The awards, announced today by ORNL Director Alvin W. Trivelpiece, are presented annually by R&D Magazine in recognition of the year's most significant technological innovations. ORNL's 96 R&D 100 awards place it first among DOE laboratories.
The honors were for the following processes or inventions: .
Terminal Repeller Unconstrained Subenergy Tunneling (TRUST): A computational tool for global optimization, developed by Jacob Barhen, Ed Oblow, Vladimir Protopopescu and David Reister.
TRUST is a fast, powerful and robust global optimization tool used to identify the absolute extremum (minimum) of very complicated functions depending on large numbers of variables and parameters. It has extremely broad relevance and a huge number of potential applications in geophysics, biology, industrial engineering, economics and finance. By using the innovative concepts of tunneling and repelling, TRUST eliminates in an efficient and reliable manner large useless regions of the search space before they are actually searched. This results in a substantial increase of the overall efficiency - up to 45 times higher than that of the competition.
ORNL CalSpec (calorimetric spectrometer), developed by Panos Datskos, Slo Rajic and Charles Egert.
This is a miniature battery-operated chemical detection device based on micro-calorimetric spectroscopy, a revolutionary photothermal concept. It can detect the presence of chemical vapors in air with extreme chemical selectivity and sensitivity that is substantially better than that of any commercially available handheld device.
ORNL, which is managed by Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corporation, is one of DOE's multiprogram research laboratories.