Sandia Labs researchers land five R&D 100 awards

Honors are often referred to as the Oscars of Innovation

Competing in an international pool of universities, corporations and government labs, Sandia National Labs inventions captured five R&D 100 Awards this year, as well as two environmental and one business award.

The contest determines research projects that represent the year’s 100 most outstanding advances in applied technologies. The awards focus on practical impact rather than pure research, and recognize entrants for their products’ designs, development, testing and production.

The sole past criterion for winning has been “demonstrable technological significance compared with competing products and technologies.” Properties that have been noted by judges include smaller size, faster speed, greater efficiency and higher environmental consciousness.

The R&D 100 contest, slightly more than 50 years old, has a new owner and the competition continues. Although R&D Magazine is gone, R&D World Magazine has taken its place. This year’s Sandia winners are:

ADDSec: Artificial Diversity and Defense Security, principal investigator Adrian Chavez: Industrial control system environments, such as the electric power grid, oil & natural gas refineries, and water pipelines, continue to use predictable communication paths, static configurations and unpatched software. Sandia developed a technology that automatically detects and responds to threats within critical infrastructure environments in real time.

CHIRP: Cloud Hypervisorforensics and Incident Response Platform, principal investigator Vincent Urias: Using CHIRP, analysts can pinpoint suspicious activities, track and record attacker actions for forensic analysis, and retrieve materials transparently from the targeted machines.

MIRaGE Multiscale Inverse Rapid Group-theory for Engineered metamaterials, PI Ihab El Kady: This unique software created by Sandia under a Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency contract, uses knowledge developed from molecular spectroscopy that determines how the symmetry of a natural molecule affects its optical behavior and properties. This enables design of a metamaterial with comparable properties.

High-Performance NanoantennaEnabled Detectors, principal investigator David Peters: These detectors offer a method to reduce noise interference to incoming infrared signals by factors of 10 to 100. This architecture is particularly useful at infrared wavelengths where current technology has run into a roadblock for noise reduction, quantum efficiency and crosstalk, all key metrics for infrared image quality.

MC-15, a Portable Neutron Detector, joint win with Los Alamos and Livermore national laboratories; Sandia lead, Scott Kief: The MC-15 detects neutrons to within 100-nanosecond resolution, enabling emergency response teams to quickly identify and assess nuclear-based threats. The MC-15 processes data in real time, requires little training to operate and is portable, lighter and said to be faster than any neutron multiplicity detector currently on the market.