Since 1963, R&D Magazine has awarded R&D 100
Awards to honor the 100 most technically significant new products
and processes of the year. These awards were originally known
as the I-R 100s. Laboratory scientists and engineers (with collaborators)
have won 113 of these coveted “Oscars of Invention” since
1978, including 7 awards in 2006.
Awards in 2008 were received for:
Left to right, Curtis Brown Thomas LaGrange and Judy Kim make adjustments to the dynamic transmission electron microscope.
SecureBox—a low–cost, reliable, reusable advanced system to improve the security of cargo containers during shipping. This award was won in collaboration with Secure Box Corp. of Santa Clara and the National Infrastructure Institute Center for Infrastructure Expertise of Portsmouth, N.H.
Autonomous alignment process for laser fusion systems or AAPLF—a revolutionary “hands-off” system that directs and aligns multiple high–energy laser beams to enable controlled manmade fusion reactions.
Dynamic Transmission Electron Microscope—which provides the highest resolution ever for digital imaging of ultrafast material processes on the billionth of a meter scale. This work has been done in collaboration with JEOL USA Inc., a Peabody, Mass.-based company.
Awards in 2007 were received for:
The final device concept
on a
PDA with a graphical interface
to guide diagnosis.
Micro
Electro Mechanical System (MEMS)-based Adaptive
Optics Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope (MAOSLO)—will
enable clinicians to image and measure microscopic
structures of the living eye, such as individual
photoreceptors and ganglion cells.
Pneumothorax
Detector—a
new medical diagnostic device to detect pneumothorax,
a medical condition caused by having air trapped
in the space between the wall of the chest cavity
and the lung.
Continuous
phase plate optics—an
important breakthrough for the Laboratory's National
Ignition Facility. Allows the laser's 192 beams to
be optimally coupled to its targets. These optics,
developed in conjunction with Zygo Corp. of Middlefield,
Conn. and QED Technologies of Rochester, N.Y., are
a vital part of the optics chain for kilojoule- and
megajoule-class laser systems like NIF, France's
Megajoule Laser, and the Omega laser at the University
of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
Large Area Imager—an
advanced radiation detection system that can be used in a moving vehicle
to pinpoint the presence of nuclear materials.
Hypre—a
software library called hypre that allows researchers
to use supercomputers such as BlueGene/L and ASC Purple
more effectively to conduct larger, more detailed simulations
faster than ever before.
Caption—The
final device concept on a PDA with a graphical interface
to guide diagnosis.
Awards in 2006 were received for:
The ELITE team includes Del Eckels, John Reynolds and Peter Nunes of the Forensic Science Center
Sonoma Persistent Surveillance System—an end-to-end systems approach to monitoring a large field of view 24/7 with sufficient resolution and frame rate to track all moving vehicles in the field.
Ultrahigh-Resolution Gamma and Neutron Spectrometer—a high-energy resolution spectrometer that can be configured to characterize and identify gamma-ray or neutron sources quickly
Babel: The High-Performance Language Interoperability Tool—provides a high-performance solution to the programming language-interoperability problem that enables software pieces written in different programming languages to seamlessly call each other.
ELITE: A Pocket-Sized Trace Explosives Test—a shirt-pocket-sized trace explosives test that is robust, sensitive, cheap and simple enough to be used by security forces everywhere.
Sapphire: Scientific Data Mining Software—a software toolkit for the analysis of massive, complex datasets arising from scientific experiments, observations and computer simulations.
Externally Dispersed Interferometry—a novel interferometer-spectrograph system used to measure precision Doppler velocities of stars or sunlit targets. It also is used to measure high-resolution spectra.
High-Average-Power Wavelength Converter—a device for efficiently changing the “color” of laser light, enabling large-aperture, high-average-power lasers to operate at wavelengths different than the wavelength set by the laser medium.
R&D 100 Award
Awards in 2005 were received for:
Biological Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (BAMS)—able to identify the presence and concentration of harmful biological particles in air samples.
Adaptable Radiation Area Monitor (ARAM)—able to detect even small quantities of radioactive materials moving at either very slow speeds or in moving vehicles (shared with Innovative Survivability Technologies of Goleta, California).
NanoFoil—a nanoengineered
heat source for lead-free soldering and brazing of materials at room
temperature (shared with Reactive NanoTechnologies of Hunt Valley, Maryland,
and Johns Hopkins University).
VisIt—a visualization software tool for parallel processing of up to trillions of bytes of data.
See this and previous years’ October issue of
our monthly magazine Science & Technology
Review, for more information about R&D100 Award winners. Also
see the achievements
page of Laboratory’s Industrial Parnerships and Commercialization
organization.