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Here’s what we are hearing (from press releases):

Upgraded universal borescope from Schoelly Imaging offers modular advantage

Schoelly Imaging Inc. announces an upgrade to its 4.0mm universal borescope, a modular borescope system whose interchangeable optic objectives allow inspectors to cost effectively change angles with a single borescope. Optics for the 4mm diameter borescope have been improved, resulting in greater luminosity. It also features threaded tips and working lengths from 135mm to 1460mm.

Thermal Technology provides K1 sapphire growers to Silian

The manufacturer of crystal growth equipment and high temperature furnace systems finalized a Model K1 sapphire crystal grower sales agreement with Chongqing Silian Optoelectronics Science & Technology Co.

Harper awarded contract for complete state-of-the-art carbon fiber processing line at Oak Ridge National Lab

Harper International has finalized a contract with the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Lab for a fully integrated pilot-scale carbon fiber process line valued at greater than US$12M. The line is a custom designed conversion process to support ORNL’s Low Cost Carbon Fiber research and technology transfer. Harper also has launched the next generation of custom oxidation ovens to process carbon fiber available at 300- 4000+mm tow band widths.

Crumm assumes leadership as Ultra Electronics Adaptive Materials expands staff 20%

The company recently appointed Aaron Crumm to be president. Crumm, who previously served as the company’s chief technology officer, will now lead AMI’s continued growth and success. “AMI is already a leader in the fuel cell market and my goal is to see it become a dominant force in the alternative energy space,” said Crumm.  “We are aggressively ramping up our development and manufacturing efforts.

Diamon-Fusion International announces new officers, directors

DFI Nanotechnology announced today its new slate of officers and directors as part of the company’s recent re-structure of its operations. DFI’s newly formed Executive Committee is made up of company officers Adam Zax, president/CEO; Guillermo Seta, corporate VP; and Rubin Turner, corporate counsel. Other previously appointed key positions include Russ Slaybaugh, VP/GM; Todd Gentry, director of operations and strategic planning; Yasser Elassal, director of research and technology; and Carl Christ, director of on-site services. DFI produces and distributes a variety of products designed for the restoration, protection and maintenance of silica-based surfaces, such as glass, granite, tile, porcelain and quartz.

MV Products offers vacuum foreline traps for green product manufacturing processes

The company is offering a line of vacuum foreline traps for processes that create large volumes of solid byproducts such as those used for manufacturing solar cells, HB-LEDs, Li-ion batteries, as well as sintering of ceramics. Several models are available to accommodate different production process and volume requirements.

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At the end of each day, I end up with a list of stories I started to write about, or started to investigate or didn’t even get that far even though the topic looked intriguing, but, I had a meeting to go to …

Rather than have these stories evaporate into the ether, here are some raw links to some of these orphan tales. Check ‘em out:

Tennessee, ORNL open Joint Institute for Neutron Studies, gateway to world’s most powerful neutron scattering facilities

Fluid fractures like a solid

Ralph Hall to chair House science panel

$5.1 million Army-Maryland proof-of-concept alliance speeds university research to market

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ORNL’s James Klett holds an LED streetlamp. The lamp will use heat sinks of graphite foam
(samples in his left hand) to extend the life of the LEDs and cut operating costs.

Around 1997, Oak Ridge National Lab’s James Klett and Timothy Burchell discovered how to make graphite foam, a material that had at least one amazing property: It transfers heat like crazy.

If this property of the foam seems a little counter-intuitive, that’s because foam materials are often associated with with heat insulation properties. But in this case, the foam acts as a super heat radiator. A story in an ORNL newsletter said the stuff worked so well that if you put an ice cube on a hockey puck-sized chunk of the graphite foam, and put the foam on you hand, “the cube melts from your body heat as if it were on a hot griddle.”

At the time, Klett, a researcher in the lab’s Metals and Ceramics Division, noted that, “Graphite foam is as thermally conductive as aluminum at one-fifth the weight. It has a very high surface-area-to-weight ratio and a high heat transfer coefficient. This interests engineers and designers because products that use energy wage an ongoing battle with heat,” he says.

He said the key to the foam’s conductivity is its unusual graphite crystal structure that is full of air pockets, making it only 25% dense and lightweight. A network of graphite “ligaments” in the foam wicks heat away from its source.

