Enhancements to combustion technology can still help with carbon reduction, oil savings issues LIVERMORE, Calif.— The internal combustion engine has been the workhorse for transportation for more than a century, but Sandia National Laboratories researchers say there is still plenty to learn about engineering it to burn cleaner and more efficiently. A Sandia researcher will [...]
Category Archives: Chemistry
Scientists to explore need for, relevance of combustion engines at AAAS gathering
February 12, 2013 – 9:00 am
‘Zombie’ replica cells may outperform live ones as catalysts and conductors
February 7, 2013 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — “Zombie” mammalian cells that may function better after they die have been created by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico (UNM). The simple technique coats a cell with a silica solution to form a near-perfect replica of its structure. The process may simplify a wide variety of [...]
Four technology transfer awards go to Sandia Labs
October 22, 2012 – 10:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Sandia National Laboratories has won four awards from the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) for Sandia’s efforts to develop and commercialize innovative technologies. The FLC’s Far West/Mid-Continent regional awards recognized Sandia’s technology transfer work with crystalline silico-titanates (CSTs), biomimetic membranes, the i-Gate Innovation Hub and DAKOTA software. “It is always gratifying when the [...]
Students painlessly measure knee joint fluids in annual Sandia contest
September 26, 2012 – 9:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Texas Tech University repeated last year’s victory in the novel design category of Sandia National Laboratories’ annual competition to design new, extraordinarily tiny devices, while Carnegie Mellon University won the educational microelectromechanical (MEMS) prize for the second year in a row. This year’s contest attracted engineering students from nine universities, nearly double [...]
Sandia solar researcher chosen as one of continent’s ten most brilliant scientists
September 24, 2012 – 9:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia researcher Greg Nielson is “one of the 10 most promising young scientists working today,” says Popular Science magazine. Nielson garnered one of the magazine’s “Brilliant 10” awards for helping lead the Sandia effort to create solar cells the size of glitter. Past Brilliant 10 honorees have gone on to win the [...]
Alaskan North Slope climate: hard data from a hard place
August 13, 2012 – 5:00 am
Researchers examine clouds (from both sides now) and the structure of the atmosphere BARROW, Alaska — Sandia National Laboratories’ researcher Mark Ivey and I (science writer Neal Singer) are standing on the tundra at an outpost of science at the northernmost point of the North American continent. We are five miles northeast of Barrow, an Alaskan village [...]
Fiery research: Sandia computers model rocket fuel fires
July 31, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Walt Gill of Sandia National Laboratories’ Fire & Aerosol Sciences Department calls it a pancake — a disk more than a foot in diameter covered with what looks like the debris you’d scrape off a particularly messy barbecue grill. It’s actually a crunchy, baked-on mixture of aluminum, aluminum oxide, carbon and other [...]
Predictions by climate models are flawed, says invited speaker at Sandia
July 25, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, a global warming skeptic, told about 70 Sandia researchers in June that too much is being made of climate change by researchers seeking government funding. He said their data and their methods did not support their claims. “Despite concerns over the last decades with the [...]
National workshop brings career development help to Sandia postdocs, student interns
July 17, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The American Chemical Society’s ACS on Campus is bringing career development workshops for scientists and engineers to Sandia National Laboratories’ postdoctoral fellows and interns, only the second time the program has come to a national laboratory. ACS on Campus will kick off the evening of July 19 with a Science Café presentation [...]
Small worlds come into focus with new Sandia microscope
June 11, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Paul Kotula recently told a colleague that Sandia’s new aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope (AC-STEM) was like a Lamborghini with James Bond features. The $3.2 million FEI Titan G2 8200 is 50 to 100 times better than what came before, both in resolution and the time it takes to analyze a sample, [...]
Sandia Labs’ unique approach to materials allows temperature-stable circuits
May 31, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M — Sandia National Laboratories researcher Steve Dai jokes that his approach to creating materials whose properties won’t degenerate during temperature swings is a lot like cooking — mixing ingredients and fusing them together in an oven. Sandia has developed a unique materials approach to multilayered, ceramic-based, 3-D microelectronics circuits, such as those used [...]
Sandia Labs technology used in Fukushima cleanup
May 29, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A Sandia National Laboratories technology has been used to remove radioactive material from more than 43 million gallons of contaminated wastewater at Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Sandia researchers had worked around the clock following the March 2011 disaster to show the technology worked in seawater, which was pumped in [...]
New model of geological strata may aid oil extraction, water recovery and Earth history studies
May 23, 2012 – 5:00 am
‘Largest known chemical wave’ caused previously unrecognized effects, said Sandia researcher ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A Sandia modeling study contradicts a long-held belief of geologists that pore sizes and chemical compositions are uniform throughout a given strata, which are horizontal slices of sedimentary rock. By understanding the variety of pore sizes and spatial patterns in strata, geologists [...]
Sandia paper on flat-panel displays is one of Applied Physics Letters’ 50 greatest hits
May 7, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, NM — A paper by Sandia National Laboratories researchers with implications for early flat panel televisions is one of the 50 most cited papers from the prestigious journal Applied Physics Letters in the last 50 years, according to a listing made public by that journal. The 1996 paper shows that zinc oxide (ZnO) will [...]
Miniature Sandia sensors may advance climate studies
April 10, 2012 – 5:00 am
Self-sealing valves also increase data reliability for airborne industrial and battlefield gas detection and point-of-contact medicine ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — An air sampler the size of an ear plug is expected to cheaply and easily collect atmospheric samples to improve computer climate models. “We now have an inexpensive tool for collecting pristine vapor samples in the [...]
Sandia National Laboratories researchers find energy storage “solutions” in MetILs
February 17, 2012 – 8:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Sandia researchers have developed a new family of liquid salt electrolytes, known as MetILs, that could lead to batteries able to cost-effectively store three times more energy than today’s batteries. The research, published in Dalton Transactions, might lead to devices that can help economically and reliably incorporate large-scale intermittent renewable energy sources, [...]
Anthrax-killing foam proves effective in meth lab cleanup
February 16, 2012 – 5:00 am
Sandia’s decontamination foam is now also a meth eraser Sandia’s decontamination foam, developed more than a decade ago and used to decontaminate federal office buildings and mailrooms during the 2001 anthrax attacks, is now being used to decontaminate illegal methamphetamine labs. Mark Tucker, a chemical engineer in Sandia’s Chemical & Biological Systems Dept. and co-creator [...]
Sandia chemists find new material to remove radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel
January 23, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste. The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. “This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine [...]
Sandia researchers, UK partners publish groundbreaking work on Criegee intermediates in Science magazine
January 13, 2012 – 5:00 am
LIVERMORE, Calif. — In a breakthrough paper (full text/PDF) published in this week’s issue of Science magazine, researchers from Sandia’s Combustion Research Facility, the University of Manchester and Bristol University report direct measurements of reactions of a gas-phase Criegee intermediate using photoionization mass spectrometry. (Click here to see a short video of Sandia combustion chemists discussing [...]