March 21, 2013 — Technologies from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are among winners of 2013 national and regional Federal Laboratory Consortium Awards. ORNL's awards, which recognize outstanding work in transferring a federal laboratory-developed technology to the commercial marketplace, were in the Excellence in Technology Transfer and Interagency Partnerships categories.
National FLC Excellence in Technology Transfer award winners included ORNL's Pulse Thermal Processing (PTP), a technology for thermally processing thin film structures that allows high-temperature operation on low-cost and temperature-sensitive substrates, such as plastics.
PTP technology uses a high-density plasma arc lamp that is capable of producing extremely high power densities and heating to provide unique capabilities in manufacturing low-dimensional multilayer structures. NovaCentrix, a leader in printed electronics manufacturing technologies based in Austin, Texas, obtained an exclusive license for the PTP and has introduced the technology as a commercial line of photonic curing equipment known as PulseForge systems.
The PTP development team includes Chad Duty, Craig Blue, Art Clemons, Nancy Dudney, David Harper, Ron Ott, John Rivard, Adrian Sabau, Alex DeTrana, all of ORNL and Stan Farnsworth, Kurt Schroder, and Charlie Munson of NovaCentrix.
The Interagency Partnership Award was given to ForWarn, a satellite-based monitoring and assessment tool that recognizes and tracks potential forest changes caused by insects, diseases, wildfires, extreme weather or other natural or man-made events. ForWarn is a major component of a broader national early warning system for cooperative forest management.
The ForWarn development collaboration was led by the U.S. Forest Service and includes significant contributions from ORNL, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the United States Geological Survey. The prototype has been operating successfully since January 2010.
Project developers include Forrest Hoffman, Jitendra Kumar and Richard Mills of ORNL; William Hargrove of the Forest Service; Joseph P. Spruce of the NASA/Stennis Space Center; and Dave Meyer of U.S. Geological Survey.
PTP and ForWarn also won FLC southeast region awards in technology transfer and partnerships, respectively.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy's Office of Science.
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
FLC Website: http://www.federallabs.org