In acknowledging the achievement, Laboratory Director Robert Kuckuck said, "The teams that received 2005 R&D 100 awards once again showed that, when put to the test, the scientific talent and the research and development excellence at this Laboratory really shine through. I am extremely proud of the award recipients and all the Los Alamos teams that submitted entries to this year's competition."
The R&D 100 awards program is designed to honor significant commercial promise in products, materials or processes developed by the international research and development community. Each year, R&D Magazine recognizes the world's top 100 scientific and technological advances with awards for innovations showing the most significant commercial potential.
The four Los Alamos National Laboratory technologies receiving R&D 100 awards exemplified scientific excellence, while two of those teams with external partners also demonstrated their abilities to successfully collaborate with private sector companies and other institutions.
Award winners this year include:
CartaBlanca: A High-Efficiency, Object-Oriented, General-Purpose Computer Simulation Environment
CartaBlanca is an object-oriented simulation software package poised to offer next-generation modeling and simulation capabilities to scientists across disciplines. CartaBlanca has applications in aerospace engineering, animation and special effects, computational fluid dynamics, fluid/solid interactions, automotive design, weapons / target interactions, pharmaceutical processing and homeland defense. It brings the efficiency of the Java programming language to scientific computing and enables computer code developers to simulate complex non-linear effects such as airflow through a turbo booster, blast effects on buildings, or heat transfer along a semi-conductor.
MESA: Measuring Enzyme-Substrate Affinities
MESA is a low-cost assay for detecting the binding of drugs to proteins without the biasing influence of adding fluorescent molecular labels. MESA's ability to measure a large number of protein-drug interactions and its resulting early detection of toxicity could save hundreds of millions of dollars in drug development costs.
MESA has applications in personalized medicine and assists in treating currently incurable diseases through identification of new protein targets for drug therapies. It also offers more accurate data than that obtained with fluorescently labeled molecules. The Los Alamos team partnered with Caldera Pharmaceuticals, Inc. on this effort.
nanoFOAM: A Metal-Nanofoam Fabrication Technique
The team developed the nanoFOAM technique to produce self-supporting, nanoporous metal foams by igniting a pressed pellet of a special compound in an inert atmosphere. Nanofoams produced to date include iron, cobalt, copper and silver, which have values comparable to silica aerogels, the lightest known solids. Nanofoams can be used to improve oil-refining processes and electrical generation from fuel cells that run on hydrocarbons, enhance the strength and heat transfer properties of jet-turbine blades while decreasing their weight, reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides from internal combustion engines and coal-fired power plants, remediate chlorohydrocarbons in the environment and increase the sensitivity of biomedical detectors.
NESSUS: Probabilistic and Uncertainty Analysis for Large Scale Complex Systems
NESSUS is a general-purpose tool for computing the reliability of engineered systems. It was originally developed by a team led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) as part of a 10-year NASA project to develop a probabilistic design tool for the space shuttle main engine. Recently, a team consisting of members from Los Alamos National Laboratory and SwRI enhanced and applied NESSUS to the Laboratory's weapon reliability assessments for Stockpile Stewardship Program.
New features include support for extremely large multi-physics models, a sophisticated Java-based graphical user interface, three-dimensional probability contouring and results visualization, advanced design of experiment and sensitivity analysis, probabilistic input database, and interfaces to ABAQUS, ANSYS, LS-DYNA, MSC.NASTRAN and ParaDyn.
Over the past 18 years, the R&D 100 awards have become just one measure of Los Alamos' technical contributions to society. Technologies from the Laboratory are nominated in open competition and judged by technical experts selected by the Illinois-based R&D Magazine. The awards are officially made in October.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Washington Group International for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.