This macrophotograph compares commercial nickel-based Alloy 600 (top) and Argonne 's new alloy after 5,700 hours of exposure to the same metal-dusting environment at 593°C.

Nov. 27, 2006 -- Some of this week's stories:

Award-winning alloys could reduce costs for chemical, petrochemical industries

Materials developed by Argonne scientists could provide large cost and energy savings to the chemical and petrochemical industries.

The new alloy materials — which won an R&D 100 award from R&D magazine as one of the top 100 scientific and technological innovations in the world during 2005 — are resistant to metal dusting, a type of degradation that occurs at elevated temperatures in hydrocarbon-containing atmospheres in which carbon activity is high.

Such environments are prevalent in chemical and petrochemical industries such as hydrogen-, methanol- and ammonia-reformers and in synthesis-gas production plants. The degradation of metallic component materials into powder and the resulting damage make it difficult to maintain equipment used in these industries. Currently, almost all commercial alloys degrade by metal dusting corrosion.

“More than 50 years of previous research could not solve this problem,” said Argonne researcher Ken Natesan (NE). “The only available solution was to quench the high-temperature gases by lowering the working temperature, which results in energy loss and decreased product yield.” In a study lasting several years, Natesan and Argonne researcher Zuotao Zeng established the role of carbon deposition in the mechanism leading to initiation and propagation of metal dusting. The work was conducted at both atmospheric and high pressures and simulated the gas chemistry — including the high steam content — prevalent in reformer environments.

This led to the development of alloys that resist this type of degradation and can be used to build equipment for the chemical and petrochemical industries. The Argonne-developed alloys performed significantly better than the currently available commercial alloys when tested in the metal dusting environment because they develop oxide scales that resist carbon attack. For example, an Argonne-developed alloy was still smooth and without pits after exposure to the same metal dusting environment for 5,700 hours at 593 degrees Celsius. Commercial alloys tested under the same conditions developed large pits.

Application of the Argonne-developed alloys in the future may enable a complete redesign of reforming systems with improved efficiency. Using these materials to build such industrial equipment could save 500 trillion Joules of energy each day, which is equivalent to 13 million standard cubic meters of natural gas each day.

Financially, this innovation could save $500 million to $1.3 billion per year in the hydrogen industry alone and could increase industrial productivity by enabling machinery to function with fewer maintenance shutdowns. Such savings will become increasingly important as hydrogen is used more as a source of energy.

While the Argonne-developed alloys will probably find their first applications in hydrogen and synthesis gas production plants, they can also be used for components such as waste heat boilers and gas bypass lines exposed to metal dusting environments in methanol and ammonia reformer plants. They can also be effective in gas-to-liquid plants in which natural gas is converted into liquid fuels.

The research was funded by the Industrial Technologies Program of the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Arts program seeks volunteers

Employees are needed to help present cultural arts programs at Argonne. Volunteers staff the ticket-sales table in the Building 213 Cafeteria at lunchtime and help organize and run concerts and other events.

“Arts at Argonne needs some new faces and new ideas to keep the program vital as it enters its third decade,” said Sue Morss (PS), who runs the program with Branko Ruscic (CHM). “The program is one of the reasons Argonne is more than just a place to work. Volunteers make it happen.”

Arts at Argonne, the laboratory's cultural arts program, presents an annual Chamber Music Series, music performances by professional artists, art and photography exhibits and other events. Concerts are open to the public, feature internationally known artists and are presented in a comfortable, intimate auditorium. A reception follows every performance, giving patrons — and aspiring musicians — a chance to meet the performers and discuss their music. Dinners are available before and after each performance at the nearby Argonne Guest House.

For more information, see the Arts at Argonne Web site, or contact Morss at smorss@anl.gov or ext. 2-6784 or Ruscic at ext. 2-4079 or ruscic@anl.gov.

System design, ending ‘blame culture' key to worker safety

Todd Conklin is a big fan of rumble strips.

Those ridges along the roadway were created with the understanding that drivers are fallible — they sometimes get drowsy and drift out of the lane. Rumble strips alert the driver and help correct the situation before it becomes an accident.

That concept — accepting humans for the fallible beings they are and building work processes that prevent errors from becoming injuries — was at the heart of Conklin's recent talk on “Human Performance Improvement.” Conklin, a deputy group leader and organizational psychologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, lectures on many subjects at facilities throughout the DOE complex. He was invited by Associate Laboratory Director Al Sattelberger to talk to Argonne managers about safety and how systems interface with people.

Rumble strips are one example of “engineered controls,” Conklin said, that take the human element out of the system, or at least recognize fallibility and accommodate it. This kind of thinking was championed by the nuclear power industry in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident.

“Instead of ‘how can we keep the workers safe from this highly hazardous facility,' they asked, ‘how can we keep our facility … safe from the workers?'” Conklin said. “That's a profound question. Once they asked it that way, they realized what they had to do was make systems ‘wise,' like rumble strips and guard rails. They realized that once you put people into that system, you're going to have fallibility.”

