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Precision Engineering |
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The Laboratory has long been a leader in the field of precision engineering, starting with weapons design in the 1950s. We expect the Laboratory to continue its demand for further pioneering work in this field, relying on our expertise in the design of machines and instruments, the development of manufacturing processes and systems, and our advanced work in dimensional metrology. We are applying this expertise to evolve machinery capable of the atomic-level material removal and deposition required to build high-precision parts and the atomic-level metrology required to characterize them and their assemblies. Our developing capabilities will be used to build the experimental target packages for studying inertial confinement fusion on the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. This stretches us in two ways. Complexity increases as we move from the simpler, two-dimensional target packages that we fielded on previous experiments to the three-dimensional experiments slated for NIF. Additionally, these experiments are a decrease in size and commensurate increase in accuracy when compared to past experiments conducted on Nova. The ultimate challenge of NIF is to construct complex, millimeter-size or "mesoscale" devices from exotic materials to precise tolerances in an extremely clean environment. Precision engineering will have a place at LLNL as long as physics experimentation continues. Physics experiments cry out for perfection. While perfection is seldom possible in an engineered system, increasing the system's precision brings it as close to perfection as possible.
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