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Discovermagazine's "environmental technology of the year" award has been won by Argonne's new technology for producing an environmentally benign industrial solvent.
Another Argonne technology, a near frictionless coating developed in the Energy Technology Division, was a runner-up in the "emerging technologies" category.
This was the first time Argonne was a finalist in the awards, presented annually to the best technologies developed by corporate, academic and government research centers. More than 4,000 innovators were invited to participate in the program, and 44 finalists were chosen in the competition.
The awards were part of the ninth annualDiscover magazine Awards for Technological Innovation. The winners and runners-up will be featured in the July issue.
Secretary of Energy Federico Peña congratulated the DOE award winners and other honorees at the awards ceremony at Epcot in Walt Disney World, Florida.
The featured developer of the new solvent is Rathin Datta; others participating in the project are Jim Frank, Shih-Perng Tsai and Mike Henry (all ES).
With their technology, millions of pounds of toxic industrial solvents -- many of which wind up polluting the environment -- could be replaced by "environmentally friendly" solvents.
The environmentally benign solvent, called ethyl lactate, has been around for years, but until the Argonne development the cost of producing it has been too high for it to compete economically with lower-priced chemical solvents.
Argonne has reduced the costs by improving a number of steps in the fermentation-based process used to manufacture ethyl lactate, and has also added an electrically driven advanced membrane separation step that eliminates an undesirable salt by-product.
Runner-up
An ultrahard coating many times slicker than Teflon, developed by Argonne scientists Ali Erdemir (ET), George Fenske (ET), and Osman Eryilaz, was runner-up in the emerging technologies division.
The most promising applications for the coating, which may have the lowest coefficient of friction of any carbon-based material in the world, are in automobile and engine parts such as turbocharger rotors and fuel injector components. Other potential applications include oilless bearings, spacecraft mechanisms, rolling and sliding gear systems and bearings of ultrahigh vacuum instruments.
The coating has exceptional wear resistance and durability, with a coefficient of friction less than .001 -- twenty times lower than the previous record holder.
Argonne-East's annual employee picnic will be held Saturday, July 11, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Argonne Park.
Argonne, DOE and University of Chicago employees and their families are invited to the annual get-together. Admission is free.
This year's picnic will feature a bungee run, Ferris wheel, big slide, "Red Baron" plane ride, moonwalk, pony ride and a petting zoo. There will be a golf-chipping contest, a pie walk and a coloring contest for children. Other attractions will include carnival-style games, hay rides, bingo and a country-music band.
Food and beverages will be available for purchase.
Volunteers wanted
The Argonne Club is seeking employees to help run games and the hayride, sell tickets and greet picnickers. Volunteers can help out at part or all of the picnic. For more information, call Sara Hahn (XFD) at ext. 2-5736 or send e-mail to hahn@aps.anl.gov.
The view through one of the world's best "microscopes" for peering into the subatomic worldwill soon be clearer, thanks to an upgrade project recently completed by Argonne researchers.
A team of physicists from the laboratory's High Energy Physics Division have installed a "presampler" in the Zeus detector at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (German Electron Synchrotron) in Hamburg, Germany. DESY is a center for basic research in high-energy and particle physics and the production and application of synchrotron radiation.
The presampler will tell scientists which particles have interacted with magnet coils and detector support structures instead of the detector itself. Knowing that particles produced in the event interacted with materials outside the detector will help physicists calculate a "correction" to be used when data are analyzed, said Physicist Steve Magill (HEP).
The presampler has been installed around the inside radius of the "barrel calorimeter." Designed and built by Argonne and a group of universities, the barrel calorimeter is located in the center of Zeus, a 1,600-ton detector for measuring the energy and direction of particles with high precision.
The calorimeter contains stacks of alternating plates of depleted uranium and "scintillator" plastic. In the center of Zeus, beams of protons collide head-on with beams of positrons (particles identical to electrons except for having a positive charge). Particles that spray out from the collisions interact with the material in the detector. The plastic plates in Zeus emit ultraviolet light when struck by these particles, and fiber-optic cables transmit the flashes to powerful computers.
The barrel calorimeter is becoming more and more important to physicists as Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA), which supplies Zeus with colliding particles, is steadily upgraded. HERA is a circular machine four miles (6.3 km) around, which now accelerate positrons to 30 billion electron-volts (GeV), and protons up to 820 GeV. This results in more collision products entering the central barrel calorimeter, increasing the importance of getting accurate data from that region of the detector.
Other detectors near the ends of Zeus had the most "dead" (non-detector) material, Magill said, and received their presamplers earlier.
The calorimeter presampler comprises 832 plates of scintillator plastic, etched with a spiral groove two millimeters deep. Optical fibers fit inside the groove. Groups of these plates sit in a plastic frame about nine feet (three meters) long by one foot (30 cm) wide.
Design and construction took two years. Installation took about a month, but required all of the team's ingenuity and patience.
"All the space is essentially used up," Magill said. "It's really difficult to add things like this."
Most of the 32 frames had to be inserted into an eight-inch, curved gap at the bottom of the detector and pulled up and around the inside curve of the device, using wires pulled from atop the structure.
Almost as tricky was running dozens of optical fiber bundles through a gap between the detector and its support structure _ a gap that ranged from one-half to one-quarter inch across _ and around bolt heads and miles of aluminized tape that help light-proof the detector.
When Zeus begins taking data again in August, Magill and other scientists will continue to study "jets," narrow streams of particles that result from the collision of a positron with a quark inside a proton. These experiments will provide clues to the internal structure of the proton, a basic particle found in the nucleus of every atom. They also hope to extend their understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe, and search for new forms of matter and unexpected phenomena.
The presampler upgrade should help the physicists find and concentrate on the especially interesting collisions.
"To really understand the interaction, you have to know the energies of the end products," Magill said. "The presampler will give us a better handle on what we see in the calorimeter."
-- Dave Jacqué
Robert J. Blaskovitz and Gregory A. Fletcher (both CMT) shared a Pacesetter Award for their contributions to the Electrometallurgical Technology Development Program and the Spent Fuel Treatment Demonstration Project. The two were instrumental in the engineering development of the high-throughput electrorefiner and demonstrations of its performance.
Nancy Stewart (OD) coordinated the high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter characterization during the 1997 "Clean Sweep." She took a diverse group of Argonne-West employees and created a cohesive team to accomplish this critical goal.
Maureen Finnerty (ED) was awarded a Pacesetter for excellence in implementation of Resource Conservation and Recovery Act requirements. She was also honored for her efforts to convince the State of Idaho that land disposal restriction requirements for wastes generated under a treatment plan may change after treatment.
