Argonne News

Five of the world's top 100 scientific and technological innovations during 2005, as judged by R&D Magazine, came from Argonne.

Argonne has been consistently on the R&D 100 Awards list, having won 95 of the honors since the magazine began presenting them in 1964.

Argonne Director Bob Rosner congratulated the winners, saying, “I am thrilled that Argonne staff members have been recognized for their important innovations with these prestigious awards. Winning such awards attests to the high quality of research at Argonne and to the caliber of our staff.”

Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said, “I congratulate the researchers who have won these awards, which highlight the power and promise of DOE's investments in science and technology. Through the efforts of dedicated and innovative scientists and engineers at our national laboratories, DOE is helping to enhance our nation's energy, economic and national security.”

The world's fastest commercially producible hydrogen sensor, which will be used in cars to detect unsafe levels of hydrogen. Developers are Argonne's Glenn Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellow Michael Zach, Argonne postdoctoral researcher Tao Xu and physicist Zhili Xiao (joint with Northern Illinois University). Funding for the research was provided by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences, by the State of Illinois, and by Makel Engineering, with funds provided by Edison Materials Technology Center.

Anti-scatter grids for X-ray imaging and collimators for nuclear imaging, developed jointly with Creatv MicroTech, Inc. Developers are Derrick Mancini, Ralu Divan and Judi Yaeger at Argonne; Olga Makarova, Guohua Yang and Cha-Mei Tang at Creatv MicroTech, Inc.; and former Argonne employees Vladislav N. Zyryanov, now at Illinois Institute of Technology, and Nicolaie Moldovan, now at Northwestern University. Funding was provided by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences and Creatv MicroTech.

Materials resistant to metal dusting degradation, which will be used to make more durable equipment in plants that manufacture hydrogen. Developed by Argonne scientists Ken Natesan and Zuotao Zeng, the research was funded by the Industrial Technologies Program of DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Multiport dryer technology for the forest industry, which will improve the efficiency of dryers used in paper mills. Developers at Argonne are Stephen U.S. Choi and Ralph Niemann. Other institutions involved in this project are the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Kadant Johnson in Three Rivers, Michigan. Funding was provided by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy through its Industrial Technologies Program.

The separative bioreactor for the production and recovery of biobased products, which will enable biobased chemical products to be used in place of petrochemicals. The bioreactor was developed jointly with Archer Daniels Midland Company. Developers at Argonne are Seth W. Snyder, YuPo J. Lin, Michael P. Henry, Michelle B. Arora, Edward J. St. Martin, Jamie A. Hestekin (now at Kraft Foods) and James R. Frank. Developers at Archer Daniels Midland Company are Thomas P. Binder, Rishi Shukla, K.N. Mani, Ahmad Hilaly, Wuli Bao and William F. Ellis. The project development has been jointly sponsored by the DOE Biomass Program and Archer Daniels Midland.

Robin Reierson and John Downs (both TSD-Central Shops) have received Quality and Safety Recognition Awards for designing and building an innovative device that made a concrete-drilling job safer and faster.

Reierson and Downs were assigned to install 1,600 square feet of stainless-steel plates over an existing concrete floor in a controlled area of Building 205. The floor was installed to seal in loose radioactive contamination and to support heavy lead casks. The casks contain radioactive material and are moved across the room into caves. The existing concrete is contaminated and had been painted to seal in loose particles; moving the casks might have loosened the paint and spread the contamination. The plating, a more permanent solution to the problem, needed to be anchored to the existing concrete. To install anchors that would hold each plate down, holes needed to be drilled in the concrete. The holes had to be aligned correctly, and the spread of contamination had to be kept to a minimum.

Originally, the work was designed and estimated for workers in anti-contamination clothing and filtered-air respirators. The plate edges were to be sealed, the holes drilled and the concrete dust was to be vacuumed.

Downs and Reierson created a device that captured potentially contaminated cement dust created during the drilling of the anchor holes. This device allowed the drilling of more than 450 holes in the contaminated floor without spreading the contamination — and it centered the holes perfectly with the plates. It made the work safer and faster and allowed Central Shops to skip a planned step of pre-masking the weld joints in the floor during the drilling operation, and also reduced the amount of post-drilling cleanup, saving time and reducing costs.

