strategy: The imagery training group learned a strategy, while working memory training simply tried to push the limits of memory capacity. 

While the imagery group did better overall, they made more mistakes than the other groups when tested on “lures” that were similar, but not the same, as items they had memorized. 

“They study things like ‘strong adhesive’ and ‘secret password,’ and then I might test them on ‘strong password,’ which they didn’t see, but they saw both parts of it,” Matzen said. “The people who have done the imagery training make many more mistakes on the recombinations that keep the same concept. If something kind of fits with their mental image they’ll say yes to it even if it’s not quite what they saw before.” 

The Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland provided the working memory materials for the study Matzen designed. Now, she and the center propose to study tasks that measure cognitive flexibility and how it relates to training performance.

For more information, visit: http://cognitivescience.sandia.gov/.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

The first Sandia Research & Technology Showcase will be held from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. on Sept. 12 at the Embassy Suites in Albuquerque.

Tips on intellectual property issues and on how to do business with the Labs through licensing, partnership agreements, procurement and economic development programs also will be featured at the first Sandia Research & Technology Showcase from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. on Sept. 12 at the Embassy Suites in Albuquerque. The event is free and open to the public.

The showcase will include presentations, panel discussions, posters and booths. Posters will focus on four broad themes: cybersecurity research, energy security, nano and micro science and technology and water security. Within each theme, a collection of research projects, technologies and facilities will illustrate the range of Sandia’s work from early-stage research through technology deployment.

The showcase is designed to provide valuable information to local and regional industry and academic partners. The meeting opens with remarks by Sandia President and Laboratories Director Paul Hommert and includes an overview of research and development at the Labs by Dennis Croessmann, chief of staff to the chief technology officer. Pete Atherton, Sandia’s senior manager of Industry Partnerships, will discuss accessing intellectual property. A panel moderated by Technology Ventures Corp.’s John Freisinger will feature representatives from several companies that have licensed Sandia technology discussing how they achieved business success. Deputy Laboratories Director Kim Sawyer will moderate a conversation over lunch with Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry and Bernalillo County Commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins. And Jackie Kerby Moore, manager of the Technology & Economic Development Department at Sandia, will moderate a panel made up of local businesses that have taken part in Sandia’s economic development programs, including the Sandia Science & Technology Park and the New Mexico Small Business Assistance Program.

Researchers and business development specialists will be on hand to discuss the showcased technology. And staff from Sandia’s recruiting department will answer hiring questions.

Sponsors include Sandia Labs, city of Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, Sandia Science & Technology Park and Technology Ventures Corp. Online registration is required. For the agenda, more information and to register visit www.sstp.org/showcase.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Albuquerque Chief Administrative Officer Rob Perry said the city is proud to have been a partner in the Sandia Science & Technology Park. (Photo courtesy of Sandia Science & Technology Park) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

And direct and indirect jobs associated with the research park, which houses private companies and several Sandia National Laboratories facilities, have generated $3.06 billion in wages, a major boost to the local economy, the report said.

Bernalillo County Commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins and city of Albuquerque Chief Administrative Officer Rob Perry announced the report’s findings Tuesday at Ted Hobbs Park in the 300-acre master-planned SS&TP. The report is available at http://www.sstp.org/about-sstp/economic-impact.

“Institutions such as the Sandia Science & Technology Park are instrumental in creating economic stability within the region,” Hart Stebbins said. “Despite the tough economy, the park continues to contribute to our nation through innovation and technology, and to our region through increased local investment, area revitalization and spin-off jobs that provide opportunities to our residents. Bernalillo County is proud to be a partner in this effort.”

Perry said the park “is a great example of regional cooperation for economic development. It is a model that has been celebrated nationally for its innovative approach to regional economic development. The city of Albuquerque is proud to have been an active partner in this important job-creation initiative since its inception.”

MRCOG assessed the research park’s economic impact on the economy from its groundbreaking in May 1998 through the end of 2011. The report also measured the number of Albuquerque-area jobs created in the park, economic activity in the community and wage and salary levels.

“Creative partnerships that represent public and private interests and multiple jurisdictions, like the Sandia Science & Technology Park, are critical to the health of the region,” said Dewey Cave, MRCOG’s executive director.

“The Sandia Science & Technology Park was founded in 1998 as a partnership to promote business growth and facilitate collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL). Since then, the park has provided a remarkable economic boost to New Mexico,” said Sherman McCorkle, chairman of the board of the SS&TP Development Corp. “This public-private partnership is a true testament to the importance of technology commercialization and its important role in job creation.”

The average salary for full-time employees in SS&TP was $74,949 in 2011, nearly 1.8 times higher than that of the average of all full-time employees in the Albuquerque area, according to the report.

“Since park jobs are primarily high technology, mainly engineering and research and development jobs, a high wage rate is associated with them,” McCorkle said.

The park expanded by more than 500 jobs since the last economic impact report was issued in 2009. By the end of 2011, SS&TP was home to about 1,500 private-sector jobs, plus another 1,000 Sandia Labs jobs. Growth in private sector employment within the park is due largely to expansion at Air Products and Emcore Corp. The park’s activities have created an additional 4,123 indirect jobs throughout the regional economy for a total of 6,593 jobs in 2011, according to the report.

Bernalillo County Commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins said the SS&TP has been a vital part of the area's economy. (Photo courtesy of Sandia Science & Technology Park) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Sandia Labs also shifted a number of jobs to the park with the establishment of the Cyber Engineering Research Laboratory and the addition of staff to the Innovation Parkway Office Center. Other Sandia Labs facilities in the park include the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, the International Programs Building and the Computer Science Research Institute.

Public investment since the park was established has been nearly $87 million, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s contribution for the master development plan, Sandia’s management of the park, land from Albuquerque Public Schools and the New Mexico State Land Office, and landfill cleanup by Bernalillo County, the report said. Other federal, state and local government entities also helped the park by providing grants or matching funds, the report said. For example, the U.S. Economic Development Administration provided significant grants for secure fiber-optic communications and security network infrastructure. The city of Albuquerque also contributed to infrastructure improvements in the park.

“As of December 2011, investment in the park has been more than $350 million with 75 percent coming from private sources,” said Jackie Kerby Moore, the park’s executive director and manager of Sandia’s Technology & Economic Development Department.

“Fourteen years ago, this area was nothing but dirt and tumbleweeds, but since then the jobs and investments have led people to invest not just in the park, but in the surrounding area,” she said. “The park has been a catalyst for economic revitalization in southeast Albuquerque.”

The SS&TP is located next to Sandia Labs and Kirtland Air Force Base, giving park companies access to scientists and engineers from Sandia and AFRL. Many park companies supply Sandia and AFRL with goods and services or technological products or have licensed and commercialized technologies that originated at the federal laboratories.

The park received the 2012 State and Local Economic Development Award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium.

The park is a partnership of Sandia, the U.S. Department of Energy, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Technology Ventures Corporation, the City of Albuquerque, Albuquerque Public Schools, Bernalillo County, the Mid-Region Council of Governments, BUILD New Mexico/Union Development Corporation, the New Mexico State Land Office, the state of New Mexico, Public Service Company of New Mexico and the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

For more information about the Sandia Science & Technology Park, visit: www.sstp.org.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Cooper taught explosives safety and technology to about 1,000 people at Sandia over 35 years. He taught hundreds more at private and government facilities nationwide, including the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Schlumberger in Houston, the world’s largest oilfield services provider. His classes always filled up and his reputation grew, both as an internationally recognized explosives engineer and as a teacher.

He taught his final class at Sandia on May 24. Students stuck around and friends stopped by to witness the end of an era. “We are very sad to see him go,” said Belinda Holley, manager of Technical and Compliance Training at Sandia. “He has had a sustained commitment not only to teaching but shaping the explosives training program. He is a rarity when it comes to that level of dedication and passion.”

Paul Cooper built a global reputation as an explosives expert and passed his knowledge to hundreds of Sandia engineers in courses he taught for more than 35 years. “It was fun,” Cooper said. “And I’m proud of what I accomplished.” (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Cooper was a natural in front of a class. He taught with expertise, humor and a dash of irreverence. “If I wasn’t an engineer, I would have been a comedian or actor,” Cooper said. “I feel like a performer when I teach.”

Cooper’s classes remained popular because of the scarcity of formal explosives training in the U.S. Cooper himself learned explosives from “what I read, what I did, who I talked to, and from experience.”

He built a global reputation, searching for nuclear weapons in Iraq and investigating disasters ranging from the explosion of a gun turret on the USS Iowa in 1989 to the crash of TWA Flight 800 over New York in 1996.

Cooper described his career with typical humility. “Along the way, wonderful things happened,” he said. “I was just in the right place at the right time.”

Cooper, a chemical engineering graduate of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, joined Sandia in 1964 after working in explosives at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Armor Research Foundation. “I was like a little kid at IIT. Here was a place where they pay you to go out and blow stuff up,” he said. “That’s how I officially got into the explosives business.”

He worked in explosive components at Sandia until 1977 when he was recruited by the labs’ Underground Nuclear Testing arming and firing group, where he stayed until he retired in January 1997. His work focused on the design of explosive systems.

In 1979, Cooper joined the national Nuclear Emergency Search Team, NEST, an atomic bomb squad of sorts. “If the FBI or somebody got a lead there was a clandestine or homemade atom bomb somewhere, NEST had to locate and disarm it,” Cooper said. “It was very exciting.” Cooper was a NEST member until the mid-1990s.

The USS Iowa gun turret exploded on April 19, 1989, in the Atlantic Ocean, killing 47 crewmen. A Navy investigation concluded a suicidal crew member who died in the blast deliberately caused it. Members of Congress criticized the investigation, and Sandia was asked to review the findings.

The Labs put together a dream team of about two dozen engineers including Cooper. It found evidence that propellants were pushed into the 16-inch gun barrel too fast and too far, hitting the base of the 2,700-pound projectile instead of stopping a foot away as required, setting off an explosion.

Paul Cooper, in a 1990 photo published in the Sandia Lab News on the USS Iowa investigation, explains the half-scale test apparatus used for impact-ignition experiments. (Photo courtesy Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The Sandia report was delivered in dramatic testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Cooper was among those testifying. The Navy reopened the investigation after Sandia concluded the explosion was likely caused by an accidental overram of powder bags into the gun’s breech. The Navy said the cause of the explosion could not be determined and closed the investigation, but withdrew accusations against the dead crew member.

In October 1991, following Operation Desert Storm, Cooper was named to a United Nations/International Atomic Energy Agency inspection team sent to Iraq to look for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. “In early October, the Iraqis denied having a nuclear program,” Cooper said. “When we left at the end of October, they declared officially they had a nuclear program. It was a pivotal team and a critical turning point.”

A year and a half later, the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, burned down at the end of a 51-day siege involving the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the FBI, and sect leader David Koresh. Seventy-five people died in the fire, including Koresh. Cooper was named to a presidential commission that investigated ATF and FBI actions after surviving Branch Davidians alleged the FBI started the fire.

“We determined that the Davidians were making explosive devices and set the fire in bales of hay,” Cooper said. “The ATF and FBI acted legally and within normal procedures.”

Cooper also was called upon by the state of Oklahoma to look at technical evidence in the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.

“It was two years after the actual bombing, so I went through tons of files and studied photos of broken windows, overturned cars and the crater. Those are passive pressure gauges that give insight into the explosives,” Cooper said. “I was able to closely match the amount of explosive material McVeigh and Nichols had bought in Kansas and Texas with the damage. That calculation had not previously been done and was used in the state trial.”

Cooper helped investigate the July 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island, N.Y., that killed all 230 people on board. The complex, four-year inquiry concluded the probable cause of the accident was an explosion of flammable fuel and air vapors in a fuel tank, most likely due to a short circuit.

“When I got there, the plane’s pieces were being reassembled and I could walk through the fuel tank,” Cooper said. “I looked around and could see where it started and where it detonated.” His calculations became part of the final report.

He did other accident and criminal investigative work for outside agencies, particularly the FBI. He said his field experience improved his explosives classes at Sandia, and teaching made him a better engineer. “The more I talked the more I learned,” he said. “What I learned in setting up and doing those classes I applied to my work, which got better and better.”

Cooper’s class notes turned into a book, “Explosives Engineering,” begun in 1982 and published in 1996. It remains the definitive text on explosives, used in university and industrial engineering programs worldwide.

“We owe a great debt of gratitude to individuals like Paul Cooper who not only excel in their chosen professional field but also put forward the time and effort to pass along their skills and knowledge to others who will follow in their footsteps,” said David Keese, director of Sandia’s Integrated Military Systems Center.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Cyber Security Technology, Policy, Law, and Planning for an Uncertain Future, which followed last year’s institute on energy technology and policy, focused on cyber law, policy, information sharing and other cyber-related issues. Three mentors led the students through a robust series of high-level talks, discussions and workshops from Aug. 5-10.

“Having worked in cyberdefense for many years and with multiple federal government customers, Sandia is well-versed in the deep technical questions and tools being developed to counter the cyber terrorism threat,” explained Susanna Gordon, manager of the systems analytics department in Sandia’s computer sciences and information systems center. “We’re now developing an interdisciplinary approach to cybersecurity to complement that technical expertise, hence our decision to include policy, law and planning, as well as technology in this institute.”

