Winning an R&D 100 Award—Innovation Meets Entry Submission
An R&D 100 Award pays dividends that go beyond the plaque on the wall.
This portable chemical analysis entry won a 2003 R&D 100 Award. (Image: Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Bryce Tappan and his brother grew up interested in science and were “partners in crime for all the backyard experiments,” he recalls. So when Tappan, a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, N.M., learned he had won an R&D 100 Award, his brother, now a staff member at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., was among the first with whom he shared the good news.
Tappan’s team took home the 2005 award in the process category for nanoFOAM, a metal-nanofoam fabrication technique that produces low-cost nanofoams of various transition metals to improve catalysis in fuel cells, rockets, and chemical processing.
When his postdoc mentor first encouraged him to submit the entry, Tappan wasn’t convinced his team had a chance but decided it was worth a shot. “There wasn’t much anticipation, as I hadn’t counted on winning anyway,” he says.
Not only did the award open up a vast number of collaborations and funding opportunities, Tappan says, “It was a great accomplishment for my career, especially as I was a postdoc looking to be converted at the time.” Winning an R&D 100 Award came as no surprise to LANL staff member Nely Trintinella Padial-Collins. Her team also won in 2005 for CartaBlanca, a high-efficiency, object-oriented, general-purpose computer simulation environment written in Java and designed for complex multiphase and fluid-structure interaction problems.
Though she admits the submission itself was a lot of work, Padial-Collins says the award “is certainly a top accomplishment because it is recognition of our work by the research community. It says that we can do very high-quality work.”
Fine-tuning the entry process
Tappan and Padial-Collins are in good company. Since 1978, LANL has garnered 105 R&D 100 Awards. In an effort to oversee entry preparation and to give them a distinct look, several years ago the Laboratory introduced an internal process for the submission of R&D 100 Award entries.
Kim Sherwood of LANL’s Technology Transfer Division oversees the process and teams with various lab organizations to ensure that all steps are completed and entries meet the budget and timeline for the competition.
“There is a call for proposals from the Technology Transfer Division,” Sherwood explains. “Scientists who want to enter the competition prepare a rough draft to answer the competition questions, writer-editors work with the scientists to complete and polish the written entry, designers work with entrants to create the covers, and then the entries are printed and submitted.”
According to Craig M.V. Taylor, technical staff member, this process is rigorous. “The Lab assisted a great deal, but it was still up to us to write the entry and all supporting documentation,” he says.
Taylor led two winning R&D 100 teams: Drywash in 1997 and Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Resist Remover (SCORR) in 2001. Drywash replaces perchloroethylene with liquid carbon dioxide in the dry-cleaning process to eliminate pollution. The SCORR process replaces semiconductor manufacturing solvents with Supercritical CO2 to allow for smaller features and better performance of the products as well as to eliminate pollution and reduce water consumption.
His advice to those entering the R&D 100 Award competition for the first time is to ensure that the technology is presented such that a high school student will understand it. “If people don’t understand the ramifications of the technology, they will not move the entry forward,” Taylor says.
Thomas Claytor, another LANL technical staff member, led the team that won in 2003 in the instrumentation category for Flash CT, the first implementation of a large-area, full-volume, amorphous-silicon computed detector-based tomography system using a Windows operating system. His previous team won an R&D 100 Award 20 years earlier for a high-temperature acoustic sensor for use in nuclear reactors.
“This is a significant award for commercial products. In my experience with two awards, each has generated significant revenue and interest,” he says.
One of the primary purposes for an R&D 100 Award entry, Claytor explains, is to introduce a technology or product that otherwise might take years to creep into the consciousness of the scientific and business community.
“The award definitely generated revenue for our partner company and resulted in royalties to the Laboratory that exceeded any cost associated with preparing the entry,” he says.
Claytor’s team has another product for which it plans to submit an entry next year. The project started out as a neutron tomography system developed under Laboratory-Directed Research and Development at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. After it was shown to work, his team adapted it to x-ray imaging and subsequently applied for Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) funding. The product was further refined to a commercial product under the CRADA and the laboratory licensed it to its CRADA partner, HYTEC.
“Since introducing Flash CT, HYTEC has been one of the 40 fastest-growing companies in New Mexico and has further developed the product,” Claytor says. “HYTEC has now sold over 30 large Flash CT systems to nearly all the armed services, other government agencies, and to universities."
Roger Wiens, technical staff member, agrees that competing for an R&D 100 Award is a great opportunity to show some of the exciting things LANL is doing. Wiens’s team won in 2003 for Compositional Analysis by Raman-Integrated Spark Spectroscopy (CARISS), which is the only field-deployable instrument that provides a complete chemical analysis (elemental and compositional) of a material at close, stand-off, and remote distances.
“CARISS can fit into a briefcase or a lunchbox, depending on the application. The versatility and portability of the instrument will allow it to sample Martian surface materials from a Mars rover, verify the composition of bobsled runners at the Olympic Games to help officials enforce rules and regulations, and detect carbon in soil for use in terrestrial carbon sequestration programs aimed at reducing global warming,” Wiens says. The R&D 100 Award is one of Wiens’s better achievements, he says. “We of course mentioned the award in subsequent proposals to potential sponsors. This may have contributed to our being accepted as a new instrument for the Mars rover to launch in 2009."
Rewarding innovation at the annual gala
Receiving the award itself can be a unique experience as well. Claytor’s team received its R&D 100 Award at a ceremony at Navy Pier in Chicago. “I found it very interesting talking to the other inventors and investigating details of all the other technologies that won that year," he says.
Thomas Sampson, a retired technical staff member, received his R&D 100 Award in 1988 at a formal dinner presentation at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. “First time in a tux since I was married,” he says. “Pretty impressive ceremony. Several lab bigwigs attended because the lab received the most awards of any organization.”
Sampson and his teammates won in the category of sampling systems and monitors for Nuclear Material Solution Assay System, which nondestructively determines the amount of fissionable U-235 in small samples of solutions by measuring the emitted gamma rays. The system has a dynamic measurement range 100,000 times greater than previous methods.
Sampson says his R&D 100 Award ranks near the top of his career accomplishments because he competed against what he considers to be the best and the brightest. With success, though, comes frustration, as he says, “Never could figure out how to get the award plaque away from the lab’s PR people so we could put it in our group conference room.”
Mig Owens, communications specialist,
Los Alamos National Laboratory
