San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
SwRI posts banner 2023 across scientific spectrum
Southwest Research Institute — the San Antonio-based nonprofit that touts its work as ranging “from deep sea to deep space” — built on its wide portfolio to generate a record high $844 million in revenue in 2023.
That was up 5.8% from its previous record of $798 million a year earlier as SwRI grew its net assets by 8.1% — to $765 million from $708 million.
SwRI’s financial progress was accompanied by other measures of scientific achievement, including notching 42 U.S. patents, filing 32 additional applications and submitting 36 invention disclosures — the first step in the patent process. Recent accolades include its 52nd R&D 100 Award and induction into the Space Technology Hall of Fame.
It also invested more than $9.3 million in internal research and development, launching 103 new projects last year.
SwRI “drives science and technology into new territory with bold exploration, inspiring ideas and novel discoveries,” President and CEO Adam Hamilton wrote in the institute’s annual report. “SwRI is a research and development leader, forging ahead through the unknown to uncover creative solutions to the world’s most challenging technical problems.”
Anyone who breathes, flips a light switch, drives an auto, rides on trains or airplanes, uses a computer or looks to the heavens has probably benefited from SwRI’s work. Its new report provides several highlights for 2023 while offering a glimpse toward the future.
Power, transportation
SwRI — which, as its motto suggests, has simulated some of the harshest environments from the ocean’s depths to distant space — completed construction last year of a “30-inch-diameter deep sea simulation chamber” to evaluate the quality and operation of components for oil producers, underwater parts manufacturers and the U.S. Navy, Hamilton said.
One of SwRI’s biggest accomplishments in 2023 was opening a $155 million supercritical transformational electric power plant with help from GTI Energy, GE Vernova and the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s a longterm project for developing new technology that uses carbon dioxide at supercritical fluid conditions — extreme temperature and pressure — instead of water in a compressor to create power. SwRI said the method is more efficient, sustainable and cheaper than other methods and could revolutionize power generation.
It’s also looking at blending hydrogen into natural gas streams to reduce carbon emissions from conventional natural gas power generation, and it helped develop a process for converting wood pulp into a refinery feed. And SwRI recently invested in a 17,000-gallon liquid hydrogen tank to facilitate its carbon-free energy research, and it’s an adviser to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on “radioactive waste storage, transportation and disposal.
SwRI also contributes to the transportation industry by making smart highway systems, creating autonomous cars, and optimizing the fluids and fuels in vehicles.
In 2023, it continued its focus “on sustainable mobility and transportation to lower greenhouse gas emissions” as it looks at technologies such as electrified power trains and alternative fuels with an eye on creating low- or zero-emission and energy-efficient vehicles. The nonprofit capped a 10-year project to reduce air polluting nitrogen oxides in future heavy-duty diesel trucks by 90%, and it continued its study of fuels from across the country, performing 200,000 analyses on almost 43,000 gas nozzles.
SwRI’s automated driving systems can travel on and off road, with some even meant to operate in combat conditions. And beside automations, SwRI is connecting vehicles to a network that continually assesses conditions and adjusts to ensure the timeliest and most energyefficient trips. According to its annual report, a quarter of the U.S. population use roads supported by the SwRI’s Intelligent Transportation Systems. Texas is among 16 states that use the SwRI system to manage their roads.
In addition to promoting clean vehicles, SwRI is working with freight rail companies to analyze the impacts of transitioning locomotives away from petroleum-based fuels.
Data, disease, defense
SwRI’s work includes computer science, such as advanced artificial intelligence and “neuromorphic engineering” that’s helping computers learn more like a human, as well as cybersecurity work that’s helping enhance “zero-trust” architecture that verifies every network interaction.
And with respect to actual humans’ health, it has developed a platform to manufacture biopharmaceuticals, including a new method — in partnership with the University of Texas at San Antonio — to synthesize an antimalarial drug that could save thousands of lives. It’s also developed antivirals targeting hemorrhagic fevers, including the Ebola, Marburg and Sudan strains.
Its Rhodium 3D modeling software that uses artificial intelligence is helping SwRI “close in on an effective treatment for these deadly diseases.”
SwRI’s work also helps manufacturers with automation via its Robot Operating System-Industrial, an open-source project to help integrate robots into industrial applications. And the nonprofit operates the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center that helps with automation and process improvement.
SwRI also has a defense and security business that’s heavily focused on electronic warfare — the ability to combat enemy electromagnetic signals. It’s working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose projects are largely classified, on small gadgets to monitor high-frequency radio signals.
And there’s a backpack — reminiscent of something from a Bond film or Inspector Gadget cartoon — that sprays a “slippery anti-traction material” that makes surfaces “impossible for people or vehicles to traverse.”
Air and space
The sky is hardly the limit for SwRI scientists whose work in aerospace is helping keep old military planes flying and unlocking new secrets of the cosmos.
They’ve redesigned the Air Force’s B-1B bomber’s fuel system and the A-10’s mission computer. And they’re working on extending the life of aging aircraft such as A-10s and T-38 trainers. T-38s currently fly at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph and other training bases. Boeing’s T-7A Red Hawk is slated to replace the T-38 by 2034.
SwRI is looking at hypersonics technology and materials with a range of ballistic launch facilities and flight ranges that provide extreme hypersonic flight environments.
A leader in space research, SwRI scientists and engineers not only study the universe’s phenomena, but they also build instruments and spacecraft and lead five NASA space missions.
Those missions include Juno, which continues its exploration of Jupiter and its moons; New Horizons, a craft journeying through the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit; four magnetospheric multiscale, or MMS, satellites that are looking at the Earth’s magnetosphere; the 12year-old Lucy mission to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, which explored an asteroid called Dinkinesh in early 2023; and the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH, mission — scheduled for a 2025 launch — to study the solar corona and winds.
Also in 2023, SwRI delivered the three instruments that it built for NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft that’s scheduled to begin its journey to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa in October.
Closer to Earth, NASA selected SwRI to lead the Center for Lunar Origin, which will further research about the moon. It’s also leading the development of instruments for a future lunar lander/rover.
And SwRI is working on other projects for NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including an interstellar mapping and acceleration probe, a solar wind plasma sensor, a quicksounder weather satellite, and a micrometeorioid and orbital debris detector.
It enhanced its capabilities by building out its space integration facility that now includes an acoustic test chamber with speakers that can generate sound at 150 decibels to simulate the rigors of a rocket launch on sensitive equipment. It created a space robotics center.
And in November, Alan Stern, a SwRI planetary scientist, flew to the edge of space aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS unity on a NASA-funded flight, marking the first such journey for a SwRI scientist.