History of Innovation

Hydrogen is not new in the pantheon of petroleum fuel alternatives, but it remains a strong contender. It promises zero tailpipe emissions, a large driving range, and fast refueling times. Many energy scientists are optimistic that hydrogen-burning vehicles will reduce the nation’s energy consumption and curb the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. “Increasing use efficiency is an important first step but may not be enough for steep reductions in petroleum dependence and greenhouse-gas emissions,” says Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Salvador Aceves. “We need to advance to a carbonless energy system using hydrogen fuel.”

As California rolls out more hydrogen fueling stations and new hydrogen vehicles roll into showrooms technical issues such as storage, metering, and supply chain remain. Because hydrogen is such a small molecule, it is difficult to store compressed hydrogen in the large quantities needed to provide the driving range achieved by gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, despite hydrogen’s stellar fuel efficiency. Most prototype hydrogen vehicles use compressed hydrogen stored at room temperature and high pressure. Cryocompressed hydrogen storage developed at LLNL, the only technology that meets 2015 DOE targets for volumetric and gravimetric efficiency, holds a key to a bright hydrogen future.

As a Department of Energy national laboratory, LLNL has long been involved in research and development of alternative energy technologies for transportation, including hydrogen fuel. LLNL began research in the 1990s on pressurized cryogenic hydrogen storage tank designs and laid the groundwork for several CRADA collaborations between 2008 and 2013, including a long term collaboration with BMW. The BMW collaboration began in 2008. Successes have included an experimental Toyota Prius hybrid vehicle that drove to a new world record: the longest distance on a single tank of hydrogen — over 650 miles! Recent hydrogen storage advancements at LLNL include the installation of a liquid hydrogen pump and extension of tank endurance—holding liquid hydrogen for six days without venting any of the fuel! BMW has since demonstrated integration of hydrogen technology to their fleet. In FY14, LLNL and BMW Group renewed their commitment to hydrogen transportation with another CRADA to make the future hydrogen economy a reality. This project was funded by the DOE Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program.

Whether in the realm of anti-bioterrorism or cancer treatment, early detection can be the difference between life and death. Leveraging the unparalleled pathogen-detecting technology that shields Americans from the threat of bioterrorism, LLNL and Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. are in the business of transforming the world of genetic testing.

For years, life scientists used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to assess the genetic composition of a specimen. However, conventional PCR approaches faced concerns of scale: the nanoscopic indicators that signal the early-onset of a disease could be missed within a traditional sample. Compounding this issue: without the ability to divide a sample into equivalent, smaller subsets, scientists needed to use statistical models to estimate—rather than quantify—the prevalence of any detected rare-event pathogens or genetic mutations.

Enter LLNL, whose work with anti-bioterror sensor systems primed the Lab to offer rare-event detectors to the world of early diagnostics. In 2008, award-winning LLNL biodefense scientist Bill Colston founded QuantaLife, Inc., a biotechnology firm that converted LLNL’s anti-bioterrorism detectors into genetic screening tools that used an oil-emulsion to anatomize a single sample into thousands of equivalent, nanoliter droplets. Each of these droplets could then be screened for the nucleic acid markers that would reveal pathogens or mutations, offering researchers a way to magnify any expressed genes within a sample. QuantaLife’s product, the Droplet Digital™ PCR (ddPCR™), allowed scientists to finally eliminate the noise that hindered accurate quantification.

Thanks to the success of the ddPCR™ system, the Personalized Medicine World Conference named QuantaLife, Inc. the “Most Promising Company” of 2010. The ddPCR™ also received Frost & Sullivan’s “2011 North American Personalized Medicine New Product Innovation Award.” Recognizing the value of this revolutionary product, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., a manufacturer and distributor of life-sciences diagnostic tools, purchased QuantaLife and the rights to ddPCR™ in 2011. Bio-Rad enriched the ddPCR™ approach by developing the QX100 Droplet Digital PCR System, which features one device to generate the emulsified droplets and a second device to analyze the results of the PCR test. This paired-approach allows researchers to integrate their own procedures during diagnostics, thereby expanding the versatility of the system. The QX100 Droplet Digital PCR system would go on to win R&D Magazine’s distinguished “R&D 100 Award” in honor of the technology’s far-reaching impact.

Thanks to the Digital Droplet™ PCR technology initiated at LLNL, transformed by QuantaLife, Inc. and expanded by Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., researchers may now delve deeper into a wide range of genetic mysteries, including sequential mutations, cancer progressions, and pathogen adaptations. What’s more, medical professionals use this tool to personalize their treatments according to the genetic needs of their patients. Such empowering technology will continue to transform medicine and promises to prompt innumerable discoveries within diagnostics and beyond.

