As you will probably note when reading through this R&D 100 Awards issue, the winning innovations are organized by category. Microscopes are grouped together, beam instruments have their section, and thin-film systems occupy another area of technology. These categories are largely for the convenience of the reader and the editors. We like to categorize things.
But in R&D, such distinctions melt away. The demands of today’s marketplace necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach. Newly designed batteries, for example, must be both powerful and environmentally friendly to survive in the marketplace. A medical imaging device might be revolutionary, but if it’s so costly that insurance companies refuse to authorize its use, then the innovation is lost. Packaging, design, and materials must also be considered along with function.
Researchers themselves tend to be specialists, which is why the development process tends to involve many individuals, from different disciplines or even companies. Some of our winners this year were created over many years by dozens of individuals. The team behind the Artificial Retina, for example, numbers in the hundreds, and though it won an R&D 100 Award this year based on its breakthrough application, development will likely continue for years and involve even more researchers.
The pattern suggests that group efforts will always dominate in the R&D process, and, indeed, it seems necessary to draw on the inventive power of many skill sets and many technologies to deliver truly impressive products to the market.
No 2009 R&D 100 winner is an exception to this rule, and here a few that show the creative thinking involved in developing a winner.
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The Synchrony Fusion magnetic bearing team. Seated, from left: Dr. Victor Iannello, Dr. Chris Sortore, Dr. Jett Field, and Dr. Matthias Glauser. Standing, from left: Kirk Treubert, Kenneth King, Bill Baxter, Mark Hanson, Gary Ramsey, and Rob Erdman. Image: Synchrony Inc.
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Fusion Magnetic Bearing
Synchrony Inc. is an example of a company able to identify a market need and respond it to with an innovative solution. The worldwide bearings market amounted to about $50 billion in 2008. Most of this market involves rolling element bearings, which have been supported by magnetic bearing technology over the past 20 years to eliminate frictional contact between the shaft and the machine. The advantages over oil-lubricated bearing systems are improved machine efficiency through the reduction in frictional losses. Reliability and elimination of environmentally-harmful lubricants are also advantageous.
Conventional magnetic bearing systems consist of electromagnets and sensors located internal to the machine and a large external control system. The complexity of this system, which handles high currents and high-frequency signals, has limited the widespread adoption of magnetic bearings.
But Synchrony’s winning product, the Fusion Magnetic Bearing, is the first to operate without an external electronic controller. When united with integrated sensors that monitor bearing health, record, and monitor these conditions via Ethernet port, the Fusion offers a powerful alternative to traditional bearings.
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The SkyTrough team, standing from left: Tim Wendelin, Coleman Moore, David White, Randy Bros, Bob Hawkins, Gary Jorgensen, Randy Gee, Dave LeSuer, and Adrian Farr. Kneeling from left: Shannon Thomson, Kent Terwilliger, Frank Burkholder, and Allison Gray. Image: SkyFuel Inc.
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SkyTrough
Developers in the solar cell marketplace like to refer to the business as a moving target. The feasibility of certain photovoltaic products is often dependent on fluctuating raw material costs, changing market demand, prevailing tax incentives, and the general state of the economy. While researchers attempt to create ever better PV architectures in the lab, companies are trying to packaging the existing technology in such a way as to gain traction in the marketplace. The goal for producing a solar cell, after all, is to make sure it actually generates useful power.
This is also the mission of SkyFuel Inc., which designed the SkyTrough with the help of National Renewable Energy Lab researchers to to increase widespread use of solar-generated electricity in the utilities market.
By designing parabolic trough solar collectors—a design that acts as a concentrator of sorts, helping direct sunlight find the PV cells at an optimal angle—to cost less, SkyFuel has increased the potential for customer investment.
On the face of it, the SkyTrough is not new technology; it follows the same basic steps of any other solar-to-steam generator by using the sun’s rays to heat a transfer fluid that creates steam in a heat exchanger. But it’s the use of innovative packaging, low-cost film instead of glassed-based mirrors, and a profile that make them easy to stack and ship, that allows SkyFuel to claim large cost savings.