Klett shows that ice held against the graphite foam will melt quickly because the heat from the hand holding the foam is transferred rapidly through the foam. As a result, this hand feels the cold fast.

When they made their discovery, Klett and Burchell were building on a legacy of carbon innovations that go back to at least the 1960s when Johhn Googin developed the first method to produce carbon foams was used as high-temperature furnace insulation. Klett and Burchell also developed a commercial carbon-carbon disk brakes system.

Over the past decade, Klett, Burchell and ORNL have licensed the special foam for numerous applications – especially with mechanical and electronic heat-transfer applications – and the material garnered an R&D 100 award.

Now, the foam’s ability to act as an efficient heat sink is being put to new uses in the world of energy-efficient lighting. On Friday, ORNL announced that it has licensed the foam to LED North America for use in commercial LED lighting systems such as in the large arrays now being manufactured for street lamps and parking garages.

The lab says passive cooling materials, such as the foam, are needed to increase LED efficiency and lifetime. ORNL reports that each 10° decrease in temperature can double the life of the lighting components. “While this technology will reduce temperatures and increase the life of the LED lighting systems, what it will really do is save municipalities millions of dollars every year in replacement fixture costs as well as maintenance,” Klett said.

Besides being lightweight, Klett says the foam is easy to machine and use in manufacturing. These advantages give it a growing edge compared to traditional heat transfer materials, such as copper or aluminum.

LED North America president Andrew Wilhelm predicts that the foam will double the life of the LED units. He also says the first lamps using the foam will be installed later this year in an ORNL parking lot.

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Through new collaborations totaling $6.2 million, ORNL will be partnering with industry to overcome challenges facing lithium-ion manufacturing. Partners include A123 Systems, Dow Kokam, Porous Power Technologies and Planar Energy. In each case, industry cost-share exceeds 50 percent of the total project cost.

“By leveraging our expertise in materials science and manufacturing, ORNL will assist these partners with their individual energy storage challenges and address opportunities to surpass non-domestic secondary battery manufacturers that dominate today’s market,” says ORNL’s Energy Materials Program director Craig Blue in an ORNL press release.

The research teams will focus efforts on safety, service life and cost reduction.

Secondary Li-ion cell manufacturing encompasses a broad range of disciplines including formulation chemistry, film casting, polymer processing, materials and composite design, interfacial science and component engineering.

According to ORNL’s David Wood, co-principal investigator and technical lead on the project, collaborative research is expected to take place during the next 18 months. Wood adds, “This is a unique and timely opportunity for ORNL to help government and industry set the course for a new generation of energy storage technologies.”

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Credit: LLNL

According to a release from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, a new element has been discovered, one that resides in a tiny slice of paradise called the island of stability. Element 117– yet to receive a formal name – is the fifth new element scientists have discovered in the past decade.

“The discovery of element 117 is the culmination of a decade-long journey to expand the periodic table and write the next chapter in heavy-element research,” says Yuri Oganessian, scientific leader of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research and spokesperson for the collaboration. JINR is a Russia-based international intergovernmental research organization.

Although these elements only appear in the lab, some researchers say they may occur in nature as extremely rare, fleeting by-products of supernova.

The quest has increasingly been driven by what nuclear physicists call the island of stability – a range of very heavy elements, not yet created, that theory suggests should remain stable far longer than many of the elements researchers have created in the lab so far.

Finding element 117 took patience. According to the LLNL website, the effort took two years. It began at the High Flux Isotope Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Lab with a 250-day irradiation to produce 22 mg of berkelium. This was followed by 90 days of processing at ORNL to separate and purify the berkelium. Then, lab in Dimitrovgrad, Russia, had to prepare the berkelium target. Finally, calcium ions were fired at the target for 150 days. And, that was cutting it close: Berkelium has a half-life of only 320 days.

The result: six atoms of element 117. The atoms existed for between 21 and 45 millionths of a second.

The team included scientists from the JINR (Dubna, Russia), the Research Institute for Advanced Reactors (Dimitrovgrad), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“This is a significant breakthrough for science,” LLNL director George Miller says. “The discovery of a new element provides new insight into the makeup of the universe and is a testimony to the strength of science and technology at the partner institutions.”

The team now is gearing up to probe element 117’s chemical properties. The team’s results appear in a research paper accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Check out the animation of the creation of element 117 here.

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