ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A new 10-year agreement between Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, has the potential to bring more reliable electricity to remote communities and the latest in electrical grid technology to rural areas in the world’s tropics. A Sandia manager who was born and grew up in Puerto Rico […]
Author Archives: Melissae Fellet
Sandia, Puerto Rican university collaborate to develop energy projects for global tropics
March 6, 2020 – 5:00 am
Seeing inside a battery while it’s working
January 27, 2020 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A new paper-thin radio-frequency detector designed to work inside a lithium-ion battery provides information about the battery’s health while charging and discharging. “It could enable researchers to check a battery’s function and capacity after years of storage without destroying it,” said Eric Sorte, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories. The work, funded […]
Reducing power plants’ thirst
January 8, 2020 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Electricity production is one of the industries that uses the most water in the country each day. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are helping the largest power plant in the United States identify the most efficient and cost-effective strategies to reduce water use. They developed a first-of-its-kind comprehensive system dynamics analysis that […]
Internships fuel research for engineering students from Puerto Rico
December 5, 2019 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — For Edgardo Desarden Carrero, a student in the newly created electrical engineering doctorate program at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, his two summers working in resilient energy systems research at Sandia National Laboratories was his first internship. He is an unusual student in that he is also a professor of electrical […]
High-speed fire footage reveals key insights for power plant safety
December 4, 2019 – 9:22 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — High energy arcing faults are high-power electrical discharges between two or more conductors that can release tens of thousands of amps of current. They can result in explosions that reach about 35,000 degrees Celsius — about the temperature of lightning strikes — and vaporize steel and spew hot metal particles into the […]
From Afghanistan to Alaska with atmosphere in between
November 5, 2019 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — For Justin LaPierre, helping maintain an atmospheric research station at the northern tip of Alaska is “eerily reminiscent” of being deployed in the deserts of Afghanistan — just much colder. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, LaPierre has worked as an observer at Oliktok Point for two years. The site is the third […]
Advanced microscopy reveals unusual DNA structure
October 30, 2019 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — An advanced imaging technique reveals new structural details of S-DNA, ladder-like DNA that forms when the molecule experiences extreme tension. This work conducted at Sandia National Laboratories and Vrije University in the Netherlands provides the first experimental evidence that S-DNA contains highly tilted base pairs. The predictable pairing and stacking of the […]
Engineering success by predicting failure
October 16, 2019 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Since people started forging and working with metal, they’ve arguably been interested in how it breaks. But only since the 1950s have scientists and engineers had a mathematical framework for using laboratory measurements of material failure to predict a structure’s resistance to cracking. “These tools work well for brittle materials, such as […]
Materials’ increased capacity, efficiency could lower the bar for hydrogen technology
October 10, 2019 – 5:00 am
LIVERMORE, Calif. — Hydrogen as a carbon-free energy source could expand into a variety of sectors, including industrial processes, building heat and transportation. Currently, it powers a growing fleet of zero-emission vehicles, including trains in Germany, buses in South Korea, cars in California and forklifts worldwide. These vehicles use a fuel cell to combine hydrogen […]
American Indian Science and Engineering Society recognizes early-career Sandia engineer
October 8, 2019 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Geoscience engineer Dylan Moriarty has been named the 2019 Most Promising Engineer or Scientist by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. The award is given to an American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, First Nations and other indigenous person of North America with less than five years of work […]
Materials for hydrogen service advanced by new multilab consortium
July 25, 2019 – 5:00 am
LIVERMORE, Calif. — Researchers at Sandia and Pacific Northwest national laboratories are leading a collaborative effort to investigate how hydrogen affects materials such as plastics, rubber, steel and aluminum. The Hydrogen Materials Compatibility Consortium, or H-Mat, will focus on how hydrogen affects polymers and metals used in diverse sectors including fuel cell transportation and hydrogen […]
Personalized medicine software vulnerability uncovered by Sandia researchers
July 1, 2019 – 5:00 am
LIVERMORE, Calif. — A weakness in one common open source software for genomic analysis left DNA-based medical diagnostics vulnerable to cyberattacks. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories identified the weakness and notified the software developers, who issued a patch to fix the problem. The issue has also been fixed in the latest release of the software. […]
Portable gas detection shrinks to new dimensions
June 27, 2019 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A sensor for detecting toxic gases is now smaller, faster and more reliable. Its performance sets it up for integration in a highly sensitive portable system for detecting chemical weapons. Better miniature sensors can also rapidly detect airborne toxins where they occur, providing key information to help emergency personnel respond safely and […]