Engineers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have increased the efficiency of utility plants run by the U.S. Navy Public Works Center in San Diego by installing automated monitoring and control systems at four plants. The center estimates the upgrades will save about $800,000 a year. Upgrades include computer systems that monitor boilers, chillers, gas turbines, electric generators and pumps. The computers monitor and record system performance and keep logs of events and malfunctions to assist operators in troubleshooting and maintaining optimal performance. The program is supported by DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program.  
 

INEEL scientist goes Hollywood   

Microbiologist Rick Colwell of DOE’s Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory joined a video production crew at Yellowstone National Park last week as they filmed a video for the park’s visitor center. Colwell serves as a science advisor for the 10-minute film, which will be narrated by Walter Cronkite, about the microbial communities that grow at the ridiculously high temperatures of Yellowstone’s springs. Bill Kurtis Productions interviewed the rising star about the uses of heat-loving bacteria and their heat-stable enzymes. Colwell doesn’t know yet whether his interview will be included in the film or end up on the cutting room floor. Expected completion date is January 1999, too late for this year’s Oscar nominations.  
 

Inexpensive Sandia substrate keeps today’s hot chips cooler   

In a few years a dime-size microchip may be home to as many as 10 million transistors, a development necessary for tomorrow’s more compact, complex micro devices. But the electrical resistance created as all those snug circuits zap electrons back and forth are causing even today’s tightly packaged microprocessors to get really hot. And hot microchips and printed circuit boards fail faster as their tiny interconnects succumb to the rigors of cyclic heating and cooling. Even more damaging are temperature gradients across chips that can cause tiny cracks and stress voids to form in a chip’s delicate wiring. An apparent solution is in the offing, however, in the development by researchers at DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories of an innovative approach that uses an intricate network of microscopic, coolant-filled passages formed directly within the substrate to remove heat from microchips and printed circuit boards and keep them closer to their optimum operating temperatures.  
 

Biologists studying genetic mutations and diseases will soon have a new ultra-high-resolution imaging tool to examine soft tissue and skeletal detail of mice and other laboratory animals—without killing them. The MicroCAT system, developed by researchers at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, generates three-dimensional images with 10 times the resolution of conventional imaging systems. With MicroCAT, researchers no longer will have to rely on visible genetic markers and physical examinations to discover the presence of mutations. And, because they don’t have to dissect the mice, researchers will be able to study the development of a mutation over several weeks or months.  
 

Scientists at DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have used the SGI/Cray T3E supercomputer at DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to create new three-dimensional nonlinear particle simulations of plasma turbulence. Magnetic fields are used to confine a hot ionized gas or plasma for the controlled production of fusion energy. However, turbulence can spoil the efficiency of this approach by causing accelerated loss of particles and energy from the plasma and by preventing transitions to enhanced confinement regimes discovered in recent experiments. In recent work [Science (281), 1835 (1998)], PPPL researchers have performed calculations involving 400 million plasma particles (i.e., 100 million guiding centers) in 5000 time-steps—an achievement made possible by access to NERSC’s massively parallel processor (MPP). The results are providing valuable new physics insights and correlate well with key trends observed in experiments.  
 

The bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and U.S. attacks on terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan are just the latest in disasters raising the public awareness of the importance of architectural and infrastructure integrity. The Architectural Surety (SM) program at DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories has been studying events like those—as well as hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, and others—with the goal of building stronger buildings that protect the people inhabiting them and remain standing and useable longer. The program uses Sandia risk management methodologies and technical capabilities to examine vulnerabilities and identify changes in architectural design, building codes, or construction standards that would improve their performance in natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or other out-of-the-ordinary situations. For more details see http://www.sandia.gov/archsur.