Sandia National Laboratories won a total of five awards from the 2017 Federal Laboratory Consortium for its work to develop and commercialize innovative technologies.
Sandia National Laboratories took home five awards highlighting their advancements in technology, including 3D printing for sub-scale wind turbine blades, which speeds up production.
The annual FLC awards program recognizes federal laboratories and their industry partners for outstanding technology transfer achievements.
The consortium’s Mid-Continent and Far West regions recognized a few of Sandia’s advancements including one for 3D printing of sub-scale wind turbine blades. The process speeds up production for wind blade prototypes and lowers costs.
Sandia partnered with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and won a Regional Partnership Award for production of the sub-scale 3D printed blades. Together, the labs are working to shorten the production cycle of new blades and reduce costs.
Trying out new wind-turbine blade designs is expensive due to the multimillion-dollar cost of making complex wind turbine molds. Sandia designed the sub-scale blade to replicate the wake of a full-scale blade. It was one-third the size and cost 5% of the standard full-scale blades. Using 3-D printing, the mold-building process is less labor-intensive as well.
“These FLC awards highlight the breadth of Sandia technologies that are being developed and transferred to the private sector,” said Jackie Kerby Moore, Sandia’s manager of Technology and Economic Development and the labs’ representative to the FLC. “Combined, Sandia and our partners are benefiting Sandia’s missions in defense and energy and strengthening the U.S. economy in cyber, solar, wind, and medical markets.”
Sandia also won Notable Technology Development Awards for its Neuromorphic Cyber Microscope and SmartLAMP.
The Neuromorphic Cyber Microscope, developed by Sandia with industry partner Lewis Rhodes Labs, mimics the brain’s ability to process large amounts of data as a way to thwart cyber attacks with great speed and accuracy. Easily integrated into an existing security infrastructure, the Cyber Microscope increases the speed and accuracy of anomaly detection while using less power. It’s more than 100 times faster and 1,000 times more energy-efficient than racks of conventional cybersecurity systems.
Filed Under: Blades, News, Projects, Turbines