Participating students included those pursuing advanced studies in computer science, law, public policy and other disciplines. In addition to a strategic planning exercise, students chose one of the following focus areas:

• Assured Sharing: Post-WikiLeaks Era Tensions in National-Security Information Sharing and Safeguarding
• Public-Private Sector Responsibilities and Legal Issues in Our Nation’s Cyber Defense
• Trusted Digital Systems Designed with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

“It was an amazing experience,” said James MacAulay, a Syracuse University student who is pursuing graduate degrees in Public Administration and Telecommunications and Network Management. “I came away with some amazing insight and ideas into the subject matter. The speakers and mentors were top notch and had great wisdom and insight.”

Institute organizers hope the experience will help persuade the students to consider careers focused on improving US cybersecurity, including future employment at or collaboration with Sandia.

“We’d love to have some of the students return to Sandia as employees, so exposing them to our laboratory and to the cyber work we’re engaged in was an important objective,” said Gordon. “But even beyond that, we generally are interested in helping students to learn about national security and motivating them to look into our nation’s defense as a potential career path.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

The new, independent report shows SS&TP has benefitted the local economy for more than a decade through job creation, increases in state and local tax revenues and higher-than-average wages for its employees when compared with the average wage in the metro area.

Dewey Cave, executive director of MRCOG, will talk about the economic impact assessment.

The Sandia Science & Technology Park has been a consistent contributor to the Albuquerque economy for more than a decade. (Photo courtesy of Sandia Science & Technology Park) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Steve Rottler, Sandia’s chief technology officer and vice president of science and technology, will discuss Sandia’s relationship with the park. Jackie Kerby Moore, the park’s executive director, and Sherman McCorkle, chairman of the board of directors for the SS&TP Development Corp., also will be available to speak with reporters.

MRCOG assessed the research park’s economic impact from its creation in May 1998 through the end of 2011. The report measures the number of jobs created in the Albuquerque area as a result of the park, state and local tax revenues, spending in the community and wage and salary levels.

The award-winning SS&TP is a 300-acre master-planned research park located next to Sandia National Laboratories, giving the park’s companies and organizations access to Sandia’s scientists and engineers. Many park companies either supply Sandia with goods and services or technological products or have licensed and commercialized technologies that originated at the national laboratory.

The park received the 2012 State and Local Economic Development Award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium.

Several Sandia Labs facilities are located in the park, including the Center for Integrated Nanotechnology, the Cyber Engineering Research Lab, the International Programs Building, the Computer Science and Research Institute and the Innovation Parkway Office Center.

The park is a partnership of Sandia, the U.S. Department of Energy, Lockheed Martin Corp., Technology Ventures Corp., the city of Albuquerque, Albuquerque Public Schools, Bernalillo County, the Mid-Region Council of Governments, BUILD New Mexico/Union Development Corp., the New Mexico State Land Office, the state of New Mexico, Public Service Company of New Mexico and the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Principal investigator Curt Salisbury developed an affordable robotic hand that is dexterous enough to mimic the capabilities of the human hand. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The Sandia Hand addresses challenges that have prevented widespread adoption of other robotic hands, such as cost, durability, dexterity and modularity.

“Current iterations of robotic hands can cost more than $250,000. We need the flexibility and capability of a robotic hand to save human lives, and it needs to be priced for wide distribution to troops,” said Sandia senior manager Philip Heermann.

The Sandia Hand project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Principal investigator Curt Salisbury said the goal was to build a capable but affordable robotic system.

“Hands are considered the most difficult part of the robotic system, and are also the least available due to the need for high dexterity at a low cost,” Salisbury said.

The Sandia Hand is modular, so different types of fingers can be attached with magnets and quickly plugged into the hand frame. The operator has the flexibility to quickly and easily attach additional fingers or other tools, such as flashlights, screwdrivers or cameras. Modularity also gives the Sandia Hand a unique durability. The fingers are designed to fall off should the operator accidentally run the hand into a wall or another object.

“Rather than breaking the hand, this configuration allows the user to recover very quickly, and fingers can easily be put back in their sockets,” Salisbury said. “In addition, if a finger pops off, the robot can actually pick it up with the remaining fingers, move into position and resocket the finger by itself.”

The operator controls the robot with a glove, and the lifelike design allows even first-time users to manipulate the robot easily. The robot’s tough outer skin covers a gel-like layer to mimic human tissue, giving the Sandia Hand the additional advantage of securely grabbing and manipulating objects, like a human hand.

Using Sandia’s robotic hand to disable IEDs also might lead investigators to the bomb makers themselves. Often, bombs are disarmed simply by blowing them up. While effective, that destroys evidence and presents a challenge to investigators trying to catch the bomb maker. A robotic hand that can handle the delicate disarming operation while preserving the evidence could lead to more arrests, and fewer bombs.

The Sandia Hand addresses challenges that have prevented widespread adoption of other robotic hands, including cost, durability, dexterity and modularity. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Sandia partnered with researchers at Stanford University to develop the hardware and worked with consulting firm LUNAR to drive costs down drastically. In current commercially available robotic hands, each independently actuated degree of freedom costs roughly $10,000.

“The Sandia Hand has 12 degrees of freedom, and is estimated to retail for about $800 per degree of freedom — $10,000 total — in low-volume production. This 90 percent cost reduction is really a breakthrough,” said Salisbury. Additionally, because much of the technology resides in the individual finger modules, hands with custom numbers and arrangements of fingers will be quite affordable.

“At this price point, the Sandia Hand has the potential to be a disruptive technology,” added Heermann. “Computers, calculators and cell phones became part of daily life and drastically changed how we do things when the price became affordable. This hand has the same potential, especially given that high-volume production can further reduce the cost.”

DARPA is funding a separate software effort in a parallel track to the hardware work.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Hobby, shobby@sandia.gov, (505) 280-3905

He was the eighth invited speaker for Sandia’s Climate Change and National Security Speaker Series.

The difficulties in using science to push for mitigation strategies are more political than scientific, Jacoby said, a fitting view perhaps for the director of the social sciences component of the Joint Program’s Integrated Global System Model. He mentioned examples that stretched from the dead end reached by the Kyoto protocols, signed by President Bill Clinton but never submitted to Congress for ratification, to the Heartland Institute’s startling Chicago billboard featuring the face of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski accompanied by the words, “I believe in climate change. Do you?”

Although Jacoby thinks climate discussion “has become toxic in U.S. political discourse,” he is part of a comprehensive effort that integrates MIT’s departments of earth, atmospheric and planetary science, economics and several engineering departments with the Sloan School of Management and the MIT Energy Initiative to gain a wide perspective on the complicated problem of Earth’s climate and what it is doing, he said.

“The motivation to integrate the disciplines was because they were ‘stovepiped’ and didn’t talk to each other,” Jacoby said. The joint cooperative research structure is funded about 60 percent by government grants and the rest by a group of 40 industries and foundations.

He cited a familiar list of problems either caused by or expected soon to be caused by climate change. These include risk to coastal infrastructure and water resources, increased storm intensity and rises in sea level and overall temperatures. However, his group’s global systems model adds an analysis of effects on gross domestic product, energy use and agricultural and health impacts, because “humans are part of Earth’s system, maybe the most important part now,” he told his audience in late May.

To more quickly handle problems appearing in the rapidly proliferating data, he wants to develop “an apparatus that can do uncertainty analysis in 30 hours, not 30 days,” he said.

“We’re facing larger and larger risks: We can mitigate, adapt or suffer,” Jacoby said.

But the real questions and solutions lie in “the complexity of cross-cultural dialogue between science and politics,” he said.

 “A lot of the opposition to climate change is not about science at all, but the role of government in society,” he said.

While New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a team of 20 people working out adaptations that would counter “a severe possible (ocean) surge in the Bowery (the lowest part of Manhattan), there’s not enough planning that could be adopted nationally, “though such work intersects with Sandia’s interest in infrastructure security,” Jacoby said.

To change the nation’s  economic basis to address climate change, he suggested taxing the production of carbon dioxide, “the greatest source of overall temperature rise.”

The alternative is the piecemeal way the country is going, he said. “We can’t handle the issue nationally so we do it individually: cash for clunkers, restrictions on utilities. It all adds up but is more expensive and less effective than a national program. We’re just chipping away.”

The Climate Security lecture series is funded by Sandia’s Energy, Climate and Infrastructure Security Strategic Management Unit and hosted by Rob Leland, director of Computing Research and of Sandia’s Climate Security Program.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

BARROW, Alaska — Sandia National Laboratories’ researcher Mark Ivey and I (science writer Neal Singer)  are standing on the tundra at an outpost of science at the northernmost point of the North American continent. We are five miles northeast of Barrow, an Alaskan village unreachable by roads, 320 miles north of the Arctic Circle and a mile south of the Arctic Ocean.

It is late spring, the ice breaking up and the snow melting around us, and Ivey — manager for Sandia of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) climate research facility at Barrow — is waiting with me for the automated release of a weather balloon in two minutes, at 9:31 a.m.

WE HAVE LIFT-OFF — Sandia National Laboratories station manager Mark Ivey indicates the path of a helium-filled weather balloon as it floats rapidly up from its cradle. The facility is part of DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) climate research program. (Photo by Neal Singer) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The balloon, to be launched from the balcony of a metal-and-glass test facility about the size of a mobile home, is expected to measure the Arctic atmosphere’s temperature, humidity and wind speeds at a rapid succession of altitudes as it rises. The tests are part of an ongoing effort to depict the structure of the atmosphere — an interesting concept to a layman — and the formation and elevation of its clouds. Imprecisions in both these areas cause disputes about the accuracies of global climate models, which need the kind of hard data provided by this facility for the most accurate results.

To this end, the launch facility inflates and releases two balloons every day, automatically, one at 9:31 a.m. and another at 9:31 p.m.

“We used to have our Barrow assistants come out here twice a day and fill a balloon with helium and let it go,” Ivey tells me from the balcony as he checks the canisters used to fill each balloon. “This automated setup is much easier on everyone.”

The time- and location-stamped data — collected every 10 seconds as the balloon soars upward — will be radioed to a receiving antenna at the test facility, and from there electronically to the ARM central Alaskan facility — an unpretentious one-story duplex a few miles away in Barrow. Along with other data collected at the wind-swept, often snowed-in research site, which operates under the aegis of DOE’s Office of Science, the information also helps calibrate satellite measurements of Earth’s atmosphere, providing reality checks to the remote sensor inputs received from space orbit. These inputs are electronic zeroes and ones to which human beings assign meanings. Atmospheric measurements secured and analyzed, on the other hand, provide hard data against which satellite observations can be calibrated, improving their accuracy and reducing another possible source of error in climate computer models.

I am kneeling on one knee with my camera ready, my pants leg soaked in permafrost, about 12 feet below the deck where Ivey is standing. The balloon should bolt out of its chamber at 5 meters per second — “It pops up and goes pretty fast,” Ivey had warned — and there would be no do-overs until 12 hours later if I miss its emergence..

Two metal petals of the machine’s business end had opened a few minutes earlier like a huge mechanical rose, indicating its sensors had determined wind speeds were low enough for a balloon launch. At 9:31 a.m., the remaining two petals should open, releasing its 3-foot diameter, helium-filled balloon.

A mile or so distant, the white radar domes of the U.S. Air Force’s Point Barrow Long Range Station are watching for planes or missiles on their way over the North Pole, some 1,300 miles to the north. A DOE radar dome and several slender, heavily instrumented towers stand nearby, also managed by Ivey, taking moment-by-moment data from a variety of ground- or tower-based sensors on humidity, methane, carbon dioxide, wind velocity, ground infrared (heat) emissions and microwave energy from the sky, all transmitted electronically to a computer. Nearby, sensors in facilities run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and by the U.S. Geological Survey gather complementary geophysical data that includes precise measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field and concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“People had mentioned to me that they thought our operation would fade away,” Ivey had said in his reflective, soft-spoken way. “But because of the quality of the data and its ability to provide information about important topics in a trustworthy way, funding has actually increased. The program could be around for a long time to come.”

That is, of course, if Ivey and his colleagues can continue balancing the interests of federal and state agencies and the native corporation that manages land in and around Barrow. One of Ivey’s pressing tasks when I visited was to finalize agreements in the community for living quarters and meeting space for the scientists who come from elsewhere to do technical work. But lease prices could rise dramatically with an influx of workers if off-shore oil drilling commences north of Barrow. And uncertain economic times have sent mixed messages to the electrical co-op about where to install new utility lines needed for the scientific effort.

The scope of the human, technical and regulatory problems facing Ivey as ARM representative reminded me of a statement Sandia’s president is fond of making: “Sandia doesn’t do easy,” Paul Hommert has said, “Sandia does hard.”

That certainly seems the case here.

*     *     *

The balloon site’s data streams are available electronically to labs and modelers around the world interested in honing their computer simulations with exact ongoing information on the Arctic climate, thought to be a precursor and influencer of the rest of the slower-responding world. Among the reasons for this sensitivity are the clear window to space for outgoing radiation provided by the very dry atmosphere and the expansion or contraction of the polar ice sheet. The latter causes large changes in surface sunlight reflectivity and regulates how much solar energy is absorbed by the darker ocean water. In addition, trends measured in the extent of Arctic ice indicate the Arctic  likely will be ice-free in summer within the next few decades. At what rate is the extreme north’s climate warming, and why? Up here in permafrost land is the data that may help decide these issues.

Instrument shelters and a new radar are part of the ARM facility near Barrow, Alaska. (Photo by Neal Singer) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Among the site’s findings to date has been that the Arctic’s very cold clouds fill with supercooled liquids rather than ice particles. This difference has a big impact on the amount of heat entering or leaving Earth’s surface, said Hans Verlinde, a meteorology professor at Penn State and site scientist for the Barrow ARM program. In the Arctic, where clouds help warm Earth’s surface instead of cooling it, they do this more effectively with liquid in the clouds instead of solids, an important clarification for climate models.