NanoFoil’s® story began in the mid-1990s, when LLNL materials scientist Troy Barbee, Jr. and then-postdoctoral researcher Timothy Weihs pooled their expertise in multilayered, ultra-thin, metallic films—known as nanolaminates—to develop improved refractive lenses for optic systems. As they explored the properties of various nanolaminates, they discovered that foils using thin stacks of aluminum and nickel exhibited near-instantaneous energy transfers when excited by a heat source. Though unappealing for optic systems, this reactive property offered vast opportunities to the precision bonding industry—a sphere often fettered by the long-term degradation of epoxies, the compositional demands of welding, and the temperature limitations of soldering processes. Barbee and Weihs recognized that this reactive nanolaminate could be perfected, and possibly could become a cost-saving tool that would revolutionize the way manufacturers assemble their products.

In 1995, Weihs joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, where he met Omar Knio, a professor of mechanical engineering and material science. The two researchers further investigated the reactive properties of this unique nanolaminate, ultimately developing NanoFoil®—a material that can be placed between the soldering faces of two parts. When triggered by an external heat source, NanoFoil® rapidly and uniformly transfers heat across the foil’s shape, thereby melting the solder from the inside without damaging the external parts.

With a license for the foundational intellectual property from LLNL in hand, Weihs and Knio founded Reactive NanoTechnologies (RNT) in 2002 to act as the manufacturing hub for NanoFoil®. The company and the product made such a splash that Indium Corporation purchased RNT, its intellectual property, and the NanoFoil® license in 2009. As a world-wide materials supplier, Indium Corp. has expanded NanoFoil’s® reach by degrees of magnitude. Their work builds upon the foundation laid at LLNL and showcases the transformation we can achieve when we combine the scientific explorations of a national laboratory, a team of innovators ready to translate discovery into opportunity, and a streamlined approach for relaying technology to industry and the world.

Moments of great national need can prompt exceptional scientific discovery. The story of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s advancements in the arena of radiation detection materials perfectly illustrates such a success.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, the American consciousness turned toward improved national security. By 2005, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had sent out a call for improved radiation detection materials. Established technology faced limitations in portability, safety, material scarcity, and expense, four challenges that undermined the availability and usability of these invaluable security tools. Owing to the Lab’s continuing mission to deliver solutions that improve the nation’s security, LLNL’s high-caliber researchers, excellent facilities, and shared purpose converged to answer the nation’s call and to reinvent tools for detecting illicit radiation.

LLNL’s quest for improved radiation detection resources began when a team of physical chemists and physicists returned to the most fundamental foundations of their fields: the periodic table. Interrogating the basic configuration and properties of elements and compounds, these researchers unearthed revolutionary radiation-detecting scintillators—materials that light up when triggered by specific types of radioactive emissions. Surpassing the DHS’s request for an improved detection material, LLNL’s expert team created a variety of new scintillator materials that offered manufacturers options: some materials could be grown quickly, some could be constructed using unprecedented applications of plastics, some were nearly as successful at distinguishing between illicit materials’ gamma-ray radiation and fast neutrons as their more expensive, time-intensive predecessors. These new materials—including Barium Iodide and Strontium Iodide crystal scintillators, solution grown organic scintillators, and scintillating dye enriched plastics—enabled detector manufacturers to overcome the limitations barring the broader insertion of these safeguarding tools.

The impact of new radiation-detecting materials is marked not just by innovation but also by distribution. To promote the dissemination and advancement of radiation detection technologies, LLNL offers ongoing, nonexclusive licenses to a variety of manufacturers and researchers. Partnering entities include Northrup Grumman , Radiation Monitoring Devices, INRAD Optics, Inc., and Eljen Technologies. These businesses have built upon the award-winning success of the new scintillating materials by converting the substances into portable detectors or infrastructure for port authorities, thereby transforming the science into products that keep America and its allies safe. The success of these partnerships yielded several accolades, most notably R&D 100 Awards, a Department of Homeland Security and Domestic Nuclear Detection Office Award for contributions to advanced materials development, a Tibbetts Award from the U.S. Small Business Association honoring INRAD Optics, Inc., and a Far West Region Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Outstanding Commercialization Success (also honoring INRAD Optics). These triumphs underscore the success of the transition LLNL’s radiation detection materials have made from the laboratory to the world and highlight the public service LLNL and the network of National Laboratories continue to offer to the American people.

