Several projects at National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratories were among the winners last week of R&D Magazine 2016 R&D 100 Awards. The awards honor 100 innovative technologies from the past year.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California won an award for its GLO Transparent Ceramic Scintillator, which involves the nondestructive imaging of the 3D volume of complex objects. The technology, developed for the lab’s Weapons and Complex Integration Directorate, was funded by the directorate’s Enhanced Surveillance Program as part of the NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program to study the effects of aging on nuclear-weapon materials.
Another Lawrence Livermore winner was the Polyelectrolyte Enabled Liftoff (PEEL) project, which is conducted at the lab’s National Ignition Facility for the fabrication of thin membranes used as load-bearing elements for laser targets.
The Sandia National Laboratories also won for its UXI project, the fastest multiframe digital X-ray camera in the world, which Sandia said could be used for inertial confinement fusion experiment diagnostics. Another award winner was Sandia’s Pyomo v4.1, a project featuring software for the formulation and analysis of mathematical models.
Other recipients of R&D 100 awards included the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Entropy Engine, a computer hardware system for cybersecurity; Sandia’s stress-induced fabrication of functionally designed nanomaterials; and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications, done in conjunction with Los Alamos, Sandia, and other partners, which provides nuclear simulation tools to improve nuclear reactor operation.
