Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory captured five 2006 R&D 100 Awards presented by R&D Magazine. The latest winners bring the Laboratory's total to 103 awards since 1978. Laboratory projects recognized this year apply to a wide range of fields, from law enforcement and mining to sports science and video gaming.
"I am proud to be part of an organization brimming with so much talent and ingenuity," said Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Michael Anastasio. "These awards further demonstrate the innovation and creativity of our staff and their ability to translate abstract concepts into real-world technology."
The R&D 100 Awards program honors significant commercial promise in products, materials, or processes developed by the international research and development community. Each year, Illinois-based R&D Magazine recognizes the world's top 100 scientific and technological advances with awards for innovations showing the most significant commercial potential. Los Alamos National Laboratory screens Lab technologies that are potential candidates and submits entries to the magazine. R&D Magazine uses technical experts to judge the submissions and officially presents the awards during a ceremony in October.
"I congratulate the researchers who have won these awards, which highlight the power and promise of DOE's investments in science and technology," U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said. "Through the efforts of dedicated and innovative scientists and engineers at our national laboratories, DOE is helping to enhance our nation's energy, economic and national security."
The five Los Alamos National Laboratory technologies winning R&D 100 Awards this year are:
Green Primaries
Green Primaries are novel, nontoxic, explosive chemical compounds designed to replace lead-based primary explosives. In addition to being more environmentally friendly (no heavy-metal residues), Green Primaries are safer to manufacture. They pose no explosion danger during the manufacturing process because they are insensitive to spark and can be manufactured in several variants. Green Primaries applications include civilian ammunition-for both hunting and law enforcement; military ammunition and explosive devices; mining, excavation, and demolition detonators; projectile propellants; industrial motors, actuators, and valves; gas generators; pyrotechnics; and miniaturized explosive systems. Since the original R&D 100 submission, scientists at Los Alamos have identified four additional ground-breaking families of environmentally friendly primary explosives.
PixelVizion
PixelVizion is a network processor unit (NPU)-based computer visualization tool that brings a hardware-assisted, lossless, highly scalable, high-frame-rate solution to the bottleneck created by image compositing. Its single-pass network data transmission and on-the-fly image compositing yields an order-of-magnitude increase in interactive response times. The tool composites data at rates 10 to 20 times faster than those of current technologies. As a cost-effective, commercial, off-the-shelf technology, PixelVizion eliminates the need for an expensive network interconnect and accommodates a variety of software rendering packages. PixelVizion has applications in orthopedics, rehabilitation, and sports science; virtual medical training; specialized diagnostic imaging; virtual skin grafting; weather patterns; large-scale scientific problems; animation and special effects; video game graphics; and film post processing.
MICHELLE
MICHELLE is a general purpose 2-D and 3-D charged-particle optics code that self-consistently computes the emission and transport of charged particles in the presence of electrostatic and magnetostatic fields. MICHELLE simulates the operation of a wide variety of charged-particle-beam devices and can calculate up to 200,000 particle trajectories. It is the only code that provides accurate simulations of several advanced guns and collectors used in high-power microwave tubes. These simulations provide physical insights that have saved years of trial-and-error in the laboratory and led to longer-lasting microwave tubes for defense-radar systems, more cost-effective tubes for satellite-communication systems, and higher power tubes for particle-accelerator and deep-space communication systems.
Energetic Neutral Atom Beam Lithography & Epitaxy (ENABLE)
Employing an energetic collimated beam of neutral nitrogen or oxygen atoms, ENABLE comprises a dual-function nanofabrication technology capable of both growing thin films and etching high-aspect-ratio nanostructures. Its low-temperature operation eliminates diffusive and other unwanted surface chemical changes, which are drawbacks of existing nanofabrication processes. Because its precise, high-aspect-ratio nanoscale etching and rapid, high-quality thin film growth capabilities readily can be combined, ENABLE technology is theoretically capable of fabricating details down to 1 nanometer or less in size, giving it greater versatility than current nanofabrication processes. Applications include wide bandgap semiconductors, solid-state lighting, ultraviolet and blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and lasers, multicolor flat-panel display technologies, photovoltaic devices, nanowires, high-quality dielectrics (supercapacitors) and high-capacity microbatteries.
Trident
Trident is a high-level language compiler that supports floating-point data types and operations. It translates into field programmable-gate-array hardware scientific algorithms in the C computer programming language that contain floating-point mathematics. Without a compiler such as Trident, computational scientists cannot access the reconfigurable hardware. In the future, Trident, combined with tools to locate computationally intensive regions, may be used to identify through the use of reconfigurable-logic arrays blocks of code suitable for acceleration.
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.