A blurred photograph results when a photo’s subject-matter changes while the camera’s aperture remains open. Similarly, transmission electron microscopy (TEM)—which shoots streams of electrons through thin slices of a specimen to reveal the specimen’s ultra-fine details—faces the challenge of capturing a crisp image at extremely high speeds and magnification. Since small-scale processes—such as the mechanisms of a virus infecting a cell—often happen at near-instantaneous speeds, researchers using TEM to discover the sequence of events in chemical reactions or biological processes must infer answers using before and after images. Thanks to LLNL’s expertise in lasers and microscopy, however, the novel Dynamic Transmission Electron Microscope (DTEM) has refined TEM’s temporal resolution by a factor of a million, a feat that promises to revolutionize the world of transmission electron microscopy.

The DTEM harnesses the precision of lasers to refine the spatial and temporal resolution of TEM. Ultraviolet light pulses from a laser and illuminates the microscope’s photocathode, which produces bursts of electrons. These electron pulses concentrate into a narrow beam as they are accelerated down the DTEM. When the electron beam passes through the sample, the scattering of the electrons creates an ultra-high resolution image of the sample that is captured on a detector—similar to a digital camera. What makes this process particularly valuable to scientists is that the laser pulses may be as brief as 10 billionths of a second—a trait that, as with a traditional high speed photograph, equates to sharper snapshots of time. This technology was enough to earn LLNL researchers an R&D 100 Award in 2008.

Determined to extend the impact of the single-shot DTEM, the Lab’s team added a high-speed deflector array to the microscope and developed an advanced laser system capable of producing precisely timed sequences of ultraviolet pulses. The deflector array sends the sample’s image to different regions of the digital receptor. By moving the deflector in time with the laser’s pulses, the DTEM technology can capture multiple, sequential, single-shot images with arbitrary temporal spacing. In short: the Dynamic Transmission Electron Microscope can make an ultrahigh-speed movie of the reactions occurring within the microscope’s chamber. Using this technology, researchers can capture sequential activities at the nanometer, 10 nanoseconds scale. This ability to visualize such fine-grain, high-speed reactions unlocks innumerable opportunities for scientists to examine the physical, biological, and chemical process that occur at near-instantaneous speeds. For this reason, the Lab’s DTEM-development team received another R&D 100 Award in 2013.

Daniel Masiel—founder and CEO of Integrated Dynamic Electron Solutions (IDES)—did his Ph.D. research with the LLNL DTEM group. The outstanding potential of the technology and the excitement it generated in the field inspired Dr. Masiel to commercialize this invention. After founding IDES in 2009, Dr. Masiel approached LLNL about acquiring the licenses for DTEM’s specialized technologies. Transforming the licenses into a wide array of manufactured Dynamic Transmission Electron Microscope products, IDES offers this advanced microscopy to the world. In 2011, IDES logged $1 million in sales, and in 2012, they received a Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for outstanding commercialization success. As DTEM’s abilities have expanded from single-shot images to movies, so have IDES’ products. IDES received a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of Health to commercialize the LLNL-licensed Ponderomotive Phase Plate technology, which enhances biological imaging in DTEM. With this extended repertoire of products, two additional LLNL veterans—Thomas LaGrange and Bryan Reed—ultimately joined the IDES leadership.

Thanks to IDES’s continual dissemination of DTEM technology, these revolutionary instruments can now be found on three continents in R&D, basic science, and academic laboratories. The ongoing research and business partnerships formed between LLNL and IDES showcases the global impact that occurs when an outstanding research institution and a creative team of entrepreneurs work together to develop and spread ground-breaking technology around the world.

The continual demand for greater material strength, durability, and longevity in structural applications makes metal a constant focus and challenge for material scientists and engineers. One of the best ways to modify the mechanical and structural properties of metal is through peening, a process that uses surface impaction to produce permanent, compressive residual stress layers within a metal’s surface; once the external impact stress dissipates, the peened material retains its harder, more durable quality. Contemporary peening processes used round metallic or ceramic balls to compress a material and harden its surface. Though this process works, shot peening has less-than-exact control due to the nature of ballistic balls, the limited or sub-surface impaction depths, and the prevalence of pitting throughout the target surface material. To combat these limitations, Metal Improvement Company (MIC)—a subsidiary of Curtiss-Wright Surface Technologies—and LLNL partnered to develop the commercial production of a more efficient method to strengthen metal: laser peening.

Although laser peening technology existed in the 1960s, its irregularity undermined the technology’s commercial viability. That is, until LLNL began applying its high-energy, high-repetition-rate, short-pulse laser to peening applications in the 1990s. Since laser-based peening allows for precision control and compaction depths of 5–10 times deeper than shot peening, a perfected laser-peeing process would expand potential applications from gears, coils, and crankshafts to more structurally demanding items such as steam turbine blades, aircraft structures, and high-performance engine components. Leveraging Livermore’s robotic mounts for fast, customized, computer-controlled peening angles, laser peening soon acquired the characteristics of speed, efficiency, and consistent coverage to warrant commercial development. Shot-peening industry leader MIC funded additional research at LLNL to hone the short-pulse laser technology for laser peening and subsequently licensed the patent portfolio covering the LLNL laser system. MIC opened its first laser peening facility in 2002 and now has three peening facilities in the US, one in the UK, and mobile peening systems with the capability to go on-site anywhere in the world.

