Sandia has accumulated 80 R&D 100 Awards since 1976. See the complete list at our corporate website…
Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary
“Once again, DOE’s labs are at the cutting edge of innovation with new technology developments to enhance America’s economic and national security. My heartiest congratulations to the DOE researchers and scientists who have won R&D Magazine’s prestigious awards this year.”
Sandia’s Chief Technology Officer
“The R&D 100 Awards are an important metric of Sandia’s success in impacting the nation through our discovery and innovation. They also serve a key role in demonstrating to industry that Sandia is an eager partner in technology maturation.”
The prestigious R&D 100 Awards are given each year by R&D Magazine to the 100 most technologically significant new products from around the world. The sole criterion for winning, according to a description released by the magazine, is “demonstrable technological significance compared with competing products and technologies.” Properties noted by judges include smaller size, faster speed, greater efficiency, and higher environmental consciousness.
The judging of the R&D 100 Awards first began in 1963. These awards — sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prizes of applied research” or the “Oscars of invention” — now represent the pinnacle of recognition for scientific innovators. Sandia and our partners have been honored with a total of 80 R&D 100 Awards since 1976, including the following five awards in 2007:
To see Sandia’s complete list of R&D Awards, visit our corporate website.
ArcSafe with PASD is a patented electrical wiring diagnostic tool that can detect and locate wiring insulation defects in complex wiring systems, including commercial and military aircraft.
PASD sends a high-voltage but extremely short-duration pulse along wires to create a momentary short circuit at the slightest break in insulation. Energy reflected back to sensors is used to locate the defect, enabling potential short circuits to be repaired before they occur. PASD has been incorporated into a portable diagnostic system
According to project lead Larry Schneider, “PASD shows tremendous promise as the world’s only effective diagnostic capable of detecting and accurately locating such hard-to-find insulation defects as breached insulation, chafing, and insulation cracks.” Funding sources for this project included the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Nuclear Energy program, and the Department of Defense (DoD).
The ElectroNeedle biomedical sensor array can be used in a point-of-care setting to make rapid diagnostic measurements by simply pressing the device against a patient’s skin.
The ElectroNeedle patch detects and identifies biological markers just beneath the skin’s surface. Microneedles of various heights enable the patch’s biological-recognition layer to contact appropriate tissue — for example, interstitial fluid in the epidermal layers or blood in the deeper dermal layers.
The array combines electrochemical measurement techniques with well-defined recognition chemistries and an easy-to-use sensor. Many biologically important species — including bacteria, toxins, viruses, carbohydrates, electrolytes, lipids, and enzymes — can be detected painlessly and rapidly in situ, eliminating the need to withdraw bodily fluids for later analysis.
ElectroNeedle arrays are produced using standard microfabrication techniques and thus can be batch-produced at a low cost after commercialization. The Sandia team, which has been granted one patent and has three patents pending, includes David Ingersoll, Chris Apblett, Steve Casalnuovo, Carrie Schmidt, retiree Stanley Kravitz, former Sandian Jeb Flemming, and former student intern Colin Buckley. The work was funded by Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program.
Using coiled fibers to dramatically increase the power of fiber lasers has led to the fabrication of high-power, high-beam-quality lasers that are compact, rugged, and extremely efficient.
Prior to this breakthrough, conventional wisdom assumed that fiber lasers were restricted to low output powers and pulse energies. Specifically, a small, single-mode fiber core (typically less than 10 μm in diameter) could not generate or transmit high optical powers without being damaged or inciting parasitic nonlinear processes. Increasing the core size increased laser power at the expense of beam quality, an unacceptable tradeoff for most applications.
In 2000, Sandia and Naval Research Laboratory researchers demonstrated that bend loss from a coiled, large-core (multimode) fiber could act as a distributed filter, suppressing all but the desired fundamental mode. Breaking the single-mode limit allowed fiber lasers to increase their power by a factor of more than 100. Since then, fiber lasers have displaced conventional solid-state lasers in numerous applications and have enabled entirely new applications.
The discovery earned a patent in 2002 for Jeff Koplow and Dahv Kliner from Sandia/California and Lew Goldberg, the inventors listed on the R&D 100 Award. The technique has become the de facto worldwide standard for power scaling of fiber lasers. The first commercial license for the invention was granted in 2005, and the first commercial products were offered by coapplicants Nufern and Liekki in 2006. Three other companies have licensed and commercialized the invention.
Funding sources for the work included LDRD, DoD’s Air Force Research Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation.
The Novint Falcon is an interactive 3D-touch game controller that uses Novint/Sandia 3D-touch software. Sandian Nathan Golden and his industrial partners submitted a joint application for this R&D 100 Award, which honors haptics technology originally developed at Sandia by former Sandian Tom Anderson. The software based on this technology was exclusively licensed to Novint for commercialization.
The Novint controller has a handgrip whose movements are tracked with a computerized 3-D cursor. When the cursor touches a virtual object, the computer registers the contact and then updates currents to the controller’s three electrical motors. These currents create an appropriate force to the handle for the user to feel. The computer updates the device’s position and currents a thousand times a second (i.e., at a 1-kHz rate), providing a very realistic sense of touch.
Haptics is the science and art of providing touch sensations with computer-generated environments so that virtual objects seem real and tangible when touched. The current focus of this commercial technology is computer games; however, haptics technology has the potential for more serious applications. For example, a medical training simulator using haptics technology could enable a doctor to feel a scalpel cut through virtual skin, a needle push through virtual tissue, or a drill pass through virtual bone.
Other possible applications include scientific visualization, computer-aided design or manufacturing, computer animation, engineering design and analysis, architectural layout, virtual toys, remote vehicle and robot control, automotive design, art, medical rehabilitation, and interfaces for the blind.
Funding sources for this work included LDRD and DOE’s Defense Programs.
Creating a self-assembling process for fabricating tailored thin films involved the development of a simple, soft coating process that forms optical, electrical, and magnetic thin films from self-assembled nanoparticles. The researchers —Hongyou Fan, Bruce Burckel, and Jeff Brinker from Sandia and Earl Stromberg of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics — developed a wet-solution-based process that uses self-assembly to create nanocomposite thin films. The properties of these films can easily be tuned by varying particle composition, sizes, shapes, packing density, and geometry.
For example, a film’s index of refraction can be tuned by changing its nanoparticle composition, concentration, or both to exactly match a surface’s required index of refraction. So an antireflective coating can be optimized for both optical glasses and high-index substrates, such as germanium windows. In addition, the Sandia-developed process makes it possible to engineer thin films with multiple functions. For instance, nanoparticle optical films can be made hydrophobic to avoid fogging and icing problems.
“The broad reach of this rapid self-assembly process, delivering performance across multiple markets, at radically lower cost, in an environmentally friendly manner, warrants serious consideration as a top innovation in this decade,” says Walt Werner, a principal engineer for Lockheed Martin.
Development of the thin-film self-assembly process leveraged the fundamental research of DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences program and LDRD aimed at developing multifunctional nanomaterials for microelectronics and optics as well as structure/property investigations of self-assembled nanomaterials. In addition, this process is an extension of nanoparticle self-assembly research that was led by Brinker, Fan, and students and faculty from the University of New Mexico and published in Science in 2004.