The industry's event rate is now “dramatically” lower, and since 1979, power production is up 42 percent despite no new plants having been built, he said.

“We found at Los Alamos, most of our systems were set up for our workers to fail.” Something as simple as getting safety shoes required three supervisor signatures on a form and two visits to the safety-shoe provider. The process is set up to discourage workers from getting safety shoes, which could lead to injuries.

System-induced errors result in about 70 percent of safety-related incidents, Conklin added.

Accountability

“Accountability” too often equates to “blame,” Conklin said. What's needed is a new definition.

“We treat every error as though it were a willful violation,” Conklin said, despite the fact that workers want to do the best job they can. After an error occurs, “You're bringing a person in and lecturing them on something they didn't intend to do, in hopes that when they go back out, they won't do something again that they didn't mean to do in the first place.”

Instead, the question to ask in the wake of an incident is, “What were they thinking at the time that made that decision seem correct?”

“We believe accountability is a partnership,” Conklin said, “where managers create an environment in which workers can make good decisions.”

To create this environment, he said, managers must recognize:

• Human error is a symptom of trouble deeper inside a system.

• To explain failure, determine how people's assessments and actions made sense at the time, given the circumstances that surrounded them.

• Encourage reporting; value errors as leading safety data.

• Don't try to punish errors out of the system.

• Prepare workers to adapt effectively to changing demands.

• Create opportunities for observation, reflection and feedback.

“Input, not distribution, is the problem,” Conklin said. For the system to work, workers need to report errors. This won't happen in a “blame culture” where errors are punished. For example, workers may invent workarounds to complete an established process or task more quickly, or more efficiently. This is actually a good thing, Conklin said: The point at which workers leave the process reveals “exactly where the process goes bad.” Workers who are willing to share this kind of information would give supervisors a chance to learn and improve both the system and safety.

“Is the way senior management imagines you do work, different from the way you actually do work?” Conklin asked.

Although errors will probably never be eliminated, Conklin said, supervisors can recognize fallibility and develop systems and processes that reduce or eliminate the consequences of error, which can lead to zero major events.

Principles

To improve performance and safety, Conklin listed five basic principles to guide supervisors:

1. People are fallible, and even the best make mistakes.

2. Error-likely situations are predictable, manageable and preventable.

3. Individual behavior is influenced by organizational processes and values.

4. Operational upsets can be avoided.

5. People achieve high levels of performance based on encouragement and reinforcement.

Bittner named senior member of IEEE

Sandra Bittner has been named a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Bittner is a software license engineer in the Office of the CIO (CIS) and a senior network and systems engineer in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division.

IEEE, a non-profit organization, is the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology, with more than 367,000 members in 150 countries. Senior membership is an invited honor recognizing the member's technical and professional excellence. Senior member standing further recognizes that the candidate has successfully completed the first step to becoming an IEEE fellow.

One example of Bittner's accomplishments leading to this recognition was her participation in the Wireless Emergency Response Team, which supported emergency search and rescue efforts through advanced wireless technology capabilities at the New York City World Trade Center site in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. For their service in a national crisis, team members received a framed certificate signed by the chairman of the Federal Communication Commission, the USAF manager for National Communications Systems, and the president of the Wireless Emergency Response Team.

Current Argonne injury/illness statistics

Through Nov. 15:

• First Aid Cases to date: 12

• U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recordable cases to date: 5

OSHA recordable case summaries to date

• Nasal fracture from being struck by a car door.

• Strained back while standing up to answer an on-site alarm.

• Bruise to chin and fracture to finger from tripping over a lawn sprinkler head.

• Strained back from lifting a container onto a wooden pallet.

• Ankle caught between equipment and step during material handling operation.

First-aid case summaries to date

• Small cut to hand while disposing of a wooden board with a protruding nail.

• Elbow scraped on a gurney.

• Minor cut to finger while unpacking boxes.

• Bump to head from striking a ladder protruding from the bed of a pick-up truck.

• Bruise to rib cage and knee from tripping over a metal door track.

• Cut to finger caught between mobile stairs and the handle of an equipment enclosure.

• Wasp sting to finger.

• Knee strained from striking against equipment.

• Lower leg strained from tripping over a box.

• Foot slipped and twisted while proceeding to answer a phone call.

• Sliver in thumb from picking up a piece of scrap wood.

• Cut to thumb while cutting Teflon tube.

New members named to Board of Governors for Argonne

UChicago Argonne, LLC has named four new members to its Board of Governors for Argonne. The new members are Richard I. Morimoto, the Bill and Gayle Cook Professor of Biology, professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, and director of the Rice Institute for Biomedical Research at Northwestern University; Don Randel, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and former president of The University of Chicago; John A. Fees, CEO, BWX Technologies, Inc. and Noel Watson, CEO, Jacobs Engineering Inc., both industrial partners of UChicago Argonne, LLC, the new organization chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to manage and operate Argonne.