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The MagViz team, from left: Josef Schillig, Michael Borden (back row), Petr Volegov (back row), Shaun Newman (front sitting), John Gomez (back row), John Power (sitting), Michelle Espy, Jeffrey Hill, Martin Pieck, Larry Schultz, James Sims, Paul Polk, Andrei Matlashov, Mathew Newell and Vadim Zotev. Other team member absent from the photo: David Barlow, Joseph Bradley, Robert Kraus, Mark Peters, Henrik Sandin, Charles Swenson, and Algis Urbaitis. Image: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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MagViz
Sometimes, solutions occur as the result of intersecting technologies. MagViz, an R&D 100 Award winner from Los Alamos National Lab, scans liquid items such as those travelers wish to carry on aircraft and assesses them for threat materials. It operates in much the same way as a conventional x-ray conveyor belt in the airport security line. Unlike conventional MRI, however, low-power magnetic fields are used to measure the relaxation times of protons exposed to the field. It can gain useful information because the detectors have been re-designed from the ground up using technology developed by experts in superconducting technology. These detectors, called superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDS, can glean chemical information from comparatively low-power signals.While the technology may soon free airline travelers from carry-on restrictions, it also frees useful MRI from bulky magnets, and potentially opening up new materials science and imaging applications.
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Dr. David Boone, CTO of OrthoCare Innovations and developer of the Compas Prosthetic Alignment System, kneels to adjust alignment on the prosthesis with the paralympic gold medalist, Jim Bizzell.
Image: OrthoCare Innovations
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Compas
The reality of accidents, warfare, and genetics means that in the U.S., there are about a million people in need of prosthetics. About 100,000 new prosthetics are made each year, each of them modified slightly to accommodate each patient. But despite the use of lightweight plastics and titanium, the ultimate fit of the prosthetic is a trial and error process.
David Boone, a Seattle, Wash.-based physician and prosthetics expert, says the need for a new approach to prosthetics was well illustrated at a world congress for prosthetics technology two years ago. His peers felt that sub-optimal alignment for using of prosthetic limbs, especially leg prosthetics, is a persistent problem.
“It’s not because people aren’t trying,” Boone says, “it’s just that manual methods we have are trial and error, insensitive, and observationally-based.”
The solution was not in advanced materials—which physicians already had—nor was it in more time spent with trainers—which certainly is of help. The better way, theorized Boone, chief technology officer at Orthocare Innovations, which won a 2009 R&D 100 Award for its Compas alignment system, was in changing the language. Instead of repositioning a lower-limb prosthesis after blisters, skin breakdown, discomfort, and pain had already set in, he believed a computationally-based system would find the optimal alignment for prosthesis without the need for trial-and-error.
Toward that end, OrthoCare Innovations, supported by funding through the Dept. of Veterans Affairs and the National Institutes of Health, began answering questions about how to quantify the process of alignment to make a better prosthetic ankle and apply it to a clinical setting. In development, they realized they could gather lots of dynamic data that had never been collected before. Their ultimate innovation, Compas, was extended to a larger system—the lower-leg and knee—and depends on the intersection of a number of disciplines: medicine, engineering, computing, and visualization.
“The purpose of Compas is to identify functionality that has eluded people before. People can feel comfortable in prostheses, but neither the people using it nor the people designing it knew exactly how a comfortable fit was achieved. No one had any tool to measure what the prosthesis was doing,” says Boone.
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The Compas Sensor and the Master Module provide the sensing and computing power that makes OrthoCare’s prosthetic alignment system tick. Image: OrthoCare Innovations
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The hardware of Compas measures live dynamic torques and forces generated during walking. Developers at Orthocare were able to measure these forces by developing a gyroscopic device contained within the prosthesis. Packaged in titanium, this Compas Sensor is able to collect values of movement and force in 3-D space. During evaluations in the clinic, a pyramid-shaped Master Module is mated to the sensor, which is a permanent part of the prosthesis, providing power, Bluetooth connection, gyroscope and laser.
“The real breakthrough was to understand the orientation of the sensor in space,” says Boone, and it is achieved through this module-sensor combination. Clinicians interact with the prosthesis through software designed to process and visualize the data collected by the Compas Sensor.
A series of proprietary fuzzy logic algorithms were developed that can interpret complex gait variables and other force dynamics in three dimensions down to the micrometer. The output is displayed numerically and graphically, and the data can optimize both static standing balance and dynamic walking alignment.