Argonne has been named one of “Chicago's 101 Best & Brightest Companies to Work For” for the second year in a row by the National Association for Business Resources. The award is made even more significant by the organization's decision to recognize only 60 area organizations this year.

Winners are organizations that “work with imagination and conviction to create organizational value and business results through their policies and best practices in human resources management. This distinction is bestowed in honor of an organization's recognition of their employees as their greatest asset.”

Some of the other winning organizations this year are DiamondCluster International, Ernst & Young, Foote Cone & Belding, Office Concepts, and Verizon Wireless.

The categories in which Argonne was judged include communication, community initiatives, compensation and benefits, diversity and multiculturalism, employee education and development, employee engagement and commitment, recognition and retention, recruitment and selection, and work-life balance. Final judging was based on a detailed description of laboratory business practices and the results of an opinion survey issued to a random sample of 250 Argonne employees.

“This recognition from the National Association of Business Resources reaffirms Argonne's commitment to developing strong leadership, supporting a creative and diverse workforce, recruiting, developing and retaining the talent needed to implement the laboratory's programmatic activities and initiatives,” said Argonne Human Resources Director Carol Quinn. “Receipt of this award helps confirm the success of the laboratory in its commitment to continue the reputation of Argonne National Laboratory as ‘The Employer of Choice.'”

Argonne will host a seminar on the use of cone penetrometer testing (CPT) in geotechnical and environmental practice Aug. 24-25. The featured speaker will be Tom Lunne of the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute. Contributing lecturers will be Don DeGroot, professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Lorraine LaFreniere (EVS), manager of CPT and the Environmental Testing Program at Argonne.

The course will cover theory and practice in CPT; soil stratigraphy; soil engineering parameters derived from interpretation of CPT data; factors influencing test results; problem soils; CPT for evaluation and remediation programs in environmental engineering, geology and hydrogeology; CPT field demonstrations; and exhibits from CPT equipment suppliers.

The registration fee — which includes snacks and a copy of the textbook “Cone Penetration Testing in Geotechnical Practice” (1997) by Lunne, Robertson and Powell — is $575 until July 31 and $650 for registrations received later. To register, contact Carmie White at (630) 739-6000 or cwhite@aps.anl.gov.

An Argonne mathematician will receive international recognition for two papers he co-authored on techniques for solving problems arising in situations as important to everyday life as air crew scheduling and finding how much power a nuclear reactor can safely produce.

Computational mathematician Sven Leyffer (MCS), along with Roger Fletcher of the University of Dundee in Scotland and Philippe Toint of the University of Namur in Belgium, will receive the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics' annual meeting in Boston this July. The prize, which is awarded by the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), is given once every three years for a paper or book consisting of original results published within the previous six years.

Leyffer works on finding methods for solving large-scale nonlinear optimization problems. These problems represent situations where maximizing a desired goal must be done with regard to other constraints. Examples include problems such as designing reloading operations for nuclear reactors that give the highest power output possible while still observing appropriate safety measures, or seeing how electricity producers maximize profit in a deregulated market while exploiting government-allocated NOx permits to drive up costs of their competitors.

To solve these problems, a sequence of linear approximations is constructed and solved. In order to decide whether this sequence is making progress towards a solution, mathematicians have traditionally combined the objective and the constraints into a single function. However, this process is fraught with difficulties, and Leyffer's new filter methods resolve these difficulties by looking at the objective and the constraints simultaneously.

“This is a radically new concept that is changing the way we do optimization,” Leyffer said.

Leyffer has been on staff at Argonne since 2002 and was also a visiting scientist at the laboratory in 1999. He is the program director for SIAM's Activity Group on Optimization, an associate editor for SIAM's Journal of Optimization and Springer's Computational Management Science.

Argonne employees can consider the second-largest vanpool program in the nation one of their options for getting to work. Pace, the Chicago area's suburban transit provider, now has more than 600 vans in service.

In the traditional vanpool model, five to 13 people commute to work in a van owned and maintained by Pace, but driven by a vanpool participant. Drivers ride free and get 300 personal miles of van use each month, and riders are transported between home and the office for less than half the cost of driving themselves. Pace also has Metra feeder vanpools, which provide the last mile of transit between Metra stations and places of work, and vanpools for persons with disabilities.

