Sandia National Laboratories won the Federal Laboratory Consortium’s (FLC) national 2017 Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer for a heat-exchanger technology that makes power generation more efficient. And Sandia won the FLC’s State and Local Economic Development Recognition award for its work on the New Jersey TRANSITGRID project. The Technology Transfer award honors employees of FLC member laboratories and […]
Battling Corrosion to Keep Solar Panels Humming
People think of corrosion as rust on cars or oxidation that blackens silver, but it also harms critical electronics and connections in solar panels, lowering the amount of electricity produced. “It’s challenging to predict and even more challenging to design ways to reduce it because it’s highly dependent on material and environmental conditions,” says Eric […]
New Cooling Method for Supercomputers to Save Millions of Gallons of Water
In different parts of the country, people discuss gray-water recycling and rainwater capture to minimize the millions of gallons of groundwater required to cool large data centers. But the simple answer in many climates, said Sandia National Laboratories researcher David J. Martinez, is to use liquid refrigerant. Dave Martinez Based on that principle, Martinez — […]
Designing a Geothermal Drilling Tool That Can Take the Heat
Sandia National Laboratories and a commercial firm have designed a drilling tool that will withstand the heat of geothermal drilling. The downhole hammer attaches to the end of a column of drill pipe and cuts through rock with a rapid hammering action similar to that of a jackhammer. Downhole hammers are not new — the […]
Lightning Lab: Recreating Nature’s Big Show for Research
Sandia National Laboratories creates lightning in a lab to evaluate how anything from sensitive nuclear weapons components to entire buildings will hold up against the worst that nature might throw at them. “Sandia’s primary mission is to assure an ‘always/never’ operating condition for nuclear weapons,” said Larry Schneider, senior manager of Sandia’s Electrical Sciences group. […]
Researchers Explore Aggressive, High-Efficiency, Sparkplug-Free Gasoline Auto Engines
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ Combustion Research Facility are helping to develop sparkplug-free engines that will help meet ambitious automotive fuel economy targets of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. They are working on low-temperature gasoline combustion (LTGC) operating strategies for affordable, high-efficiency engines that will meet stringent air-quality standards. Sandia researchers Isaac Ekoto and […]
World’s Fastest Multiframe Digital X-Ray Camera Created
An adversary who steps inside a boxer’s sense of rhythm may land a punch the boxer never saw coming. A similar problem faces physicists struggling to achieve laboratory-scale nuclear fusion: A rogue event occurring between successively monitored images may knock an otherwise promising experiment off-kilter without anyone seeing the cause. To narrow that unexamined patch […]
Ingenious Method Enables Sharper Flat-Panel Displays at Lower Energy Costs
A perpetual quest of manufacturers and viewers is for ever-brighter colors and better images for flat-panel displays built from less expensive materials that also use less electricity. An intriguing method discovered by Sandia National Laboratories researcher Alec Talin and collaborators at the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at the National Institute of Standards and […]
Sandia Flame Cell Tests, Tames Godzilla-Style Fire
The flame starts out like Bambi, looking slender and vulnerable in the array of video screens above the computer bank in the FLAME facility of Sandia’s Thermal Test Complex in Tech Area 3. View more: Photos of the Day: Sandia Conducts Monstrous Flame Tests Within seconds, cameras record what appears to be a forest fire of […]
Photos of the Day: Sandia Conducts Monstrous Flame Tests
Sandia National Laboratories’ Thermal Test Complex (TTC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, provides a controlled environment in which to demonstrate the performance of components and assemblies under a variety of abnormal thermal environments. This controlled environment provides an ideal setting on which to develop and validate response models. The facility conducts thermal testing under controlled temperatures […]