A new design for gigantic blades longer than two football fields could help bring offshore 50-megawatt (MW) wind turbines to the United States and the world. Sandia National Laboratories’ research on the extreme-scale Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR) is funded by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program. The challenge: Design a […]
Thor’s Hammer To Crush Materials At 1 Million Atmospheres
A new Sandia National Laboratories accelerator called Thor is expected to be 40 times more efficient than Sandia’s Z machine, the world’s largest and most powerful pulsed-power accelerator, in generating pressures to study materials under extreme conditions. “Thor’s magnetic field will reach about one million atmospheres, about the pressures at Earth’s core,” said David Reisman, […]
Supercomputer Benchmark Gains Adherents
A software program that ranks supercomputers on their ability to solve complex problems rather than on raw speed alone continues to gain traction in the high-performance computing community. More than 60 supercomputers were ranked by the emerging tool, termed the High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) benchmark, in ratings released at the annual supercomputing meeting SC15 […]
DOE Aims to Boost Economy Through National Lab Tech Transfer
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is intensifying efforts to move technology developed at the national laboratories into the private sector to boost the economy and create jobs, says the acting director of the department’s new Office of Technology Transitions. “Tech transfer is a mission of the DOE and all our national labs,” said Jetta […]
LED Pulser Delivers Laser-Like Performance at Fraction of the Cost
When Sandia National Laboratories electronics engineer Chris Carlen got enthusiastic about flashlights containing high-power light-emitting devices (LEDs), he didn’t expect his hobby to lead to the creation of a new, high-speed LED driver that delivers lighting performance that exceeds that of conventional sources at a fraction of the cost. The Sandia LED Pulser provides high-brightness, […]
Way Cheaper Catalyst May Lower Fuel Costs for Hydrogen-Powered Cars
Sandia National Laboratories researchers seeking to make hydrogen a less expensive fuel for cars have upgraded a catalyst nearly as cheap as dirt — molybdenum disulfide, “molly” for short — to stand in for platinum, a rare element with the moonlike price of $1,500 a gram. Sandia-induced changes elevate the plentiful, 37-cents-a-gram molly from being […]
Improving How Intelligence Analysts Gather Visual Information
Intelligence analysts working to identify national security threats in warzones or airports or elsewhere often flip through multiple images to create a video-like effect. They also may toggle between images at lightning speed, pan across images, zoom in and out or view videos or other moving records. These dynamic images demand software and hardware tools […]
Shared Opportunities for Natural Gas & Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle Markets
Fueling stations that offer both hydrogen and natural gas could benefit distributors of both fuel types, says a new Sandia National Laboratories report, “Transitioning the Transportation Sector: Exploring the Intersection of Hydrogen Fuel Cell and Natural Gas Vehicles.” The report, from a workshop last fall supported by the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies and Fuel […]
Asian American Engineering Honorees Credit Families for Success
Two scientists at Sandia National Laboratories thought back to their roots when they won Asian American Engineer of the Year (AAEOY) awards: Somuri Prasad to a village in India and Patrick Feng to a refuge in America. Prasad’s father helped found the first school in his native Pasumarru in the Krishna District of southern India. […]
Iron Is Key to How Stars Transmit Energy
Working at temperatures matching the interior of the sun, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine have been able to determine experimentally, for the first time in history, iron’s role in inhibiting energy transmission from the center of the sun to near the edge of its radiative band — the section of the solar interior […]