The commercial laser peening process developed by LLNL and MIC extends the service lifetime of aircraft engines, power turbines, and other critical components of military and civilian systems by a factor of 10. The impacts of this technology are particularly evident in the aerospace industry, where laser peening has improved more than 10,000 jet engine turbine blades and extended the lifespan for components of aircraft for customers ranging from Boeing, Rolls Royce, Siemens, and the Department of Defense. Using LLNL’s technology, MIC now treats blades for steam and gas turbines for all major electric power equipment manufacturers in the U.S.

MIC integrated LLNL-developed laser technology and peening capability into a viable commercial process that continues having a major global impact. Laser peening improves performance, increases service life, and reduces costs for various industry structures and propulsion, yielding billions of dollars in savings for jet engine fan blades, fuselages, wings, and other components of civil and military aircraft structures, electricity generation steam turbines, and high-performance racing vehicles.

Every year, 60,000 people are diagnosed with brain aneurysms, weakened portions of arterial vessels that create sacs of high-pressure blood. Although small, aneurysms that burst can cause massive tissue damage, stroke, and death. Current treatments continue to carry associated risks that compromise their efficiency, such as base-clamping to seal and pinch off aneurysms—which fails to treat aneurysms with wider necks—and inserting expanding metal coils to clot and disintegrate sacs—which often unravel or become compressed, leading to the recurrence of blood flow.

In 2004, however, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and UC Davis were awarded a five-year Bioengineering Research Partnership Grant to investigate polymers as a mechanism for treating the risks of aneurysms. The study, led by principal investigator Dr. Duncan Maitland, focused on shape memory polymers (SMP), smart materials that undergo physical and molecularly structural metamorphoses between deformed and permanent states in response to changing temperatures. An SMP is first shaped at a high threshold temperature to achieve a desired permanent shape. After removal from the high-temperature environment, the SMP is again molded to a desired temporary shape. When subjected to stimulus temperatures above or below its transition threshold temperature, the SMP reconfigures its structure from the temporary form to the permanent form and vice versa. Temperature-dependent metamorphosis makes SMPs excellent candidates for medical devices because they can be compact during operational delivery and expand to functional forms with body temperature.

These polymers showed immense promise as memory foam–coated, metal coils with extremely low density, enabling them to undergo substantial changes in volume—up to 100 times that of its compressed volume—and be easily delivered via arterial micro-catheter. SMPs can fill aneurysms with only 1–2 foams and with 1000 times less expansion force than the traditional metal coils that resulted in 70% of aneurysm volume being unfilled.

In January of 2008, Maitland continued developing SMPs for this application at Texas A&M University (TAMU). That September, TAMU and LLNS reached an inter-institutional agreement to begin commercialization. A year later in June of 2009, Maitland founded Shape Memorial Medical Inc. (formerly DEP Shape Memory Therapeutics) as a medical device company that commercializes SMP-based innovations and, as CEO, secured initial capital from Texas Emerging Technologies Fund and Research Valley Angel Fund as well as millions of dollars in technology development funds from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, and LLNL. An exclusive licensing agreement between LLNS and Shape Memory Medical was finalized in July of 2010, leading to 12 issued patents, 15 pending patents, and regulatory path launch dates in European and United States markets in 2016 and 2017, respectively.

Shape memory polymers are already a disrupting technology within the greater medical market and promise to have continued impact in the cerebral aneurysm market. With material costs as low as $10 per pound and operational time and complexity cut by 50% when compared to similar alternatives, SMPs will redefine the $700 million detachable coil market (average 16% CAGR) and $1.5 billion neurovascular market (20% CAGR) as the preferred material and treatment option for mitigating aneurysm risk.

After more than two years of joint research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Total and Stanford University are released an open-source, high-performance simulator for large-scale geological carbon dioxide (CO2) storage.

The GEOSX simulator enables researchers around the world to build on the work of the three partners, providing an open framework to accelerate the development of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies. It also has application to a variety of other subsurface energy technologies.

The simulator uses field data to predict the behavior and impact of CO2 stored in deep geological repositories. Its resolution and speed were made possible by new technological developments in the fields of algorithmics and high performance computing. It is used to improve the management and security of geological CO2 repositories and plan for the widespread implementation of these projects at an industrial scale.