To find a vanpool, or to find information on how to start a new vanpool, visit the Pace Web site at www.pacebus.com.

The laboratory's retirement vendors will send representatives to Argonne during August.

Fidelity —Tuesday, Aug. 8, and Tuesday, Aug. 22. Call the appointment desk at (800) 642-7131.

TIAA-CREF — Wednesday, Aug. 2, Thursday, Aug. 3, and Friday, Aug. 4. Call the appointment desk at (800) 842-2005 or www.tiaa-cref.org/moc.

Prudential — Wednesday, Aug. 2, and Wednesday, Aug. 16. Call Cheryl at the appointment desk at (630) 285-8876.

Completed in January 2006, Argonne's Westgate entrance was completely renovated with a focus on safety and security for all employees. Installed more than 30 years ago, the old Westgate was in need of renovation to comply with Argonne's updated safety and security initiatives.

The new Westgate was designed to meet all laboratory security requirements. The guardhouse was replaced, a canopy was installed, lighting was added and updated, LED signs were installed, gate arm sensors were added and search lanes were constructed for inbound and outbound vehicles.

The new guardhouse insures all officers have heat in the winter and air conditioning in summer months, adding to their overall comfort, health and safety. The increased lighting assists the officers when performing badge checks and car searches and increases the safety of employees approaching the gate. The LED signs can relay safety bulletins, traffic alerts and safety and security reminders. The signs have recently been reconfigured to display the number of days since the last lost workday due to a work-related injury or illness.

The newly installed gates are equipped with “smart-gate” technology that can detect objects beneath the gate arm, minimizing the potential for damage to vehicles.

In the past, vehicles were searched after passing through the gate, which was a security concern. The new search lanes enable officers to search vehicles before they enter the Argonne site.

“Safety and security at the gate is everyone's concern,” said Ed Mickulas (SCD-OS), security administration manager. “When entering or exiting Argonne, please remember to slow down, use extreme caution, stay alert and follow the directions of the officers at the gate.”

The new Argonne Jazz Club recently announced its presence at the laboratory with a charity benefit concert at the Advanced Photon Source Auditorium.

At the concert, Tim Branch (EQO) played saxophone and Tim Madden (APS) played trombone. They were joined by guest musicians Scott Gillis on drums, Jason Trtan on bass and Clifford Dubose on keyboard, all of whom Branch knew from previous musical engagements. Gillis' mother and stepfather, Lynn and Tony TenKate, both work in Argonne's Chemical Engineering Division.

In addition to Branch and Madden, the club's officers include Lisa Reyes (EQO) and Gaylen Kuehl (PFS).

Proceeds from ticket sales were donated to the Will County United Way, which funds 45 local charities. Reyes said the group raised $330. Future concerts, which will also benefit charities, are planned for fall and around Christmas, although the group does not have specific dates for those yet.

Branch said various Argonne employees had been telling him for the past few years that he should start a jazz club, after hearing him play saxophone at Argonne's annual tribute to veterans in November. He thinks there may be more potential Argonne Jazz Club members at the laboratory.

“I think there are more jazz musicians than fans,” Branch said. “They come out one by one.”

Branch said jazz musicians may be prevalent at a place like Argonne because some of the skills required to be a scientist are also required to be a musician.

“Science, math and music all go hand in hand to me,” Branch said, adding that all three disciplines are concerned with issues of sound waves and rhythms and calculations.

1,500 attend employee picnic

The Argonne Club sponsored the annual Argonne Employee Picnic on July 8. About 1,500 people attended the festivities, which included games, demonstrations, a reptile exhibit and, of course, food.

“We would like to thank all of the volunteers — there were about 200 — for helping run the activities; PFS Grounds, Rigging, Fire, and Building Maintenance for helping set up, tear down, prepare the park and keep it clean; C&PA for the 60th anniversary signs; management for taking the time to be greeters; and the Chicago Herpetological Society for their display,” said Argonne Club president Todd Hayden (HEP).

The Argonne Club's next major event will be a discounted trip to Great America in August. Details will be available soon on the club's Web site: www.argonneclub.anl.gov.

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