Information like this is so desirable that the Office of Science has allocated additional funding during the next two years through its Biological Environmental Research (BER) arm to build new facilities and buy equipment for another ARM site. Also to be managed by Sandia, it will be constructed 166 miles away at Oliktok Point, a spit of land that borders directly on the Arctic Ocean. The property is owned by the Air Force, which has been required by federal mandate to reduce its landholdings in Alaska. Part of its station may be transferred to other federal agencies, the State of Alaska or a native corporation. The idea from the scientists comprising the Barrow ARM group is to install a ground station of four prefabricated buildings and stock it with Doppler and high spectral resolution lidars, radar, and radiometers, along with meteorological equipment and other sensors. More important, an abandoned Air Force hangar a hundred yards away would shelter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), probably to be owned by a university in collaboration with the Office of Science. These would be expected to fly through air space almost empty of civilian or military traffic from Oliktok Point to the North Pole, about 1,400 miles away, for additional atmospheric data collection.

“Routine measurements of the Arctic atmosphere would be very valuable in understanding it,” Ivey said, “and the ground station would be helpful in understanding cloud processes. But UAVs and balloons are ways to get at atmospheric structure that currently are poorly represented in our models.”

Oliktok Point has another advantage: It’s on a major north-south road (the “haul road” used by ice truckers on a popular reality TV show) that ends in the assorted collection of workaday buildings known as Deadhorse, an entrance point to Prudhoe Bay oil rigs. The flat, primitive  peninsula that ends at Oliktok Point is eerily dotted with enormous facilities built every few miles by oil companies. The companies require personnel and heavy equipment brought in year-round to process oil to put into pipelines that send the precious liquid south.

Though Barrow is a real community, unlike the expanded truck-stop facilities that comprise Deadhorse, one of its limitations is that equipment, materials, fuel and food arrive by barge from Seattle only once a year, though smaller items can be flown in.

The existence of the Oliktok station depends on Ivey’s ability to get the Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Inupiats, federal and state land offices and the oil companies of the Prudhoe peninsula to agree. He needs power lines and building leases from the native corporation that oversees Barrow, site licenses from government organizations, Air Force permissions and oil company concurrence for access to the road system in Prudhoe Bay. Finally, the land may have been polluted by previous users; if ARM purchases it, or  just takes it over with the Air Force’s blessings, who is responsible for cleanup?

“What do you do when you clean up one year and next year something else leaks out?” said engineer Jerry Peace, a member of Sandia’s North Slope team. “Residual pollution requires ongoing inspections.”

“It was enlightening to see the complicated maze that must be negotiated to create the new Oliktok Point site and UAV capability,” said Sandia’s Marianne Walck during a visit that included Rick Stulen, Sandia’s vice president for its California lab, and Rob Leland, director of Sandia’s Computing Research Center and of its Climate Security program. Walck, who directs the Geoscience, Climate and Consequence Effects Center, added, “We’re working on ideas on how to find funding so we can increase the scientific impact from our activities there.”

How did Ivey, an electrical engineer by training, develop these negotiating, managerial, and leadership skills? Ivey, who speaks slowly, shrugged and smiled. “I’m a lucky participant and partner in science,” he said quietly.

Thus far, Ivey’s continuous low-key negotiations have been successful in moving the work forward at Barrow and Oliktok Point.

“The work on the North Slope is producing uniquely important measurements that will enable vast improvements in today’s evolving climate models,” said Stulen. “There will be increased confidence in model accuracy in predicting the actions of nature.”

Stulen also was impressed by the petroleum industry. “I was really taken by the enormous oil industry infrastructure in Prudhoe Bay and the Alaska pipeline that provides for something like fifteen percent of U.S. petroleum – quite an engineering feat!”

Leland said, “What stood out for me most is the enormity of the scientific opportunity in the Arctic. Researchers believe that the effects of climate change are amplified substantially in the arctic, and yet comparatively little is known about the specifics. By combining the data coming from our ARM program with satellite data and the proposed UAV data with the new generation of high-resolution climate models we are developing, it should be possible to greatly advance our understanding of what is really happening there.

“There are a host of critical national security issues at stake in the Arctic — new shipping routes, new access to resources, new operational demands on the military to name a few — and you get a sense of the significance of the opportunity. We are just now developing our ability to work across that entire spectrum, and of course we need to do that in close partnership with many other agencies and institutions, but the prospect of Sandia being centrally engaged in addressing the Arctic challenge is just tremendously exciting to me.”

One factor that could help forward Sandia’s arctic research are the facilities and personnel at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Sandia’s Jerry Peace — whose master’s in geophysics from U of A in 1979 included being treed by a grizzly when he went looking for mineral deposits on an industry-sponsored summer project — said, “The U of A’s Geophysical Institute, established by Congress in 1946, studies a spectrum of geophysical processes ranging from the center of the earth to the center of the sun. It has an international reputation for studying the physical environment of the Arctic. Partnering with them could be useful in furthering our state and national needs.”

*                                             *                                *

The balloon-launch station is a robotic marvel. Twenty-four balloons at a time can be stacked on a conveyor belt. A half-hour before lift-off, the lead balloon is automatically chambered and inflated by the helium-filled canisters.

But by 9:36 a.m., no balloon has emerged. “Something’s wrong,” said Ivey, and we drive the few miles back to the one-story building housing the project’s headquarters. There, Jimmy Ivanoff, hired as a technical aide from the Inupiat native corporation that runs Barrow, looks at the data in the duplex’s office and erupts, “Darn, that thing has worked without a flaw for months. On the day we have a visitor, it fails!”

The Arctic Ocean near Barrow in late June 2012. (Photo by Neal Singer) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

A balloon apparently was not loaded in the chamber casing. The chamber’s sensors, detecting the absence, prevented the structure from opening and essentially shooting a blank.

“Fortunately, experts from the vendor are on their way here,” Ivey said. “At least once or twice a year we bring someone here from there to check it out.”

I remember what Ivey told me before we left: “It’s Alaska. Expect delays and keep your sense of humor.”

I have one more chance to photograph the rising balloon before leaving early the next morning. Because it’s late spring in Alaska, the sun won’t set tonight. I look at Jimmy poker-faced and say, “As long as you can fix the problem before nightfall, we can try again.

He looks at me, as does the Inupiat station manager WalterBrower, to see if I am kidding. “I guess I can,” Jimmy said finally, “seeing as how it won’t be dark for weeks.” We all laugh.

That evening, promptly at 9:31 — my last photo opportunity before leaving Alaska — the balloon takes off like a sprinter. I have to estimate when to press the shutter button, because it takes almost two seconds for my camera to agree to snap a highly pixellated shot. I acheive the image, but with the balloon not quite fully airborne.

Nothing about any of this seems easy.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

Bonnie Apodaca, Sandia's new VP of Business Operations and CFO, joined the Labs in 1988 and has held a variety of management positions. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Bonnie Apodaca is the new vice president of Business Operations and chief financial officer at Sandia National Laboratories.

“I am confident that her contributions will move Sandia forward, improve our business efficiencies and ensure continued excellence in mission support,” said Kim Sawyer, Sandia’s deputy laboratories director and executive vice president for Mission Support.

Apodaca started at Sandia in 1988 as a contract auditor and in 1991 was promoted to manager of the business office for the Satellite Center and Non-proliferation program. She served from 1998 to 2005 as controller and director of Sandia’s Pension Management Center. She went on to become director of the Supply Chain Management Center and, for the past four years, director of the Business Management Operations Center.

Before joining Sandia, Apodaca was the controller for private companies in Albuquerque and Colorado Springs, Colo. She has a Bachelor of Science in accounting from the University of Colorado and a Master of Business Administration from the University of New Mexico. She became a certified public accountant in 1985.

Apodaca is a member of the Central New Mexico Community College Accounting Advisory Board, an alumna of Leadership New Mexico, a member of the Rio Grande Chapter of Blue Star Mothers, and an adviser to the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

Sandia researcher Jeff Tsao and colleagues have published a follow-up paper in the journal Energy Policy regarding the productivity gains to be realized with LED lighting. The paper came after an initial article published in 2010 was misinterpreted in some media outlets. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

In an article in the journal Energy Policy, Sandia researcher Jeff Tsao and Harry Saunders of The Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., predicted in 2010 that the same phenomenon might apply to light-emitting diodes (LEDs), poised to take over from the Edison light bulb as the next, more efficient light source of choice.

But their main point, as three centuries have shown, was that increased light availability leads to increased productivity. Workers are no longer forced to stop shortly after nightfall, as they had in primitive, candle-illuminated huts, but instead could continue producing through the night in homes, offices, factories, and even at outdoor locations not serviced by power lines.

The original paper, titled “Solid-state lighting: an energy-economics perspective,”  drew attention to the increased productivity made possible by better lighting, rather than societal energy-savings mistakenly cited as a feature of improved lighting technologies.

Misinterpretations of the original paper by two widely read international media outlets led to the confusion that Tsao and his co-authors had shown that lighting efficiency improvements were no improvements at all. This is because reductions in neither overall energy usage nor overall lighting costs would occur.

The researchers, in the upcoming article, titled “Rebound effects for lighting,” said the 2010 article generated both interest and confusion in the popular press and in the blogosphere. “This communication seeks to clarify some of this confusion for the particular benefit of energy economists and energy policy specialists,” they wrote.

The new article appears under “Articles in Press” on the Energy Policy website.

“We were motivated to publish something, even if short, in Energy Policy, because that journal serves a community very different from that served by the Journal of Physics, where our original article was published,” Tsao says. “We thought that many in the energy economics community were still unaware of the work, and of the benefit — even when there is no direct energy-use savings — of energy efficiency and other welfare-enhancing technologies.”

Other authors of the 2010 article included Sandia researchers Mike Coltrin, Jerry Simmons and Randy Creighton (retired). Harry Saunders is also associated with Decision Processes Inc. in Danville, Calif.

The work was supported by Sandia’s Solid-State Lighting Science Energy Frontier Research Center, which is funded by DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

The gritty material is part of a study Sandia is doing under a three-year contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, with funding from NASA.

Sylvia Gomez-Vasquez and Walt Gill, both of Sandia’s Fire & Aerosol Sciences Department, posing in the burn chamber in Coyote Canyon, demonstrate the early stages of sample analysis of crusty pieces of burned debris such as might occur after a rocket propellant fire. Sandia signed a three-year contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, with funding from NASA, for a propellant fire modeling project. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The propellant fire modeling project began in February and expands beyond the risk analyses Sandia already does for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). A presidential directive requires the DOE to assess the risk to the public of launching NASA space missions that carry radioactive material used to make thermoelectrical power. The DOE contracts with Sandia for those assessments.

A propellant fire is one of the major risks in launching space missions with radioactive material, said Ron Lipinski, Sandia team leader for the risk analysis.

Lipinski’s team needs information to assess overall risks. This year JPL teamed with Sandia’s fire sciences group to provide technical information on propellant fires for a report on potential accidents that could occur during launch. JPL is managing the activity.

Gill said the key to Sandia’s contribution is advanced computer modeling focused on characteristics of propellant fires.

“It would be a combination of experimental data and model results that would work together to give them the information they need,” he said.

The report, termed a databook, becomes the foundation for assessing risk. “Sandia is able to use our broad range of expertise, from experiments with various environments to modeling to our risk analysis process and safety analysis,” Lipinski said.

The work builds on tools the Labs created in nuclear weapons programs, including data from propellant fires it has studied since the 1970s, Gill said. “What Sandia has contributed that’s original into this whole mix is the idea of putting test data together with multi-physics high-fidelity models and looking at them as one piece,” he said.

Coupling experimental data with high-fidelity modeling in the databook hasn’t been tried before, so researchers in the Labs’ Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycle Technologies Department are building an interface between Sandia’s physics-based computational model of a fire environment and DOE’s radiological response model.

The interface is one of three parts of the project. The team also will update the computer model and add features to predict how things will behave in a propellant fire, then develop experimental data to validate the model. Tests will be done in the contract’s final year.

“That’s what sets Sandia apart,” Gill said. “We model, predict, experiment, compare. The Sandia way is we make the model first. … It’s like the scientific method; you come up with a hypothesis and test it.”

The complexity of this particular problem is increased by the makeup of rocket propellant, which has an oxidizer, a rubber binder and aluminum powder for fuel. Under conditions representing a launch accident, aluminum powder burns slowly, melts on the surface of the propellant and is lofted up into the flame, where it burns like droplets and leaves gritty deposits on everything, Gill said.

The risk assessment examines the chemical makeup of the deposit and the temperatures in its layers, Gill said, hefting a large clear plastic bag of ashy-looking chunks. “This stuff comes from the aluminum that is burning in the flame. It hits the surface, goes out. It becomes really thick.”

Sandia is improving its overall model by focusing on models for the droplets and the coating’s chemical makeup.

It’s one thing to study a single aluminum droplet — there are numerous technical papers on that — but it’s another to study it in the complex physics of a propellant fire, said Anay Luketa of Fire & Aerosol Sciences.

“It’s very hard in a real propellant environment to capture the true dynamic behavior experimentally,” said Luketa, who has been studying a code called Rocstar, developed by the University of Illinois under a DOE-funded Advanced Simulation & Computing program. She’ll spend much of the summer seeing if Rocstar will meet the project’s needs. Sandia also has its own fire modeling code: Fuego, Spanish for fire. Gill said the team wants to run both programs and compare them.

The team can base its study of how the materials respond on current weapons work involving melting and burning aluminum, Gill said.

