Research
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Bonnie Hames traces her interest in biomass chemistry back to her days as a Girl Scout leader when she taught workshops on edible and medicinal plants. A comment made during one of these workshops inspired Hames to pursue a career in converting plants to useable energy. “After listening to one of my talks, someone said they didn't know I was a scientist. I had never thought about it before but I was a scientist of sorts, I just didn't have the credentials” said Hames, team leader for the Chemical Measurement Sciences team and Biomass Analysis Technologies team at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “That comment inspired me to go back to school.” More than 18 years later and three degrees later, Hames is using her experience in biomass (plant materials used as a source of fuel) chemistry to develop rapid methods for the chemical characterization of biomass feedstocks based on infrared spectroscopy and advanced multivariate analysis techniques. “The ability to obtain an accurate chemical composition of a biomass sample using quick and inexpensive methods is a key element to the commercialization of processes that convert biomass to fuels and chemicals,” Hames said. Traditionally, it could take days or weeks to get results from one sample at a cost of $800-$2,000 per sample. Rapid biomass analysis allows researchers to characterize biomass in minutes rather than days for an estimated $20 per sample. Hames and her co-workers support 25 different projects within NREL's biomass program. They maintain a large inventory of standard biomass samples as reference materials and a large database on the chemical, thermal, and mechanical properties of various forms and kinds of biomass materials. “The research community knows that we in the biomass program have years and years of experience with different types of biomass and biomass processes,” Hames said. “It doesn't matter if someone is talking about sugar beets or corn stover, we've seen it all.”Submitted by DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory |
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Don't hedge your bets on JASPERNot all the action in southern Nevada takes place in Las Vegas . Sixty miles away at NNSA's Nevada Test Site, the JASPER team is on a roll. The team, from DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has staged 31 consecutive successful shots between March 19, 2001 and July 29, 2004 . This includes a string of nine fully contained plutonium shots, all of which paid out valuable data and proved to be scientific winners. JASPER, an acronym for Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research, is a nearly 100-foot, two-stage gas gun within Area 27 at NTS. It's also an important experimental technique to determine the properties of materials at high temperatures, pressures, and strain rates by shocking the material, and measuring its response. JASPER can fire small projectiles at velocities of up to eight kilometers (five miles) per second. That's nearly 18,000 miles per hour or more than 24 times the speed of sound. When a tantalum projectile strikes a plutonium target at those speeds, the impact produces a high-pressure shock wave that passes through the target in a fraction of a microsecond. During this extremely brief period, diagnostic equipment measures the properties of the shocked plutonium inside the target. These shock-physics experiments complement the on-going subcritical experiment program currently at NTS. In the absence of full-scale nuclear testing, JASPER's role in Science Based Stockpile Stewardship is to help assess the aging of nuclear weapon components, to verify that aging weapons can perform as designed. Currently, the $3.5M JASPER facility and infrastructure are capable of executing about 24 experiments per year, costing about $6 million annually over a ten-year life. That's approximately $250K per shot; plus variable Pu costs that typically run ~$100K per target. While the Livermore Lab operates JASPER, the gun provides multi-laboratory experimental use. Color animation showing how the JASPER gun works appears at: http://www-eng.llnl.gov/eng_llnl/02_gifsjpegs/Jasper_1-13.mov Submitted by DOE's
Lawrence Livermore |
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