Feature Articles

Motivated by the need to eliminate expensive rare-earth magnets in utility-scale direct-drive wind turbines, Sandia National Laboratories researchers developed a fundamentally new type of rotary electrical contact. Sandia is now ready to partner with the renewable energy industry to develop the next generation of direct-drive wind turbines.

Based at Sandia National Laboratories, a team of scientists believes the key to preventing large-scale, catastrophic failures in bridges, airplanes and power plants is to look — very closely — at damage as it first appears at the atomic and nanoscale levels.

In order to design radically new idea offshore wind turbines, Sandia National Laboratories engineers first needed to build a design tool capable of modeling the physics vertical-axis wind turbine, or a new "drawing board."

For the first time, Sandia National Laboratories researchers delivered electricity produced by a new power-generating system to the Sandia-Kirtland Air Force Base electrical grid.

Examination of very fine real-world data can improve the fidelity by which complex computer simulations are guided, says Sandia National Laboratories applied mathematician Pete Bosler. Bosler investigates multiscale simulations that, integrated, could combine individual raindrops, thunderstorms and the entire global atmosphere, guided by data currently thought too fine to be used, that is, too small to be seen on a data grid, or in other words, subgrid.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are working to replace legacy analog radars commonly used by the military with a new, digital, software-defined system called Multi-Mission Radio Frequency Architecture.

2022 marks a major milestone for Sandia National Laboratories’ groundbreaking tribal energy internship program: two decades of meeting the growing renewable energy technical needs of Native American tribes and providing valuable, real-world experience for Native and Alaska Native STEM students.

Why are scientists setting off small-scale explosions inside 1-foot cubes of plexiglass? They’re watching how fractures form and grow in a rock-like substance to see if explosives or propellants, similar to jet fuel, can connect geothermal wells in a predictable manner.

Valhalla, a Python-based performance modeling framework developed at Sandia National Laboratories, uses high-performance computing to build preliminary satellite designs based on mission requirements and then runs those designs through thousands of simulations. The results of the simulations feed into an interactive multidimensional video-like view of satellites executing their mission and hundreds of plots that show the user the relationship between each of the outputs and inputs at a glance. This data enables the user to quickly find the solution that best executes the mission.

Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and partner U.S. national laboratories will compare their Geologic Disposal Safety Assessment software framework to the safety assessment software of international peers at a late-April workshop.