LAB REPORT

Science and Technology Making Headlines

Aug. 5, 2016


nanosuit

Researchers Eric Meshot, left, and Ngoc Bui evaluate the uniformity of a carbon nanotube array covering the entire area of a 4-inch wafer. Photo by Julie Rusell/LLNL

A 'second skin' to protect soldiers

A team of Lawrence Livermore scientists has developed a "econd skin" material that would help protect soldiers from biological and chemical agents.

High breathability is a critical requirement for protective clothing to prevent heat stress and exhaustion when military personnel are engaged in missions in contaminated environments. Current protective military uniforms are based on heavyweight full-barrier protection or permeable adsorptive protective garments that cannot meet the critical demand of simultaneous high comfort and protection, and provide a passive rather than active response to an environmental threat.

The LLNL team fabricated flexible polymeric membranes with aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) channels as moisture conductive pores. The size of these pores (less than 5 nanometers) is 5,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. This material is the first key component of futuristic smart uniforms that also will respond to and protect from environmental chemical hazards.


panel

Digital Glass™ can provide new ways to harvest sunlight. These football field-sized solar thermal power plants use microfluidic-based solar collector panels that exploit electronically modulated invisibility to harvest sunlight dynamically. Photo courtesy of Giant Leap Technologies.

A giant leap for developing solar

Utility-scale solar plants consist of thousands of heliostats (special mirrors) or other large solar energy collecting modules. Each module is mounted on a tracking device that rotates throughout the day, keeping its payload in an optimal position to collect solar energy as the sun moves across the sky. All that energy is then transported to a central location.

But each of those modules requires a relatively large amount of space between itself and the next one, partly to enable optimal rotation and partly to allow access for repair and maintenance.

However, Lawrence Livermore might be changing that. With $1.75 million from the Department of Energy, Giant Leap Technologies and LLNL will develop capillary optics to replace expensive and wear-prone mechanical sun trackers with low-cost invisibility-inducing digital glass for solar thermal and photovoltaic applications - i.e., base-load and peak-load needs.

Digital glass has the potential to replace today's sun tracker stations with thin transparent panels using a fraction of today's materials, while also drastically reducing the area needed for solar power plants by a factor of five to 10 for the same annual energy harvest.

 


Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has licensed LLNL technology for its futuristic magnetic levitation transportation system.

Rising above the rest

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT), one of two private startups that have the biggest lead in developing high-speed transportation system, has agreed to collaborate with Deutsche Bahn to develop a conventional train that will use new technologies being developed for the Hyperloop.

Earlier this year, HTT licensed technology that is safer and cheaper than what conventional high-speed trains use. The base technology of its proposed high-speed transportation system is passive magnetic levitation originally developed by the late Dick Post and his team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The startup has worked with the national lab over the past year to develop and build test systems using the technology.

It achieves levitation when the magnetic fields on the train interact with the conducting circuits in the track. It uses no superconducting magnets or powered electromagnets, but instead, has an array of permanent room-temperature magnets.


brain

IBM partnered with Lawrence Livermore to create a chip, which tries to mimic the human brain.

The brains inside the computer

IBM has created a brain-like machine with a processor, known as TrueNorth, which is capable of 46 billion synaptic operations per second, per watt.

To underscore this difference between the brain and today’s computers, a human-scale simulation with 100 trillion synapses required 96 Blue Gene/Q racks of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia supercomputer.

Running at only 70 milliwatts, the chip is very efficient and had 1 million individually programmed brain neurons.


award

Lawrence Livermore's Aurora Pribram-Jones (right) receives a Howes Scholar award from Jeffery Hittinger of the Lab's Center for Applied Scientific Computing. Both are alumni of the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Program that confers the annual award. Image courtesy of InSight Foto Inc.

Top honors for computational know-how

Lawrence Fellow Aurora Pribram-Jones is one of two recipients of the Howes Scholar award presented by the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) Program.

The award, presented last week, was established to honor Fredrick Anthony Howes, who managed the DOE Applied Mathematical Science Program during the 1990s. Each year, a recent graduate of the CSGF program is selected for the award based on his or her demonstrated scientific achievement, leadership and service.

"On a personal level this award makes things different for me," said Pribram-Jones, who is conducting her research with the Quantum Simulations Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "Most of these people would present videos of fluid dynamics at conferences, but I do a lot of paper and pencil work. It's a big honor to receive this award. I don't quite believe it wholeheartedly yet."

Pribram-Jones uses mathematics to computationally predict the basic properties of matter.

Computer with email graphic

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The Lab Report is a weekly compendium of media reports on science and technology achievements at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Though the Laboratory reviews items for overall accuracy, the reporting organizations are responsible for the content in the links below.