Sandia researcher Bill Erikson said the model has to capture convection, or the flow of hot gases over a surface; thermal radiation transfer; and the thermal loading associated with accumulating grit with its varying particle sizes and distribution.

Burning aluminum particles are extremely hot, reaching about 4,940 degrees Fahrenheit or more, Erikson said. As they radiate out, countless tiny, very hot particles slam into surfaces, leaving the gritty chemical buildup.

Sandia researchers have designed models for the heat transfer occurring with the deposition, and they’ve added changeable properties to account for growing deposit layers, Erikson said. Still, he said, the models don’t yet capture such things as chemical reactions where molten aluminum hits other surfaces.

Eventually, the team’s work will be added to large codes. “It’s one thing to understand; it’s another thing to make them predict something,” Gill said. “This is the result of a lot of work by a lot of people to give us these big machines and these big models.”

The team will validate the model by putting all the pieces together, such as through an accident scenario.

“You do the calculation, predict what it’s going to do and then you do the experiment and see if that’s what happened. You put everything in there, not just one part,” Gill said. “So these experiments can get large and complex. It might take six months to set up and a minute to do it.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

Basing their work on decades of wind energy research and experience, Sandia engineers are creating several concept designs, running those designs through modern modeling software and narrowing those design options down to a single, most-workable design for a VAWT turbine-blade. Results aren’t in, but the early favorite for further testing is the Darrieus design. (Illustration by Josh Paquette and Matt Barone). Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Though VAWTs have been around since the earliest days of wind energy research at Sandia and elsewhere, VAWT architecture could transform offshore wind technology.

The economics of offshore windpower are different from land-based turbines, due to installation and operational challenges. VAWTs offer three big advantages that could reduce the cost of wind energy: a lower turbine center of gravity; reduced machine complexity; and better scalability to very large sizes.

A lower center of gravity means improved stability afloat and lower gravitational fatigue loads.

Additionally, the drivetrain on a VAWT is at or near the surface, potentially making maintenance easier and less time-consuming. Fewer parts, lower fatigue loads and simpler maintenance all lead to reduced maintenance costs.

Elegant in their simplicity

Sandia is conducting the research under a 2011 Department of Energy (DOE) solicitation for advanced rotor technologies for U.S. offshore windpower generation. The five-year, $4.1 million project began in January of this year.

Wind Energy Technologies manager Dave Minster said Sandia’s wind energy program is aimed at addressing the national energy challenge of increasing the use of low-carbon power generation.

“VAWTs are elegant in terms of their mechanical simplicity,” said Josh Paquette, one of Sandia’s two principal investigators on the project. “They have fewer parts because they don’t need a control system to point them toward the blowing wind to generate power.”

These characteristics fit the design constraints for offshore wind: the high cost of support structures; the need for simple, reliable designs; and economic scales that demand larger machines than current land-based designs.

Large offshore VAWT blades in excess of 300 meters will cost more to produce than blades for onshore wind turbines. But as the machines and their foundations get bigger — closer to the 10–20 megawatt (MW) scale — turbines and rotors become a much smaller percentage of the overall system cost for offshore turbines, so other benefits of the VAWT architecture could more than offset the increased rotor cost.

Challenges remain

However, challenges remain before VAWTs can be used for large-scale offshore power generation.

Curved VAWT blades are complex, making manufacture difficult. Producing very long VAWT blades demands innovative engineering solutions. Matt Barone, the project’s other principal investigator, said partners Iowa State University and TPI Composites will explore new techniques to enable manufacture of geometrically complex VAWT blade shapes at an unprecedented scale, but at acceptable cost.

VAWT blades must also overcome problems with cyclic loading on the drivetrain. Unlike horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs), which maintain a steady torque if the wind remains steady, VAWTs have two “pulses” of torque and power for each blade, based on whether the blade is in the upwind or downwind position. This “torque ripple” results in unsteady loading, which can lead to drivetrain fatigue. The project will evaluate new rotor designs that smooth out the amplitude of these torque oscillations without significantly increasing rotor cost.

Because first-generation VAWT development ended decades ago, updated designs must incorporate decades of research and development already built into current HAWT designs. Reinvigorating VAWT research means figuring out the models that will help speed up turbine design work.

“Underpinning this research effort will be a tool development effort that will synthesize and enhance existing aerodynamic and structural dynamic codes to create a publicly available aeroelastic design tool for VAWTs,” Barone said.

Needed: aerodynamic braking

Another challenge is brakes. Older VAWT designs didn’t have an aerodynamic braking system, and relied solely on a mechanical braking system that is more difficult to maintain and less reliable than the aerodynamic brakes used on HAWTs.

HAWTS use pitchable blades, which stop the turbine within one or two rotations without damage to the turbine and are based on multiple redundant, fail-safe designs. Barone said new VAWT designs will need robust aerodynamic brakes that are reliable and cost-effective, with a secondary mechanical brake much like on modern-day HAWTs. Unlike HAWT brakes, new VAWT brakes won’t have actively pitching blades, which have their own reliability and maintenance issues.

VAWT technology: A long history at Sandia

A Sandia team completes installation in the late 1980s of a vertical axis wind turbine test platform in Bushland, Texas. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when wind energy research was in its infancy, VAWTs were actively developed as windpower generators. Although strange looking, they had a lot going for them: They were simpler than their horizontal-axis cousins so they tended to be more reliable. For a while, VAWTs held their own against HAWTs. But then wind turbines scaled up.

“HAWTs emerged as the predominant technology for land-based wind over the past 15 years primarily due to advantages in rotor costs at the 1 to 5 megawatt scale,” Paquette said.

In the 1980s, research focused more heavily on HAWT turbines, and many VAWT manufacturers left the business, consigning VAWTs to an “also ran” in the wind energy museum.

But the winds of change have blown VAWTs’ way once more.

Sandia is mining the richness of its wind energy history. Wind researchers who were among the original wind energy engineers are going through decades of Sandia research and compiling the lessons learned, as well as identifying some of the key unknowns described at the end of VAWT research at Sandia in the 1990s.

The first phase of the program will take place over two years and will involve creating several concept designs, running those designs through modern modeling software and narrowing those design options down to a single, most-workable design. During this phase, Paquette, Barone and their colleagues will look at all types of aeroelastic rotor designs, including HVAWTs and V-shaped VAWTs. But the early favorite rotor type is the Darrieus design.

In phase two researchers will build the chosen design over three years, eventually testing it against the extreme conditions that a turbine must endure in an offshore environment.

In addition to rotor designs, the project will consider different foundation designs: Early candidates are barge designs, tension-leg platforms and spar buoys.

The project partners will work on many elements.

Another partner, the University of Maine, will develop floating VAWT platform dynamics code and subscale prototype wind/wave basin testing. Iowa State University will develop manufacturing techniques for offshore VAWT blades and subscale wind tunnel testing. TPI Composites will design a proof-of-concept subscale blade and develop a commercialization plan. TU-Delft will work on aeroelastic design and optimization tool development and modeling. Texas A&M University will work on aeroelastic design tool development.

“Ultimately it’s all about the cost of energy. All these decisions need to lead to a design that’s efficient and economically viable,” said Paquette.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

For more information on Sandia National Laboratories’ energy work, see the Energy, Climate, & Infrastructure Security website  http://energy.sandia.gov/.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Holinka, slholin@sandia.gov, (505) 284-9227

Sandia researcher Stan Atcitty was recognized for advances in power electronics. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Dan was nominated by DOE’s Office of Science “for developing innovative techniques to study the properties of instabilities in magnetized-high-energy-density plasma, enabling quantifiable comparison between experiment and simulation needed for validating cutting-edge radiation-hydrodynamics codes, and for demonstrating substantial leadership qualities in high-energy-density-laboratory-plasma physics.”

In 2011, Dan was awarded a DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program award of $2.5 million over a five-year period for measuring fundamental instabilities in magnetically driven Z-pinch explosions.

Dan’s team was the first to capture, in a series of images separated by nanoseconds, the undesirable but apparently unavoidable appearance of a damaging instability (called Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor, or MRT) in Z-pinch magnetic fields, otherwise known to create conditions that fuse atoms for possible electrical energy generation.

Steve Rottler, Sandia’s Chief Technology Officer, said, “I want to congratulate Stan and Dan on behalf of their many Sandia colleagues. The body of work for which each is being recognized represents an important contribution to the mission of our Laboratories and an advancement at the frontiers of science and engineering.”

The Pecase awards were established in 1996 and are administered by eleven federal agencies. In addition to  DOE’s Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, other nominating agencies are the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and the Smithsonian Institution.

The awards will be presented at a White House ceremony on July 31.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Stephanie Holinka, slholin@sandia.gov, 505-284-9227

“Despite concerns over the last decades with the greenhouse process, they oversimplify the effect,” he said. “Simply cranking up CO2 [carbon dioxide] (as the culprit) is not the answer” to what causes climate change.

Lindzen, the ninth speaker in Sandia’s Climate Change and National Security Speaker Series, is Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology in MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and is the lead author of Chapter 7 (“Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks”) of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.

For 30 years, climate scientists have been “locked into a simple-minded identification of climate with greenhouse-gas level. … That climate should be the function of a single parameter (like CO2) has always seemed implausible. Yet an obsessive focus on such an obvious oversimplification has likely set back progress by decades,” Lindzen said.

For major climates of the past, other factors were more important than carbon dioxide. Orbital variations have been shown to quantitatively account for the cycles of glaciations of the past 700,000 years, he said, and the elimination of the arctic inversion, when the polar caps were ice-free, “is likely to have been more important than CO2 for the warm episode during the Eocene 50 million years ago.”

There is little evidence that changes in climate are producing extreme weather events, he said. “Even the IPCC says there is little if any evidence of this. In fact, there are important physical reasons for doubting such anticipations.”

Lindzen’s views run counter to those of almost all major professional societies. For example, the American Physical Society statement of Nov. 18, 2007, read, “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” But he doesn’t feel they are necessarily right. “Why did the American Physical Society take a position?” he asked his audience. “Why did they find it compelling? They never answered.”

Speaking methodically with flashes of humor — “I always feel that when the conversation turns to weather, people are bored.” — he said a basic problem with current computer climate models that show disastrous increases in temperature is that relatively small increases in atmospheric gases lead to large changes in temperatures in the models.

But, he said, “predictions based on high (climate) sensitivity ran well ahead of observations.”

Real-world observations do not support IPCC models, he said: “We’ve already seen almost the equivalent of a doubling of CO2 (in radiative forcing) and that has produced very little warming.”

He disparaged proving the worth of models by applying their criteria to the prediction of past climatic events, saying, “The models are no more valuable than answering a test when you have the questions in advance.”

Modelers, he said, merely have used aerosols as a kind of fudge factor to make their models come out right. (Aerosols are tiny particles that reflect sunlight. They are put in the air by industrial or volcanic processes and are considered a possible cause of temperature change at Earth’s surface.)

Then there is the practical question of what can be done about temperature increases even if they are occurring, he said. “China, India, Korea are not going to go along with IPCC recommendations, so … the only countries punished will be those who go along with the recommendations.”

He discounted mainstream opinion that climate change could hurt national security, saying that “historically there is little evidence of natural disasters leading to war, but economic conditions have proven much more serious. Almost all proposed mitigation policies lead to reduced energy availability and higher energy costs. All studies of human benefit and national security perspectives show that increased energy is important.”

He showed a graph that demonstrated that more energy consumption leads to higher literacy rate, lower infant mortality and a lower number of children per woman.

Given that proposed policies are unlikely to significantly influence climate and that lower energy availability could be considered a significant threat to national security, to continue with a mitigation policy that reduces available energy “would, at the least, appear to be irresponsible,” he argued.

Responding to audience questions about rising temperatures, he said a 0.8 of a degree C change in temperature in 150 years is a small change. Questioned about five-, seven-, and 17-year averages that seem to show that Earth’s surface temperature is rising, he said temperatures are always fluctuating by tenths of a degree.

As for the future, “Uncertainty plays a huge role in this issue,” Lindzen said. “It’s not that we expect disaster, it’s that the uncertainty is said to offer the possibility of disaster: implausible, but high consequence. Somewhere it has to be like the possible asteroid impact: Live with it.”

To a sympathetic questioner who said, “You are like a voice crying in the wilderness. It must be hard to get published,” Lindzen said, adding that billions of dollars go into funding climate studies. “The reward for solving problems is that your funding gets cut. It’s not a good incentive structure.”

Asked whether  the prudent approach to possible climate change would be to prepare a gradated series of responses, much as insurance companies do when they insure cars or houses, Lindzen did not shift from his position that no actions are needed until more data is gathered.

When another Sandia employee pointed out the large number of models by researchers around the globe that suggest increases in world temperature, Lindzen said he doubted the models were independently derived but rather might produce common results because of their common origins.

The Climate Security lecture series is funded by Sandia’s Energy, Climate and Infrastructure Security division. Rob Leland is director of Sandia’s Climate Security Program.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

Washington, a pioneer in atmospheric computer modeling, served as science adviser to five presidents — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He received a lifetime achievement award from then-DOE Undersecretary for Science Raymond Orbach in 2007 and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama in 2010.

Washington presented graph after graph showing how various atmospheric processes have combined to create stronger rainfall near the equator and more intense droughts in the subtropics, as well as sea-level rises and increased storm surges. He said more tropical diseases would move poleward as the tropics expand.

He also envisioned stresses on national security when some island and coastal countries either disappear or sink below sea level because of rising oceans. “Their populations will need to migrate elsewhere, causing immigration issues,” he said.

Basically, he advised, “People shouldn’t be building houses on the seacoast or putting houses in flood plains.”