UChicago Argonne, LLC names the board members to help oversee and guide Argonne research, operations and management. Members of the board are chosen from faculty, administrators and trustees of The University of Chicago, from other universities, from national and international organizations, and from industry. In addition, the director of Argonne is an ex-officio member of the board.

• Richard I. Morimoto is the Bill and Gayle Cook professor of biology, professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, and director of the Rice Institute for Biomedical Research at Northwestern University. He is widely recognized for his research on the regulation of the heat-shock stress response and the function of molecular chaperones. His current research studies provide a molecular basis to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases including Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, ALS and Alzheimer's disease.

• Don Randel, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, grew up in Panama and then attended Princeton University, where he received bachelor's, M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees in music. He joined the Cornell University faculty in the department of music in 1968. Thereafter, he served as department chair, vice-provost, associate dean and then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In 1995, he was named provost of Cornell University. He became president of The University of Chicago on July 1, 2000. He became president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in July 2006.

• John A. Fees, BWXT's chief operating officer, joined the company in 1979 at the Nuclear Products Division in Lynchburg, Va. During his time there, he managed Engineering and Project Management for national security programs. Fees transferred to Diamond Power in 1993 as general manager of manufacturing and was named president of Diamond Power in September 1994. From 1997, Fees served as President of BWXT Services, Inc., which provides management and technical services to federal agencies.

• Noel Watson, chief executive officer, Jacobs Engineering Inc., was recruited by company founder Joseph Jacobs in 1960. He left for a few years but returned in 1965 and has been with the company ever since. With a degree in chemical engineering from the University of North Dakota, his early focus was mining and minerals processing projects. Over the years, Watson worked in several locations and roles for the company. First a process engineer and then a project manager, he assumed successive senior management positions until ultimately becoming president in 1987 and CEO in 1992. He became chairman in 2004 and executive chairman in 2006 upon the election of Craig Martin as CEO.

Deadline for last issue of 2006 is Dec. 1

The deadline for 2006's last issue of Argonne News, to be published Monday, Dec. 11, will be Friday, Dec. 1, at noon.

The first issue of 2007 will be Monday, Jan. 15; the deadline for all materials is Friday, Jan. 5, 2007, at noon.

Argonne Today will be published through Dec. 21.

Livermore, Argonne scientists to work with IBM designers

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and IBM will share the cost of a five-year, $58 million research and development effort to further enhance the capabilities of the fastest computer in existence. Under the agreement, scientists from two of the DOE's national laboratories are teaming with IBM to further develop supercomputer technology to increase America's ability to deliver answers to scientific problems and to safeguard the nation's nuclear stockpile.

“Supercomputing is essential to maintaining and extending America's economic competitiveness,” said DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman. “This R&D effort will give us the capability to advance science and business with unprecedented speed, performance and efficiency.”

A key goal of the R&D effort is to produce a software environment that enables scientific exploration atop an architecture that can scale to hundreds of thousands of low-power CPU cores. Some other specific examples of scientific problems in the national interest include:

• reinvigorating nuclear power technologies;

• speeding genome sequencing;

• modeling environmental and climate changes; and

• deepening the understanding of genetic and biological processes.

The work will be performed by scientists at Argonne and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working together with computer and software designers from IBM. NNSA and the Office of Science will each contribute $17.5 million, and IBM will contribute $23 million.

“This agreement will help us design computer architectures to attack key scientific problems,” said Raymond L. Orbach, DOE under secretary for science. “It offers a tremendous step forward.”

Retirement vendors to visit site

The laboratory's retirement vendors will send representatives to Argonne during December. To schedule an appointment, call the number listed.

Candidates for R&D 100 and Green Chemistry Awards due

Argonne candidate entries for the R&D 100 Awards and Green Chemistry Challenge Awards are being requested by the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT).

R&D 100 awards are presented annually by R&D magazine to recognize the “100 most technologically significant products” of the preceding year.

The Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards acknowledge innovative technology that promotes industrial ecology or reduces or prevents pollution in a significant way. Application or commercial use of the technology is also important in this award. More Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award information can be found online.

Topics chosen as candidates for R&D 100 awards must be technologies that are available for license to industry or could be ordered as products in 2006. The entry will be strengthened if there is tangible evidence of private-sector involvement either as partners or as commercial supplier, such as a CRADA (cooperative research and development agreement) partner, industry joint ventures, partner, industry licensee or some other contractual arrangement with industry.

Candidates for the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge must be chemical technologies showing a clear environmental advantage over current commercial practice, with meaningful industry involvement, as in the R&D 100 awards.

Additional information is available online. Final entries for Green Chemistry are due to OTT by Dec. 16. Final entries for R&D 100 Awards are due to OTT by Feb. 7, 2007. Contact Cynthia Wesolowski (OTT) at ext. 2-7694 or weso@anl.gov for more information.