PNNL wins 5 ‘Oscars of Innovation’

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has won five R&D 100 awards, the most in any year since 2010.

The national lab in Richland was recognized for technologies that boost cybersecurity, convert sewage into fuel, forecast electricity needs, detect trace amounts of chemicals and view energy processes under real world conditions.

R&D Magazine selects the 100 most innovative scientific and technological breakthroughs each year from nominations from private, academic and government institutions. PNNL’s awards this year brings its total to 98 since the awards inception in 1969.

The Department of Energy national labs across the country did well this year, bringing home a third of the awards, nicknamed the “Oscars of Innovation.”

Cybersecurity software that knows its stuff

If you're a hacker aimed at stealing credit card information from a retail company and you want to evade detection, massive amounts of data make it easy to hide.

Analysts have the know-how to sort through this digital mess, but they often identify attacks too late.

Analytical software developed at PNNL can sort through data like an analyst but on a much greater scale to help find threats in near-real-time.

Scientists designed the system, called CHAMPION, to use human analysts and historical data to learn about the company it's protecting. If it spots unusual cyberactivity it alerts an analyst.

The system also can learn to analyze financial services or health care data. PNNL licensed the software to Champion Technology Company to pursue all three applications.

The development team includes PNNL's Shawn Hampton, Rick Berg, Katya Pomiak and Patrick Paulson and former PNNL scientist Frank Greitzer.

From wet to jet (and other fuels)

A new chemical processing system can convert natural substances as diverse as waste treatment sludge, food scraps and algae into useful fuels.

The system is remarkably efficient, in many cases converting 99 percent of a feedstock like algae into fuels, which can then be refined into aviation fuel, gasoline and diesel. The process also produces another fuel — methane gas — as well as clean water and useful plant nutrients.

Other technologies recover much less energy from the raw material and typically cost much more because they require drying out the raw material. The PNNL system can work directly with a wet slurry of raw material.

Utah-based Genifuel Corp. has licensed the technology and built a pilot plant for its partner, Reliance Industries Ltd., to create biocrude oil from algae. The PNNL team is also working with the Water Environment Research Foundation to demonstrate the process's effectiveness with municipal wastewater.

The team includes Doug Elliott, Dan Anderson, Rich Hallen, Todd Hart, and Andy Schmidt.

Electricity forecaster reduces costly errors

Mistakes in forecasting electricity needs because of sudden changes in the weather or other variables can have serious repercussions, from blackouts to higher energy costs.

The Power Model Integrator developed at PNNL provides as much as a 50-percent increase in accuracy and the potential to save millions of dollars in wasted energy costs, according to PNNL.

The new forecasting tool simultaneously evaluates several models that now are used individually by utilities to determines how to best combine them into a more accurate forecasts. Better forecasts can help reduce excess power generation, decrease the need to suddenly buy emergency power at a high cost and reduce the energy's carbon footprint.

The Power Model Integrator team includes PNNL researcher Luke Gosink, as well as former PNNL researchers Ryan Hafen, Alex Venzin, Maria Vlachopoulou, Ning Zhou and Trenton Pulsipher.

A new SPIN on an old technology

Researchers have improved one PNNL groundbreaking device, the Electrodynamic Ion Funnel, to better measure tiny samples of substances such as cancer cells in a tissue sample.

Collecting the most molecules possible is key to the most accurate results, but collecting particles and getting them into the ion funnel is challenging because many of the ions escape.

The new development, known as SPIN, or Subambient Pressure Ionization with Nanoelectrospray, eliminates this problem by using low atmospheric pressure. Nearly 50 times as many gas-phase ions enter the mass spectrometer than without SPIN.

The SPIN team includes PNNL staff members Keqi Tang, Gordon Anderson and Richard D. Smith, and Ryan Kelly, a staff member the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at PNNL, and former PNNL staffers Jason Page, Ioan Marginean, and Jonathan Cox.

Putting some pressure on magic

A PNNL team created a way to make a sophisticated scientific tool more useful for a variety of studies, including several aimed at answering important questions about energy and the environment.

The method boosts the ability to use nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to look at molecular interactions in complex samples under conditions that more closely mimic their real-world environment, whether it is the extreme conditions found on the tundra, in the deep ocean or underground.

In the past, scientists have not been able to analyze solid materials using NMR spectroscopy in its most effective mode, known as “magic angle spinning,” while the samples were held under the high pressures or temperatures relevant to real-world reactions.

The PNNL team has applied the technology, called pressurized magic angle spinning, to such real-world conditions as the high pressures of fracking wells deep underground.

The multidisciplinary team is based largely at the Environmental Molecular Sciences laboratory and includes David Hoyt, Jian Zhi Hu, Jesse Sears, Eric Walter, Hardeep Mehta, and Kevin Rosso, as well as former PNNL researcher Flaviu Turcu.

This story was originally published November 28, 2015 at 5:07 PM with the headline "PNNL wins 5 ‘Oscars of Innovation’."