With a nod to climate-change skeptics, he cited noted University of California-Berkeley professor Richard Muller as a one-time skeptic of the general scientific belief that “we’ve warmed the planet by almost a degree [Celsius] from 1880 to 2010 in the global land temperature average.” Washington said Muller and his colleagues used a different technique to compute Earth’s land temperature, but his graph only reproduced what others found earlier.

 In several instances, he challenged climate-change skepticism.

“Climate skeptics often mention that solar radiation has changed and that is what is causing the climate change,” he said as he presented a graph charting the intensity of solar irradiance at the top of Earth’s atmosphere. “You can see 11-year cycles from 1975 on and you can see there is no significant trend on radiation coming into the atmosphere. So this argument by skeptics isn’t valid to the climate change community.”

Meanwhile, he said, extremes in temperature have grown since the 1960s, methane and nitrous oxide concentrations are increasing, ozone depletion is increasing, the usually ice-locked Northwest Passage this fall should be open for shipping if accompanied by an icebreaker and 2010 was “a record year for glacier melting in Greenland, as observed by satellite.”

With some exceptions, he said, glaciers are melting substantially around the globe. “Since the 1960s,” he said, “ocean heat content, humidity, temperatures near just above the sea surfaces and the temperatures over land and oceans have increased substantially. Meanwhile, snow cover, glaciers and sea ice have decreased.”

 As for what is causing the changes shown by his graphs, he said, “Natural variations [used in models] do not explain climatic change. Climate model simulations with just natural ‘forcing,’ including volcanic and solar, do not reproduce warming. However, when the increase in greenhouse gases is included, models do reproduce the global warming patterns. We consider this a ‘smoking gun’ proof.”

Adding the effects of aerosols to climate models further improves their agreement with the temperature-warming trends of the last decades, he said.

Slow computing initially handicapped experiments to simulate climate change, he said. Much faster computing speeds have led to more accurate models.

Still, Washington said, international meetings about climate with politicians in Copenhagen, Cancun, Mexico, and Durban, South Africa, “haven’t gotten very far. Basically, there’s a lot of inertia in making big changes in our energy profile.”

He postulated several reasons for this. “Many skeptics claim that climate change is a hoax and we have some sort of secret agenda to fool the public. Obviously, I believe there’s no conspiracy, that climate change is not a hoax and that the advice we give the policymakers is honest and good science,” Washington said.

Later in his talk, he said, “We’re faced by a lot of people whose business interests are affected by climate change mitigation.”

Washington’s simulations showed that cutting back on carbon emissions and concentrations in the atmosphere would help curb future temperature rises. But he called some proposed geoengineering measures unlikely to do much. These include space mirrors to reflect light away from Earth and stratocumulus cloud seeding to brighten them so that more solar radiation is reflected out to space.

He said more realistic possibilities include sequestration of carbon — sending it underground or to the ocean bottom. For the short-term, he mentioned the positive effect of reducing the amount of airborne methane and other non-greenhouse gases such as Freon.

“Climate system models are far from being perfect,” he said, “but are the best indicator of our science knowledge of how the climate system works.”

Sandia scientist Mark Taylor came in for special praise from the speaker for a significant climate simulation on the Argonne National Laboratory supercomputer Blue Gene/P that produced a geographic resolution of 12 kilometers. “Sandia has played a major part in getting the climate community a brand new tool to study climate change,” said Washington.

Later, he said, “Scientists like Mark Taylor and others have turned to techniques like using a cubed sphere grid to make calculations parallel and therefore solvable on modern systems.” Old-fashioned maps showing latitude and longitude converged at the poles, making them hard to work with.

The talks are sponsored by Sandia’s Climate Security Program.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

ACS on Campus will kick off the evening of July 19 with a Science Café presentation and a panel discussion on alternative careers in science. The daylong program July 20 at Steve Schiff Auditorium, video-linked to Sandia/California, includes workshops on publishing, writing grant proposals, finding collaborative research opportunities, careers in industry and higher education and effective communication about why science matters.

“This is an important program that is of value to our next generation of scientists,” said Jennifer Taylor Howell, program manager in the ACS Membership and Scientific Advancement Division, who is helping organize the event. “These are the people we’re looking at to lead us. We certainly want to invest in them.”

The program, presented in coordination with Sandia’s Postdoctoral Professional Development Program, or PD2P, is being offered to the Labs’ estimated 200 postdocs and 300 to 400 student interns, who are split between Sandia’s New Mexico and California sites.

The postdoc community in particular is living between two worlds, said geochemistry department postdoctoral appointee Stephanie Teich-McGoldrick, PD2P workshop chairwoman in New Mexico. She and PD2P statistics chairman Morgan Alley, a postdoctoral appointee in the international chemical threat reduction department, are helping organize the ACS event.

Sandia’s postdoctoral appointees are temporary employees who recently received doctoral degrees. They come to Sandia to develop additional technical and professional skills, said Teich-McGoldrick.

“ACS on Campus is great for us,” she said. “It’s a full day of program material that would be very hard to do ourselves.”

ACS on Campus made its debut in 2010 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and has been presented around the nation and overseas in Germany, Italy, China and elsewhere. It will travel to Los Alamos National Laboratory on July 23-24.

ACS first presented the program at a national lab in July 2011 at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. It went well, and ACS representatives asked Nancy Jackson, a Sandia manager who is the immediate past president of ACS, if Sandia would be interested in a similar program.

ACS wants students to gain new skills and an awareness of what resources are available so they’re better equipped to advance in their careers, Howell said. Although ACS is behind the event, workshops have been tailored to interest postdocs and student interns from all disciplines.

“The goal is to help build community and help the next generation of scientists moving forward,” Howell said. “The American Chemical Society is invested in the future of the science.”

The basics of ACS on Campus don’t change just because it’s presented at a national laboratory.

“There are so many students and postdocs at the national labs that it’s a good place to get in touch with them also,” Jackson said.

PD2P, which began in 2007, provides a way for Sandia’s postdoc community to meet each other and develop professional skills. Sandia’s Student Intern Program has year-round, summer and academic year co-op programs in technical and business-related opportunities for students from high school to doctoral candidates. ACS publishes 39 journals and is the largest professional organization in the world with more than 164,000 members. 

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

The MEP award recognized the program’s “commitment to the business growth and transformation of U.S.-based manufacturing through work in the manufacturing sector.” Specifically, the NMSBA was honored for its significant impact in helping drive new product innovation among New Mexico small businesses and contributing to state economic growth.

Jackie Kerby Moore, manager of Sandia's Technology and Economic Development Department, says NMSBA collaborations have resulted in innovation, jobs and economic growth. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

NMSBA is a public-private partnership among Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories and the state of New Mexico that connects small business owners with scientists and engineers who give the companies technical assistance. The program provided $4.6 million worth of help last year.

“The NMSBA Program truly appreciates this national recognition and thanks all the principal investigators at Sandia, Los Alamos, NM MEP and the research universities in New Mexico for providing their skills and expertise to help small businesses throughout the state,” said Jackie Kerby Moore, manager of Sandia’s Technology and Economic Development Department.

The award was presented in May at the 2012 Manufacturing Innovation conference in Orlando, Fla. The Manufacturing Innovation 2012 awards committee reviewed more than 75 nominations highlighting work in manufacturing throughout the country. Ten awards were given.

Through the NMSBA, small businesses with technical challenges can seek assistance from laboratory scientists or engineers for projects that require testing, design consultation or access to special equipment or facilities. For selected businesses, assistance takes the form of laboratory staff hours valued at up to $20,000 per calendar year if located in rural New Mexico counties and $10,000 for those in Bernalillo County. The total amount of assistance is capped at $2.4 million annually for each of New Mexico’s two national laboratories.

“The NMSBA team is comprised of dedicated individuals that help companies overcome their obstacles to growth,” Jennifer Sinsabaugh of the New Mexico MEP said in nominating NMSBA for the award. “In addition to their technical resources, the NMSBA team creates partnerships to provide other resources businesses may need. They realize that business needs vary significantly, and they strive to ensure that they have the best solutions to promote business growth and vitality.”

Since its inception 10 years ago, the NMSBA has provided 1,876 New Mexico small businesses with nearly $30 million in technical assistance. The program has helped create and retain more than 2,300 jobs at an average salary of $38,000, increase small companies’ revenues by $107.6 million and decrease their operating costs by $63.6 million. These companies in turn invested $35 million in other New Mexico goods and services and received an estimated $41 million in new funding and financing.

For further information about NMSBA, companies may call Genaro Montoya at (505) 284-0625 or visit www.NMSBAprogram.org.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

LIVERMORE, Calif. — Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a lab-on-a-disk platform that they believe will be faster, less expensive and more versatile than similar medical diagnostic tools.

Sandia’s Ulrich Schaff holds a prototype SpinDx, a portable instrument that can determine a patient’s white blood cell count, analyze important protein markers, and achieve results from other tests in a matter of minutes. (Photo by Randy Wong) Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Lab officials are seeking industry partners to license and commercialize the SpinDx technology, which can determine a patient’s white blood cell count, analyze important protein markers, and process up to 64 assays from a single sample, all in a matter of minutes.

“In a doctor’s office, time is money,” said Anup Singh, manager of Sandia’s biotechnology and bioengineering department. “Patients have become accustomed to an initial visit, some tests, samples that are sent off to a far-away lab, a wait of a week or more for results, more tests and charges every step of the way. With SpinDx, you can see results before you even leave the office.”

The technology advances in SpinDx have profound implications for patient care. Heart attacks, strokes, infections, certain cancers and other afflictions could be detected days or weeks sooner than they are today, with no new burdens placed on patients or their doctors, Singh said.

The SpinDx platform has several advantages:

• Small sample size: Patients merely have to provide a pin-prick sample of blood.
• Ease of use: The device uses a spinning disk, much like a CD player, to manipulate a sample. The disks contain commercially available reagents and antibodies specific to each protein marker.
• Custom applications: Singh envisions a “plug and play” approach whereby the physician chooses among a “cardiac disk,” “immune disk” and similar options.
• Inexpensive technology: The disks — the crux of the technology — cost pennies to manufacture.
• Quick response time: Results can be delivered to the physician’s computer in 15 minutes.

“We envision medical personnel using SpinDx routinely,” said Greg Sommer, the Sandia researcher who spearheaded development of the project. “Instead of standard blood panels and costly lab tests, a SpinDx disk would be processed right in the office while the medical office staff is gathering routine data like temperature and blood pressure.”

Click on the thumbnail to view video footage of the “SpinDx” medical diagnostic tool. (Or view in HD on YouTube.)

The platform also has homeland security and food processing applications.

Singh recently led a National Institutes of Health grant (grant # 1U01AI075441) to adapt the lab-on-a-disk platform for toxin diagnostics.

The device could be the most accurate method available to detect the botulinum toxin, said Sommer. Caused by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum, the botulinum toxin is one of the most toxic substances known—a miniscule quantity can deliver a lethal dose. But despite scientific advances, laboratory mice remain the only reliable way to test for botulism.

“The mouse bioassay is primitive, but remains the gold standard due to its sensitivity,” Sommer said. “Our SpinDx botulinum assay vastly outperformed the mouse bioassay in head-to-head tests, and requires absolutely no animal testing. Plus there are a lot of cost and speed advantages.”

While botulism is quite rare — only about 145 cases are reported in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the lethality of the toxin makes it an attractive candidate for bioterrorism. “A very small amount in the food system could harm a lot of people,” said Sommer.

Sandia’s goal, Sommer said, is to create a handheld, point-of-care device that can be used in the field by emergency responders.

SpinDx technology uses a spinning disk, much like a CD player, to manipulate samples. The disks cost mere cents to manufacture. (Photo by Randy Wong) Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

SpinDx’s ability to process many substances also makes the device relevant for food safety testing. About 15 percent of botulism cases are food-borne. In 2007, 14 people in seven states contracted botulism from chile sauce due to faulty manufacturing equipment at a food plant in Georgia.

The Sandia team made improvements to the assay that enabled it to handle thick, viscous food substances. Collaborators at the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided high-quality botulinum antibodies that bind with high affinity, enabling higher sensitivity.

“Food processing plants are looking for something that can be integrated into their assembly lines,” said Sommer. “Our device will be suitable because it’s fast, inexpensive and simple to operate.”

The team is developing a deployable prototype to run the assays, with the goal of a fully integrated, automated device for field testing. “We’ve done most of our testing in a benchtop setting, where we spin the sample on the disk and then read it out on a microscope,” Sommer explained. “The next step is to automate those processes and get the system into users’ hands. SpinDx has a lot of potential for so many applications.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov (925) 294-2447

A few years later Maish ran into Tim Leonard at an Albuquerque nursery. Leonard had worked at Sandia in the 1980s, programming computers in the wind energy group at the same time Maish was working in solar power. After some small talk, Maish mentioned his solar-tracking technology. “I told him I’d take a look,” said Leonard, who worked in video game programming after leaving Sandia.

Tim Leonard, right, owner of Precision Solar Technologies Corp., and the company's project engineer, Tony Louderbough, do final adjustments on the instrumentation of a trailer-mounted solar weather station, called the Prospector Mule, at Sandia Labs. Precision Solar uses a tracking technology developed at Sandia. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

He liked what he saw and went on to license the technology and build a business, Precision Solar Technologies Corp., that now has trackers in 18 countries. Among Leonard’s customers is Sandia, where the technology was developed and where many solar devices are fitted with his trackers, including the National Solar Thermal Test Facility and the solar furnace.

