ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories will open an office this fall in The University of New Mexico’s Lobo Rainforest building, a 160,000-square-foot multiuse center that is the first piece of Innovate ABQ, a seven-acre downtown hub of the Innovation Central district in Albuquerque. “Sandia is an integral part of the high-tech business community along […]
Author Archives: Sue Holmes
New Sandia fellowship named after first female director of nuclear security lab
July 24, 2017 – 7:20 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories has established a new fellowship program, named after its immediate past director, Jill Hruby, in hopes of attracting and recruiting talented women in engineering and science fields who are interested in becoming technical leaders in national security. The Jill Hruby Fellowship Program will immerse postdoctoral candidates in a three-year […]
Lighting up the study of low-density materials
July 17, 2017 – 7:25 am
Sandia Labs develops way to spot defects inside hard-to-image materials ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — It’s hard to get an X-ray image of low-density material like tissue between bones because X-rays just pass right through like sunlight through a window. But what if you need to see the area that isn’t bone? Sandia National Laboratories studies myriads […]
Upgrades at Sandia’s Tonopah Test Range help weapons testing
June 21, 2017 – 5:15 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A former test director at Sandia National Laboratories’ Tonopah Test Range has described its combination of old and new tracking and data-collection equipment as like a mix of horseless carriages and horses — you can’t feed oats to the horseless carriages and you can’t gas up the horses. It’s been a challenge […]
Mechanical engineering society elects four fellows from Sandia Labs
June 8, 2017 – 9:30 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Fellows of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers make up only 3.1 percent of ASME’s 107,895 members. Sandia National Laboratories engineers Cliff Ho, Alexander Brown, Hy Tran and Kevin Dowding now are members of that elite group. Election as a fellow “recognizes exceptional engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession,” according […]
History of Sandia Labs rocketry told in award-winning film, ‘It Really Is Rocket Science!’
June 5, 2017 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The history of rocket testing and aerospace work at Sandia National Laboratories is the history of aero everything. “There was aeroheating and aeroballistics and aerodynamics and all things aero,” said Myra Buteau, a Sandia Labs video producer whose latest half-hour documentary, “It Really is Rocket Science!” tells the story of the laboratories’ […]
Strategic Petroleum Reserve taps Sandia expertise in salt
May 15, 2017 – 8:05 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Not all salt is created equal, so when the nation stockpiles oil in salt caverns, it’s important to know all about the salt itself, as well as the shape of the storage caverns. Decades of Sandia National Laboratories expertise on how salt domes behave went into a recent report that concluded that […]
New director says Sandia will respond to whatever future brings
May 1, 2017 – 2:35 pm
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories will maintain its strong missions in nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, energy, basic science and national security work for federal agencies, the labs’ new top leader said Monday. “I see those continuing,” Director Steve Younger said at a news conference on his first day as Sandia’s 15th director. “However, we are […]
Drop of mock B61-12 is first of new flight tests
April 13, 2017 – 2:39 pm
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — From a distance, the drop of a mock nuclear weapon — containing only non-nuclear components — was a mere puff of dust rising from a dry lake bed at Nevada’s Tonopah Test Range. However, it marked the start of a new series of test flights vital to the nation’s B61-12 weapon refurbishment […]
Predicting the limits of friction: Sandia looks at properties of material
March 23, 2017 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Normally, bare metal sliding against bare metal is not a good thing. Friction will destroy pistons in an engine, for example, without lubrication. Sometimes, however, functions require metal on metal contact, such as in headphone jacks or electrical systems in wind turbines. Still, friction causes wear and wear destroys performance, and it’s […]
Evaluating nuclear weapons: Sandia Labs taking a modern approach
March 1, 2017 – 8:45 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories is transforming how it assesses nuclear weapons in a stockpile made up of weapons at different stages in their lifecycles — some systems that have existed for decades alongside those that have undergone life extension programs. Back when the United States was developing new nuclear weapon systems, weapons typically […]
Exploring the evolution of nuclear deterrence through interviews, historical footage
February 28, 2017 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories explores the evolution of nuclear deterrence in a new documentary that combines modern and historical footage with a wide range of interviews. On Deterrence features interviews with former secretaries of defense, general officers, policymakers, analysts, scholars and scientists with varied viewpoints to describe the impact of nuclear deterrence since […]
Sandia using kinetics, not temperature, to make ceramic coatings
February 21, 2017 – 8:30 am
Room temperature coatings make design, fabrication flexible ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Researcher Pylin Sarobol explains an elegant process for ultrafine-grained ceramic coatings in a somewhat inelegant way: sub-micron particles splatting onto a surface. That splatting action is a key part of a Sandia National Laboratories project to lay down ceramic coatings kinetically. By making high-velocity submicron […]
Research at Sandia looking at how brittle materials fail
February 13, 2017 – 1:45 pm
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — If you want to see what happens if your phone falls onto concrete, you can actually drop it or let an engineer work out the consequences in advance. Odds are you’ll go with the engineer. Figuring out how brittle materials inside a device behave, and fail, is one goal of Sandia National […]
Battling corrosion to keep solar panels humming
February 2, 2017 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — People think of corrosion as rust on cars or oxidation that blackens silver, but it also harms critical electronics and connections in solar panels, lowering the amount of electricity produced. “It’s challenging to predict and even more challenging to design ways to reduce it because it’s highly dependent on material and environmental […]