Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory researchers are the recipients of six awards among the top 100
industrial innovations worldwide in 2009.
The six technologies honored by the trade journal R&D Magazine were developed
by six teams of LLNL scientists and engineers. They worked with three universities,
four industrial firms, one other national lab, the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear
Detection Office.
Artist's representation of water molecules going through a pair of carbon nanotubes. A large ion (center) is excluded.
The winning of an R&D 100 award provides a mark of excellence known to
industry, government and academia and represents one of the most innovative
ideas of the year.
This year’s R&D 100 awards will be presented Nov. 11 during a black-tie
dinner at the SeaWorld Conference Center in Orlando, Fla.
With this year’s results, the Laboratory has now captured a total of
135 R&D awards since 1978.
“I am extraordinarily proud that the Laboratory has received this outstanding
recognition through the R&D 100 awards this year,” said LLNL Director
George Miller. “Once again, the Laboratory has succeeded in winning acclaim
in a wide range of research areas. These LLNL teams are using their world-class
capabilities and external partnerships to help solve difficult challenges in
the global interest.”
Energy Secretary Steven Chu noted: “I want to congratulate all of this
year’s winners on their awards and to thank them for their work. The large
number of winners from the Department of Energy’s national labs every
year is a clear sign that our labs are doing some of the most innovative research
in the world. This work benefits us all by enhancing America’s competitiveness,
ensuring our security, providing new energy solutions, and expanding the frontiers
of our knowledge. Our national labs are truly national treasures, and it is
wonderful to see their work recognized once again.”
This year’s Livermore R&D 100 awards could provide assistance in
homeland security, help in improving sight for people, boost fusion energy research
and permit major improvements in water purification, among other benefits.
Helping homeland security
A new material — strontium-iodide doped with europium — developed
by LLNL researchers and their partners for use in radiation detectors enables
high-resolution gamma-ray spectroscopy to identify nuclear materials for homeland
security and other important applications.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is supporting the development
of this material and its use in devices. Several private companies are interested
in obtaining licenses to deploy the material as a scintillator in hand-held
detectors and portal monitors, as well as for medical, industrial and military
uses.
The work to develop the material was performed in collaboration with Oak Ridge
National Laboratory, Fisk University, Radiation Monitoring Devices Inc. of Watertown,
Mass. and the DHS’ Domestic Nuclear Detection Office.
Improved water purification
Scientists from LLNL and a Hayward-based company, Porifera Inc., have developed
a technology known as ultrapermeable carbon nanotube membranes, or simply nanotube
membranes, that could play an important role in producing clean water.
Nanotube membranes can serve as an excellent filtration tool for separating
salt and other ionic compounds from seawater or brackish water and for reclaiming
waste water for use in crop irrigation and manufacturing processes.
Water flows about 1,000 times faster through nanotube membranes than through
conventional filtration membranes of similar pore diameter and pore density.
This capability could provide a more than 20 percent reduction in energy consumption
in seawater desalination and more than 80 percent in brackish water desalination.
Seeing the retina at the cellular level
A new clinical instrument, a microelectromechanical systems-based Adaptive
Optics Optical Coherence Tomography device, developed by researchers from LLNL
and other institutions, permits ophthalmologists to see the eye’s retina
at the individual cell level.
With this capability, doctors will be able to obtain early diagnoses and follow
the progession of retinal diseases, as well as track the progress of genetic
therapies that reverse such diseases. The instrument uses the same adaptive
optics principles that allow astronomers to see distant stars and galaxies with
the ground-based Keck Telescope in Hawaii with a higher resolution than the
Hubble Space Telescope.
To date, the team has built and tested three prototype instruments with support
from the National Eye Institute. The work has been performed in collaboration
with the University of California, Davis, the Indiana University School of Optometry
and Boston Micromachines Corp. of Watertown, Mass.
Detecting nuclear materials
LLNL researchers have developed the Statistical Radiation Detection System
(SRaDS), a novel software system that nonexperts can use to rapidly and accurately
distinguish nuclear materials, such as plutonium and uranium, from other radioactive
substances for homeland security uses.
While traditional gamma-ray spectrometry techniques encounter problems with
short screening periods, the SRaDS technology uses all the information available
from each and every gamma ray screened. This approach ensures more accurate
and timely detection and identification than can be achieved with conventional
systems.
SRaDS is scalable and is easily integrated into any gamma detector system,
including large stationary radiation portals used to search for contraband radioactive
material in vehicles, cargo containers, or pedestrians moving through customs
or border crossings. The work was performed in conjunction with ICx Technologies
Inc. of Arlington, Va.
Capturing images of a tiny star
A new diagnostic system, the Grating Actuated Transient Optical Recorder (GATOR),
developed by LLNL scientists and engineers can acquire sequential images of
X-rays or optical light in a trillionth of a second or faster from experiments
on the National Ignition Facility.
This diagnostic tool enables detailed measurements to be taken under ignition
conditions to study the high energy density physics of thermonuclear burn –
the condition in which stars and nuclear weapons operate. It will enable new
studies to advance the scientific understanding of stars as well as stockpile
stewardship.
The GATOR system improves upon the time resolution achievable with existing
instruments by more than fifty-fold and can image events created using high-power
lasers, as well as other high-energy-density objects.
Measuring a photon beam
LLNL researchers have developed an instrument, or energy monitor, that measures
the pulse-by-pulse energy of an X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) photon beam
without being damaged by the beam or affecting beam quality.
Obtaining a continuous understanding of the XFEL photon beam with minimal intrusion
is important because beam characteristics determine the interaction of the beam
with the experimental sample.
XFELs are tunable, high-power sources of photons, and these new machines offer
significant promise for scientific and medical breakthroughs by capturing molecules
and atoms in motion. This work was done in collaboration with a researcher from
the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.