Leonard licensed the technology — trademark named SolarTrak by Sandia, which holds the patent — in 1996. Maish was still working on the project at Sandia, and he and Leonard fine-tuned the technology to get it commercialized. “Alex was eight years into it when we started working together,” Leonard said. “It became a joint venture. We’re now into 16 years of commercial use and thousands of unit-hours of performance.”

Maish’s goal was to develop affordable precision tracking for solar energy research, development and production. His SolarTrak technology is a software program in a computer chip that sits on an electronic circuit board that controls the tracker.

Unlike sensor-based controllers, SolarTrak uses celestial equations to calculate the exact position of the sun at any time, anywhere on the planet, regardless of cloud cover. “This can be critical in partly cloudy situations where the bright edge of a cloud can fool a sensor,” Leonard said.

SolarTrak determines the sun’s location, makes decisions based on its angle and turns on machinery that moves solar equipment into position. It factors wind speed and other external information into performance.

“The computer uses electronic feedback to monitor where the machinery is in its range of motion. With that information and the position of the sun, it makes the two coincide,” Leonard said. “It’s a simple process. It’s prudent to hook up a PC every few months and check the clock, but mostly it runs and runs.”

SolarTrak technology has been used in commercial, industrial, residential and research applications. Precision Solar Technologies has put controllers to work in heliostat projects, solar furnace applications, solar trough facilities, photovoltaics and fiber optic daylighting research.

Hundreds of SolarTrak controllers are in commercial use around the world and in research projects at Sandia and Oak Ridge national laboratories, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, Walt Disney Imagineering, the University of Loughborough and the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, U.S. universities and private-sector entities including Emcore, Amonix and Los Alamos Research Associates.

“I’ve put a SolarTrak controller on everything I know of that moves and has to point at the sun,” Leonard said.

Leonard built the business through word of mouth and a website. His first customer was a researcher at the University of Australia in Canberra. Other early customers included Arizona Public Service Co. and Amonix, where Leonard installed his first high-powered, large piece of tracking equipment, on a 30 by 40 foot, 19,000-pound array.

Leonard’s signature product is the Prospector, a stand-alone solar weather station to measure solar and atmospheric environments.

In addition to the station, Precision Solar produces other full systems that include motors, gear drives, mechanical arms and frames that hold and move the solar arrays for power production or research. The company does new systems and retrofits older ones. Leonard works from a home base in Tijeras, N.M., with an electronics and assembly workshop, forklift and loading dock to send trackers to far-off places.

Solar engineering consultant Rich Diver said Leonard’s trackers are cost-effective and “very robust.” “The Prospector is a really nice product,” he said. “It works well.”

Santa Fe resident Ricardo Sanchez remembers going to Sandia, where his dad worked, and looking up at the solar tower. “I was amazed at what it could do,” he said. “I was really psyched to have that type of technology on my home.”

About five years ago, Sanchez installed 13 fixed solar thermal panels on his roof, but they didn’t generate enough heat. “I met Tim and went with his mirror heliostat tracker that reflects sunlight onto the panels. It took my system from something that didn’t work to something that worked,” he said. “I used to have a $500-a-month heating bill in the winter. Now it’s $700 for the whole season. The tracker is perfect. I don’t do a thing. It just works.”

Leonard said he’s never regretted taking on the business. “I grew up with Erector sets and Lincoln Logs and was making things that moved since I was very young. Then I learned computers and electronics,” he said. “This business has brought together every single aspect of everything I have learned either in school or on my own.”

Maish died in 2005 after a lifelong struggle with cystic fibrosis. He lived to see the beginnings of a business founded on his technology. Leonard said he and Maish became the best of friends and that he believes Maish would have been proud of the growth of the business and how it accomplished his goal of bringing down the once-astronomical cost of precision solar tracking.

“To this day, every (circuit) board I make says ‘Originally developed at Sandia Labs,” Leonard said. “Alex gets the credit. I’m still looking for my first opportunity to dedicate a precision solar field in his name.”

For further information on Sandia’s photovoltaic work, see  http://energy.sandia.gov/?page_id=2727, “Photovoltaics.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

The award recognizes people who go above and beyond their jobs in energy management for the federal government. Evans has been involved in DOE’s energy savings program since he was tapped in 2003 to head the Sandia conservation effort, which includes all the Labs’ sites.

Chris Evans heads up Sandia's effort to cut energy consumption in its buildings. His team has helped the Labs cut energy usage by more than 250 billion BTUs in the past six years. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Sandia’s goal is to cut energy intensity, or BTUs per square foot, by 30 percent from 2006 through 2015 using a 2003 baseline, and reduce greenhouse gases 28 percent by 2020. To get there, the Labs must lower energy consumption in its buildings by about 30 billion BTUs a year, or the amount of energy used by about 300 households.

“Sandia is more than halfway there and right on track to meet the goal,” said Evans, who works in Sandia’s Facilities Management and Operations Center (FMOC), Partnership and Planning Dept. 4853, and is Resource Conservation lead for the Labs’ Energy Management program. His team works with project managers, operations engineers and maintenance personnel in FMOC to implement new conservation programs and install energy-saving equipment.

During the past six years, the FMOC team, working with mission customers, has helped Sandia cut energy usage by more than 250 billion BTUs.

“What we’ve done so far has been a big success,” said Evans, who has been with Sandia since 1988.  “We’ve come up with some pretty innovative projects.”

Jack Mizner, department manager, said the energy projects are driven by a desire to reduce costs to Sandia’s customers and to be a good corporate citizen. “I think it is incumbent on us as a national lab to do the most we can and be a leader in energy management.”

He said four strategies guide the effort. “Use less, use what we have efficiently, use renewable energy, and tell people about it. That’s a thumbnail sketch of our energy management program.”

“Free cooling” has saved the most BTUs for Sandia. The process uses cold, dry outside air in late fall, winter and early spring to chill water for air conditioning systems in data centers, which need year-round refrigeration.

Other savings have been achieved through sophisticated controls on lighting, air flow, heating and cooling of buildings. “We’ve really been pushing the envelope on converting our buildings from old-style, analog controls to new, digital controls,” Evans said. “It is demand-based, only using the power we need.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

LIVERMORE, Calif.— A team of nanomaterials researchers at Sandia National Laboratories has developed a new technique that could make radiation detection in cargo and baggage more effective and less costly for homeland security inspectors.

Sandia researchers Patrick Doty, Patrick Feng, and Mark Allendorf (L to R) have created a new type of scintillator using metal organic framework or plastic scintillator hosts combined with heavy metal dopants, shown in Doty’s hand. This material enables detection of neutrons using spectral- or pulse-shape discrimination techniques that could transform radiation detection (photo by Dino Vournas). Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Known as spectral shape discrimination (SSD), the method takes advantage of a new class of nanoporous materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Researchers discovered that adding a doping agent to an MOF leads to the emission of red and blue light when the MOF interacts with high-energy particles emanated from radiological or nuclear material, enabling more effective detection of neutrons. Neutron detection is currently a costly and technically challenging endeavor due to the difficulty in distinguishing neutrons from ubiquitous background gamma rays.

Initial work on the use of MOFs for radiation detection was internally funded by Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program, but subsequent funding for the project has come from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation research office.

“Improving our radiation detection capabilities is crucial to advancing NNSA’s nonproliferation mission,” said Anne Harrington, NNSA’s deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation. “Preventing the illicit movement of radiological and nuclear materials around the globe supports the president’s nuclear security objectives and helps to mitigate the threat of a nuclear terror attack.”

The new technology works with plastic scintillators, materials that fluoresce when struck by charged particles or high-energy photons, making it suitable for commercialization by companies who produce plastic and other organic scintillators used in radiation detection devices. Though work remains before it can move into the marketplace, Sandia is currently seeking commercial partners to license the technology.

Click on the thumbnail to view video footage of researchers demonstrating and explaining spectral shape discrimination. (Or view in HD on YouTube.)

Current radiation detection methods are limited in terms of speed and sensitivity, crucial elements for dynamic scenarios, such as border crossings, cargo screenings and nuclear treaty verification. This new technology monitors the color of light emissions, which have the potential to make the screening process easier and more reliable.

“We are approaching the problem from a materials-chemistry perspective,” said Sandia materials scientist Mark Allendorf. “Fundamentally, it is easier to monitor the color of light emissions rather than the rate at which that light is emitted. That’s the crux of this new approach.” Current radiation detection methods use time to discriminate between neutrons and gamma rays, requiring complex and costly electronics.

MOFs and dopants lead to more light

Allendorf and his team have been working with MOFs for more than five years. Early on, they discovered a fluorescent, porous MOF with superb scintillation properties, an important breakthrough and the first new class of scintillators found in decades. The MOF’s porosity is a key feature because it allows researchers to add other materials to fine-tune the scintillation.

The MOF’s nanoporosity triggered a new idea when team member Patrick Doty read about the use of dopants to increase the efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). These dopants, usually compounds containing heavy metals such as iridium, dramatically increase OLED brightness by “scavenging” the excited-state energy in the device that was not converted to light. This energy represents as much as 75 percent of the possible light output.

Combining MOFs with OLED dopants led to a second breakthrough. By filling MOF pores with dopants, the team created a material that not only produces more light, but light of another color. Doty, a materials scientist working in Sandia’s radiation/nuclear detection materials and analysis department, hypothesized that the discovery could be applied to radiation detection.

Crystals of a metal organic framework (left) emit light in the blue (middle) when exposed to ionizing radiation. Infiltrating them with an organometallic compound causes the crystals to emit red light as well (right), creating a new way to differentiate fission neutrons from background gamma particles. Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The trick, Doty said, is to add just the right amount of dopant so that both the scavenged light and fluorescence from the excited MOF itself are emitted. Then the ratio of the intensities at the two wavelengths is a function of the type of high-energy particle interacting with the material. “That’s the critical thing,” Doty said. “SSD allows one particle type to be distinguished from another on the basis of the color of the emitted light.”

Because the ratio of neutrons to gamma rays is so low — on the order of one neutron to 10⁵ gamma rays — the threshold at which current detectors can see neutrons is fairly high. Sandia calculations suggest that the threshold for detecting neutrons produced by fissionable material could be lowered substantially using SSD, perhaps improving the “figure of merit” by a factor of 10 compared to the current standards. “In principle, we could quadruple the sensitivity of the gold standard,” said Allendorf.

SSD also addresses another radiation detection problem — active interrogation. Using an active source to create a signal from special nuclear material is an effective means for detection, say Sandia researchers. But current detectors are often overwhelmed by the onslaught of gamma rays. The new materials developed at Sandia can be tuned for improved timing performance at high rates, and the new technology also could be used in radiation detectors for treaty verification.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

Williams was named Most Promising Engineer-Government in the prestigious BEYA program, which recognizes some of the nation’s best and brightest engineers, scientists and technology experts. The awards are sponsored by the national Career Communications Group, an advocate for corporate diversity, as part of its national Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) achievement program.

Sandia's Adam Williams took s spin on a camel near the Pyramids in Egypt on a work-related trip to the Mideast in November 2009. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Williams was nominated by Rodney Wilson, director of Sandia’s Nonproliferation and Cooperative Threat Reduction Center. Williams joined the center’s International Nuclear Security Engineering Group in early 2008.

“Adam’s name jumped right to mind. I didn’t think twice about it,” Wilson said. “He demonstrates an immediate sense of leadership. I traveled to the Mideast with him and observed his ability to become a leader in complex cultural, technical situations.”

Williams said, “Honestly, it was an honor to be nominated. I measure success by being able to come home, look in the mirror and say I did all I could to do my best at the tasks in front of me. To have my efforts acknowledged by my colleagues and management is encouraging and inspiring.”

The Fort Hood, Texas, native was a freshman in the mechanical engineering program at Texas A&M University (TAMU) when he heard a talk by James Olson of TAMU’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. Olson had recently retired from the CIA. “His talk was like something out of a Jason Bourne movie, but real,” Williams said. “It was interesting and engaging to say the least.”

Olson became a mentor to Williams and guided him to a career in international relations. “He opened my eyes to this big thing called the world and its complex geopolitical interactions,” Williams said. “There are many events going on all over the world, and they all matter.”

Williams completed his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and enrolled in the master’s program in international affairs at the Bush school. “I realized my interests revolved around big, global problems,” he said. “Graduate school was a way to see if international relations was where I really wanted to be.”

Williams came across the concept of nonproliferation, and a light went on. “Learning about nuclear nonproliferation was akin to digging in the sand and hitting something solid,” he said. “I wanted to keep digging to find out more. Peeling back its layers and complexities and intricacies is fascinating. I got my master’s and decided that nonproliferation was the direction I wanted to go.”

Williams was hired by Sandia after completing his master’s degree. He is an international security technical systems analyst for the Labs. “My job is to help develop creative solutions to the vast array of nonproliferation problems,” said Williams, whose work takes him to countries around the world.

He said he loves having a job that “will ultimately make the world a safer, more secure place.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Nancy Salem, mnsalem@sandia.gov, (505) 844-2739

ALBUQERQUE, N.M. — A celebration at Sandia’s Computer Science Research Institute in mid-May wrote finis to Red Storm, the Sandia-designed and Cray Inc.-built supercomputer, one of the most influential machines of its era, with 124 descendants at 70 sites around the world.

A Cray contractor checks out a Red Storm panel when the machine was in its prime. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image. Media are welcome to download/publish this image with related news stories.

Cray Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer Peter Ungaro did not stint in his praise. He told the assembled group, “Without Red Storm I wouldn’t be here in front of you today. Virtually everything we do at Cray — each of our three business units — comes from Red Storm. It spawned a company around it, a historic company struggling as to where we would go next. Literally, this program saved Cray.”

Red Storm’s design and its descendants have racked up more than a billion dollars in sales for the company, he said.

Among the machine’s advances was its use of off-the-shelf parts, which made it cheaper to build, repair and upgrade. Red Storm was air-cooled instead of water-cooled, so parts could be replaced and upgrades completed while the machine was running. The only custom component was the Interconnect chip that made it possible to pass information more directly from processor to processor while applications were running. High-memory bandwidth kept the processors from being starved for data.

And its architecture was upgradeable, from a theoretical peak at birth  of 41.47 teraflops in 2005 to 124.42 teraflops in 2006 to 284.16 teraflops in 2008, because (among other reasons) the machine accommodated single-, dual- and quad-core processors that eventually reached 12,920 in number.

Among the machine’s technical achievements was the operation in 2008 known as Burnt Frost, in which Red Storm programmed a 152-inch rocket to shoot down an errant satellite traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, 153 miles above the earth.

For months, Red Storm calculated a large number of shoot-down scenarios, until Sandians were ready to brief then-President George W. Bush on his options.

The result: after the successful take-down with no collateral damage, a military commander exulted, “We can hit a spot on a bullet with a bullet.”

Red Storm’s role, classified for several years, was made known when DoD released the information, followed by a Sandia impact video with a sound track that opened oracularly, “This IS rocket science!”

Other, still classified, Red Storm operations were officially described as solving “pressing national security problems in cyber defense, vulnerability assessments, informatics (network discovery), space systems threats and image processing.”

One nonclassified use for the machine and its more powerful descendant Jaguar at Oak Ridge was to produce high-fidelity climate models that revealed, for the first time in simulations, swirls of water, or vortices, in the Indian Ocean.

Sandia Center Director Rob Leland, who hosted the celebration, was the responsible senior manager when Red Storm was designed and built. He recalled that in 2004, he was on the verge of re-locating his family to Seattle, Cray’s home base, to help out. “Things were really tense. We couldn’t keep flying back and forth to be in immediate touch with Cray management and technicians,” he said in an interview. “Imagine going to a company whose defining idea is one thing [a custom vectorized, or linear, processor] and telling them it’s the wrong idea for the future and they needed to focus instead on building massively parallel systems out of commodity processors. It only worked because they were at risk of going out of business, so they were quite motivated to accommodate us. And it turned out really well for them. In four years, their market share of supercomputers jumped from 6 percent to 20 percent.”

“Red Storm is over, but its influence is not,” agreed Bill Camp, the retired Sandia director who achieved support for the design first proposed by Sandia technical adept Jim Tomkins (retired).

Then-Sandia vice-president Frank Figueroa was wary to let Camp embark on the project because, Figueroa protested, “The size of the project is bigger than the net worth of the company.” To Camp, with Intel refusing to remain in the specialty supercomputer field and IBM already committed to another type of machine, Cray was, so to speak, the only U.S. game in town, but Cray wasn’t sure it wanted to play.

Sandia executives convinced Congress and DOE to fund the new effort, which eventually reached a cost of approximately $72 million, a large sum but far less than comparable supercomputers at the time, and for a far more all-purpose machine.

“The normal supercomputer development time for Cray was four to five years,” said Leland. “We had in mind about 18-22 months.”

“It was the fastest development cycle of any supercomputer,” said Camp.

Things moved fast despite the perfectionism of the originator of the design, Jim Tomkins. “I had this nickname at Cray, ‘the devil incarnate,’ because I was something of a hard nose,” he told the group. “I believed if we didn’t pay attention to detail, we were going to fail. I wanted dotted i’s and crossed t’s. But it was the best team I ever worked with. There was no internal friction, and it was a great adventure.”

Because of the speed with which Sandians pressed forward, when the machine arrived in Albuquerque, it had neither management software to boot the system nor working communication software between processors, so Sandia researchers wrote them. “The communication software is still in use today,” said Sandia manager Sue Kelly, credited with leading the effort to make the system usable once it was delivered.

One of the most often-heard compliments to the machine, one man said at the celebration, is that “when a program doesn’t work on another machine, they say, ‘It works on Red Storm.’”

Horst Simon, deputy director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a prominent computer scientist, emailed Camp, “I just want you to know what a wonderful thing you and Jim [Tomkins] have done for supercomputing.”

“Jim Tomkins and me, we hung in there and made it happen,” reminisced Camp.

About Camp, Leland said, “There were a handful of people in the country with the leadership skills for this job and a handful with the technical skills for this job, but I don’t know anyone who had both, except for Bill.”

Among other people mentioned as having a positive impact on the project were Don Cook (now NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs), and Sandia California vice president Rick Stulen.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

An international team that includes Sandia National Laboratories announced the single-source shortest-path specification to assess computing performance on Tuesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

The latest benchmark “highlights the importance of new systems that can find the proverbial needle in the haystack of data,” said Graph500 executive committee member David A. Bader, a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering and executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The new specification will measure the closest distance between two things, said Sandia National Laboratories researcher Richard Murphy, who heads the executive committee. For example, it would seek the smallest number of people between two people chosen randomly in the professional network LinkedIn, finding the fewest friend of a friend of a friend links between them, he said.

Graph500 already gauges two computational techniques, called kernels: a large graph that links huge numbers of participants and a parallel search of that graph. The first two kernels were relatively easy problems; this third one is harder, Murphy said. Once it’s been tested, the next kernel will be harder still, he said.

The rankings are oriented toward enormous graph-based data problems, a core part of most analytics workloads. Graph500 rates machines on their ability to solve complex problems that have seemingly infinite numbers of components, rather than ranking machines on how fast they solve those problems.

Big data problems represent a $270 billion market and are increasingly important for businesses such as Google, Facebook and LexisNexis, Murphy said.

Large data problems are especially important in cybersecurity, medical informatics, data enrichment, social networks and symbolic networks. Last year, the Obama administration announced a push to develop better big data systems.

Problems that require enormously complex graphs include correlating medical records of millions of patients, analyzing ever-growing numbers of electronically related participants in social media and dealing with symbolic networks, such as tracking tens of thousands of shipping containers of goods roaming the world’s oceans.

Medical-related data alone could potentially overwhelm all of today’s high-performance computing, Murphy said.

Graph500’s steering committee is made up of more than 30 international experts in high-performance computing who work on what benchmarks supercomputers should meet in the future. The executive committee, which implements changes in the benchmark, includes Sandia, Argonne National Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology and Indiana University.

Bader said emerging applications in healthcare informatics, social network analysis, web science and detecting anomalies in financial transactions “require a new breed of data-intensive supercomputers that can make sense of massive amounts of information.”

But performance can’t be improved without a meaningful benchmark, Murphy said. 

“The whole goal is to spur industry to do something harder” as they jockey for top rankings, he said. 

“If there’s a change in the list over time — and there should be — it’s a big deal,” he added. 

Murphy sees Graph500 as a complementary performance yardstick to the well-known Top 500 rankings of supercomputer performance, based on speed processing the Linpack code. Nine computers made the first Graph500 list in November 2010; by last November, the number had grown to 50. Its fourth list, released at the conference in Germany, ranked 88. Rankings are released twice a year at the Supercomputing Conference in November and the International Supercomputing Conference in June.

“A machine on the top of this list may analyze huge quantities of data to provide better and more personalized health care decisions, improve weather and climate prediction, improve our cybersecurity and better integrate our online social networks with our personal lives,” Bader said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact:  Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

The Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center, housed at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, provided timely analysis of the likely impact of Hurricane Irene on infrastructure in August 2011. (Graphic courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories is expecting the unexpected to help the nation prepare for severe weather and figure out the best ways to lessen the havoc hurricanes and other disasters leave on power grids, bridges, roads and everything else in their path. 

“I think our work in critical infrastructure protection is a really great thing to be working on,” said Marianne Walck, director of Geoscience Climate and Consequence Effects. She said Sandia can give policymakers the understanding and information they need to make decisions that lead to systems that are better able to absorb impacts and recover quickly, so-called resilient infrastructure. 

Walck was part of a panel at the recent American Geophysical Union’s inaugural Science Policy Conference that highlighted geoscience insights for the economy, public safety and national security. She discussed how Sandia is developing ways to assess the resiliency of the nation’s infrastructure and provide the knowledge officials need to create more resilient systems. 

Efforts to analyze natural disasters and other threats grew out of Sandia’s strengths in systems engineering and complex systems analysis, Walck said. Some of the work is done through the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program jointly housed at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. NISAC models and analyzes critical infrastructure, including how interdependent and vulnerable systems may be and the consequences of having them disrupted. 

“Given how much of our national and economic security rests on the resiliency of our infrastructure, the rational choice for policymakers is to experiment with models, not the system,” said Lori Parrott,  manager of Policy and Decision Support Analytics and the NISAC program for Sandia.     

Parrott, who was not part of the panel, said Sandia can better quantify the results of such resiliency studies by taking a mathematically rigorous approach to objective assessments. Sandia has developed high-fidelity computer models of individual infrastructure elements as well as generic network models and dynamic simulations. It’s part of critical infrastructure protection programs funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), DHS, Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and such agencies as DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). 

Researchers do a risk analysis and quantify uncertainties. They look at interdependencies among systems and supply chains, the resilience of various systems, how infrastructure systems fail, cascading effects and how results might differ if a series of disasters hits instead of just one. 

Walck said in an interview before the Science Policy Conference that good models allow analysts to quantify consequences of disruptions in very complex systems. “If you don’t have a good model to look at or to exercise in terms of running through these various scenarios, you may not understand what could really happen,” she said. 

A flood, for example, could damage roads, collapse bridges and take down power lines, so officials have to decide what to rebuild first, how best to rebuild and how much that will cost, she said. 

“This isn’t just saying, ‘Oh, I think that hurricane is going to knock out this particular chemical plant.’ You have to think about what that means in terms of getting critical chemicals to industries. What societal or economic effects will result if this particular product isn’t supplied? There are lots of different interactions that go on,” Walck said. “It’s just illuminating to understand what the impacts are if you’ve got particular types of infrastructure.” 

Analytic information can better inform policymakers so they can decide how to craft policies, how to promote incentives to create resilient infrastructure or how to prioritize recovery and restoration, Parrott said. 

Each year, NISAC undertakes projects analyzing various risks. Given a particular disaster, how could people be evacuated along the roads? How much damage would hurricane-force winds cause to power lines, and would that cause governments to consider requiring underground lines in the future? Then there are rebuilding considerations. Would it be better, for example, to focus on repairing rail transportation routes in a particular area rather than trying to repair all routes simultaneously? 

NISAC has developed expertise in analyzing subjects and developing models that cover everything from national transportation to interdependent supply chains. Sandia’s long-term analysis projects help keep data, models and analytic expertise current so they’re useful for crisis decision support, Parrott said. 

NISAC has worked on a number of hurricanes, including Hurricane Irene, the only one to threaten the U.S. mainland last year. Although small compared to other hurricanes, Irene was unusual. Rather than striking a concentrated area, Irene traveled up the East Coast, threatening a large swath of significant infrastructure. 

Officials asked NISAC to analyze Irene’s likely impacts while the storm moved toward shore and to deliver an analysis in less than 12 hours. NISAC came through, and its analysis was used to brief FEMA and first responders, as well as the DHS and DOE, Walck said. 

For more information on NISAC, go to http://www.sandia.gov/nisac/. 

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362

R&D Magazine presents the awards each year to researchers whom its editors and independent judging panels determine have developed the year’s 100 most outstanding advances in applied technologies. An awards banquet will be held Nov. 1 in Orlando, Fla.

The awards, with their focus on practical impact rather than pure research, reward entrants on their products’ design, development, testing and production. The Chicago Tribune once described the contest as “the Oscars of invention.”

“Congratulations to this year’s R&D 100 award winners,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “The research and development at the Department of Energy’s laboratories continues to help the nation meet our energy challenges, strengthen our national security and improve our economic competitiveness.”

Researchers at DOE labs received 36 awards. Sandia’s sister defense labs in the National Nuclear Security Administration, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, won three and four awards, respectively.

Sandia’s four winners are:

Sandia National Laboratories distinguished technical staff member Juan Elizondo-Decanini holds a prototype of a “neustristor,” a new R&D100 Award-winning configuration for neutron generators. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

• Computer Chip Configuration for Neutron Generators The ultra-compact neutron generator, dubbed a “neutristor,” is a thousand times smaller than anything on the market today. A three-year Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project led by Sandia researcher Juan Elizondo-Decanini turned away from conventional cylindrical tubes and demonstrated the basic technology necessary for a tiny, mass-produced neutron generator that can be adapted to medical and industrial applications. “The idea of a computer chip-shaped neutron source — compact, simple and inexpensive to mass-produce — opens the door for a host of applications,” Elizondo-Decanini said. Mounting the package on a computer chip allows varying numbers of layers in a stack, and the layers can be rotated for radial discharge to ramp up output. Elizondo-Decanini’s vision for the neutron generator of the future is one that uses no tritium and no vacuum and is made in a solid-state package. The technology is ready to be licensed for some commercial applications, but more complex commercial applications could take five to 10 years.
• The “Sandia Cooler,” also known as the “Air Bearing Heat Exchanger” will significantly reduce the energy needed to cool the processor chips in data centers and large-scale computing environments, said Sandia researcher Jeff Koplow. With the Sandia Cooler, heat from a conventional CPU cooler is efficiently transferred across a narrow air gap from a stationary base to a rotating structure. The normally stagnant boundary layer of air enveloping the cooling fins is subjected to a powerful centrifugal pumping effect, causing the boundary layer thickness to be reduced to ten times thinner than normal. The Sandia Cooler also offers benefits in other applications where thermal management and energy efficiency are important, particularly heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC).

Sandia researcher Greg Nielson, team leader on the Microsystems-Enabled Photovoltaic cell project, holds up a sample of the cells that won an R&D 100 Award. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

• Microsystems Enabled Photovoltaics (MEPV) Sandia’s microsystems enabled photovoltaics, also known as “solar glitter,” combine mature technology and tools currently used in microsystem production with groundbreaking advances in photovoltaic cell design. The cells are created using mature microdesign and microfabrication techniques, said Sandia researcher Vipin Gupta. (Sandia researcher Greg Nielson led the project.) The cells are then released into a solution similar to printing ink and ‘printed’ onto a low-cost substrate with embedded contacts and microlenses for focusing sunlight onto the cells. Each cell can be as small as 14 microns thick and 250 microns wide, reducing material costs while enhancing cell performance by improving carrier collection and potentially achieving higher open circuit voltages. The technology has potential applications in buildings, houses, clothing, portable electronics, vehicles, and other contoured structures. Find more on Sandia’s MEPV work here. 
• Preparation of Nucleic Acid Libraries for Ultra-High-Throughput Sequencing with a Digital Microfluidic Hub builds from Sandia’s RapTOR (Rapid Threat Organism Recognition) Grand Challenge. RapTOR rapidly identifies and characterizes unknown pathogens. It is a digital microfluidics “Grand Central Station” that manages and routes samples. “We’re taking advantage of DNA sequencing technology,” said Sandia’s Kamlesh (Ken) Patel. “Reading the genetic code, the original building blocks, allows you to begin characterizing a pathogen at the most basic level.” Patel leads the Automated Molecular Biology (AMB) research to scale down and automate traditional sample preparation methods such as normalization, ligation, digestion and size-based separation — methods that traditionally require a skilled scientist and take days or even weeks. The hub functions like a train station for samples, shrinking and enlarging samples as necessary and manipulating their speeds. Samples are cargoed within a microliter-scale droplet that is spatially moved across the Teflon-coated surface of the hub when electrostatic forces are appropriately applied. The hub moves samples from one step to the next with the flexibility to skip or repeat steps on the fly. The hub also manages the size of the sample, extracting the right amount for each process.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Researchers creating electricity through photovoltaics want to convert as many of the sun’s wavelengths as possible to achieve maximum efficiency. Otherwise, they’re eating only a small part of a shot duck: wasting time and money by using only a tiny bit of the sun’s incoming energies.

For this reason, they see indium gallium nitride as a valuable future material for photovoltaic systems. Changing the concentration of indium allows researchers to tune the material’s response so it collects solar energy from a variety of wavelengths. The more variations designed into the system, the more of the solar spectrum can be absorbed, leading to increased solar cell efficiencies. Silicon, today’s photovoltaic industry standard, is limited in the wavelength range it can ‘see’ and absorb.

But there is a problem: Indium gallium nitride, part of a family of materials called III-nitrides, is typically grown on thin films of gallium nitride. Because gallium nitride atomic layers have different crystal lattice spacings from indium gallium nitride atomic layers, the mismatch leads to structural strain that limits both the layer thickness and percentage of indium that can be added. Thus, increasing the percentage of indium added broadens the solar spectrum that can be collected, but reduces the material’s ability to tolerate the strain.

Cross-sectional images of the indium gallium nitride nanowire solar cell. (Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Sandia National Laboratories scientists Jonathan Wierer Jr. and George Wang reported in the journal Nanotechnology that if the indium mixture is grown on a phalanx of nanowires rather than on a flat surface, the small surface areas of the nanowires allow the indium shell layer to partially “relax” along each wire, easing strain. This relaxation allowed the team to create a nanowire solar cell with indium percentages of roughly 33 percent, higher than any other reported attempt at creating III-nitride solar cells.

This initial attempt also lowered the absorption base energy from 2.4eV to 2.1 eV, the lowest of any III-nitride solar cell to date, and made a wider range of wavelengths available for power conversion. Power conversion efficiencies were low — only 0.3 percent compared to a standard commercial cell that hums along at about 15 percent — but the demonstration took place on imperfect nanowire-array templates. Refinements should lead to higher efficiencies and even lower energies.

Several unique techniques were used to create the III-nitride nanowire array solar cell. A top-down fabrication process was used to create the nanowire array by masking a gallium nitride (GaN) layer with a colloidal silica mask, followed by dry and wet etching. The resulting array consisted of nanowires with vertical sidewalls and of uniform height.

Next, shell layers containing the higher indium percentage of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) were formed on the GaN nanowire template via metal organic chemical vapor deposition. Lastly, In_0.02Ga_0.98N was grown, in such a way that caused the nanowires to coalescence. This process produced a canopy layer at the top, facilitating simple planar processing and making the technology manufacturable.

The results, says Wierer, although modest, represent a promising path forward for III-nitride solar cell research. The nano-architecture not only enables higher indium proportion in the InGaN layers but also increased absorption via light scattering in the faceted InGaN canopy layer, as well as air voids that guide light within the nanowire array.

The research was funded by DOE’s Office of Science through the Solid State Lighting Science Energy Frontier Research Center, and Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078

Sandia's new Cybersecurity Technologies Research Laboratory (CTRL) offers an open yet controlled area for professionals to discuss cyber research. (Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

LIVERMORE, Calif. — Sandia National Laboratories’ new Cybersecurity Technologies Research Laboratory (CTRL) now offers an open yet controlled area for cybersecurity professionals from the Bay Area and across the country to meet and discuss critical cyber research issues.

A grand opening for the facility, which resides on the grounds of the Livermore Valley Open Campus (LVOC), was held today, June 12.

“With CTRL, we can run experiments and talk more freely about a wide range of cyber research activities, and we can do so with a variety of U.S. and international collaborators but without some of the unrelated restrictions that are often associated with a national laboratory,” said Jim Costa, senior manager of computational sciences and analysis at Sandia’s California site.

“At the same time, we can do these things in a uniquely controlled environment where we know what activities are taking place and we can monitor who and what else is in the building,” he said. “We look at CTRL like our own neighborhood hangout for Sandia and visiting cyber professionals who need an open but secure place to meet and collaborate.”

Broadly, CTRL will promote stronger relationships between industry, academia and national laboratories in the research and development of cybersecurity solutions through technology, practices and policy. Specifically, CTRL aims to:

• Develop the science and computing foundation necessary for robust cyber security research and development.
• Develop critical relationships to help understand the full range of technical threat concerns facing industry, government (nonclassified) and academia.
• Develop, test and help implement cybersecurity approaches in real-world situations.
• Promote the various technical domains that support the advancement of cybersecurity, essential to the security and stability of the U.S. and the world.
• Develop political and social awareness of the real, imminent threat and the consequences posed by cyber exploits and attacks.
• Provide a window to the external world on open cybersecurity and related work throughout Sandia, along with acting as a Bay Area resource for open work performed at Sandia’s New Mexico location.

Sandia has a decades-long history in cybersecurity, said Costa, the origins of which lie in the Labs’ nuclear weapons program. Most recently, it has received accolades for its successful Center for Cyber Defenders (CCD) program, which has trained hundreds of college students in cyber defense and has seen many go into private industry and government to tackle cybersecurity issues. This summer’s Sandia/California CCD interns are housed in the CTRL facility.

As a national security laboratory, Sandia needs to remain active in the cybersecurity arena, said Costa, and Sandia’s California site is well-positioned to offer a facility like CTRL to Silicon Valley interests, federal and local government and companies from around the country that need it the most. Virtually every company and organization in existence has issues with privacy, supply chains, exfiltration of intellectual property, malware and communications, so places where scientists, engineers and cyber analysts can gather openly yet securely have become critical.

“The Bay Area is a hotbed for social media and computer companies of every type, and every product or service being developed today must be reliable and resilient,” Costa said. “Any of it can be attacked by our adversaries, so the more we can facilitate technical discussions with our cybersecurity brethren, the better.” Access to CTRL, he said, is very flexible, so some non-Sandia personnel could conceivably come for an afternoon or day, stay a week or more or even have an office set up for long-term use.

In addition to its CCD students, CTRL houses a number of Sandia cyber programs funded by multiple sources and is beginning to provide office space for academic and industrial partners. Costa said he envisions even more CTRL users in the coming months and years, potentially from other collaborators Sandia hasn’t even begun to work with. He also sees the facility as an important contributor to workforce development.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Mike Janes, mejanes@sandia.gov, (925) 294-2447

The $3.2 million FEI Titan G2 8200 is 50 to 100 times better than what came before, both in resolution and the time it takes to analyze a sample, said Kotula and Ping Lu, who are materials scientists. 

The AC-STEM delivers electron beams accelerated at voltages from 80 kV to 200 kV, allowing researchers to study properties of structures at the nanoscale — crucial for materials scientists working on everything from microelectronics to nuclear weapons. 

Kotula and Lu operate the microscope from a basement lab adjacent to the environment-controlled room that houses it. They’re not in the same room because the instrument is so sensitive even clicking a computer mouse against a desk would cause an image to jump, Lu said. 

“At the atomic scale, it doesn’t take too much,” Lu said. 

Principal investigators Paul Kotula, left, and Ping Lu of Sandia National Laboratories show off the Labs’ new aberration-corrected scanning transmission microscope, which has a unique combination of X-ray detectors and very high resolution and is capable of doing analyses in far less time than its predecessor. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

The remote operation affords another advantage: researchers at Sandia’s California site can run it from 1,000 miles away, which they demonstrated in March. Kotula jokes the only things they can’t do from the California site are load the sample and fill the liquid nitrogen that cools the machine. 

Sandia’s AC-STEM is the first commercial unit fielded, based in part upon development funded by a Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences project to develop advanced electron microscopes based on aberration-correcting optics. The Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope, or TEAM project, was a collaboration of the Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge national laboratories and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory. 

The physics of nanomaterials are different, Kotula and Lu said. “They have different optical properties than bulk material — gold nanoparticles versus gold foil, they’re totally different,” Kotula said.

For example, the smallest impurities or structural defects hurt performance in super thin microelectronics layers, he said. In the same way, interfaces in a weapon are critical because that’s where impurities tend to show up, “where you might get some sort of separation or corrosion or reaction happening that’s the basis of aging of these materials,” he said. “Being sensitive to that lets us help others predict lifetimes, replacement intervals or failure modes so we know what to look for.” 

It takes powerful instruments to do those studies. 

“You need this kind of tool to quantify it,” said Lu as he sat in front of a computer screen showing an image of a 50-nanometer-thick specimen inside the AC-STEM, a sample 2,000 times thinner than a human hair. 

What looks like a close-up of mesh or lattice on the screen is really an image of 3-angstrom atomic spacing between titanium and strontium. An angstrom equals one-tenth of a billionth of a meter. 

The microscope uses a unique in-lens design in which four X-ray detectors surround a sample placed in the center, increasing collection efficiency, Lu said. 

Older instruments were limited by lens aberrations, particularly spherical aberration that prevents sharp focus because electrons off the optical axis are focused more strongly than ones near the optical axis, Kotula said. The AC-STEM’s additional lenses and computational elements eliminate such problems, he said. 

“With the aberration-correction technology, you can open the aperture up and keep all those electrons focused to a nice point on your sample,” he said. 

The image on the left was captured in seven minutes at 0.5nm/pixel with Sandia's new AC-STEM; the image on the right was captured in 120 minutes at 2nm/pixel with the old microscope. The analytical power of the AC-STEM is at least 70 times better than the older analytical microscope at Sandia. These high-resolution chemical images are confirming predictions from the 1970s regarding the atomic-scale characteristics of electrical contact materials. (Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

Atomic resolution requires a tiny probe and scanning the sample at very high magnification. 

High electron-beam currents can damage some samples. However, “you can easily back off on the intensity” of the AC-STEM’s beam because it has so many adjustable parameters, Kotula said. 

A dark spot that looks like a hole in Lu’s sample indicates damage, but it’s deliberate as he sputters atoms from the sample with a 200 kV electron beam, knocking atoms out of the lattice to measure how removing part of the sample affects the X-ray signal.  

 The AC-STEM also studies material in the micron world. Although a hundred microns is about the smallest size a human eye can see, it’s a huge scale for a transmission electron microscope. 

At the micron level, “we’re not making such a fine beam anymore but we’re using the collection efficiency and the bright electron source to be sensitive to small concentrations,” Kotula said. “That’s very important for a lot of our customers who are looking for impurities in some of these materials.” 

The room that houses the microscope has to retain stability in vibration, acoustics, temperature and electromagnetic fields. Acoustic and chilled water panels line the walls, and the room’s 65-degree temperature varies less than two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit over half an hour. The instrument’s accelerator, capable of producing 200,000 volts, is stowed behind acoustic drapes in a corner to isolate vibrations from the 9.5-foot-tall column containing lenses and the instrument’s in-lens X-ray detectors. 

Theories about aberration-correction were published in the 1950s but computers were in their infancy and no one could manually adjust microscopes that required multiple alignments and mechanical and power stability, Kotula said. 

“This new transmission electron microscope is now the flagship of our departmental capabilities that include professionally maintained, state-of-the-art equipment in all types of bulk material analysis — gas, liquid, solid — and microstructural characterization, including electron optics, diffraction and spectroscopy,” said manager Jim Aubert. 

The AC-STEM offers endless potential for collaboration with colleagues at Sandia and other national laboratories, companies and universities since they don’t have to be on site to participate, the researchers said. 

“Other colleagues can go online and look over your shoulder virtually,” Kotula said.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.

Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362