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Posts Tagged ‘technology transfer’

This article appeared in Fermilab Today on July 30, 2014.

Fermilab physicist Arden Warner revolutionizes oil spill cleanup with magnetizable oil invention. Photo: Hanae Armitage

Fermilab physicist Arden Warner revolutionizes oil spill cleanup with magnetizable oil invention. Photo: Hanae Armitage

Four years ago, Fermilab accelerator physicist Arden Warner watched national news of the BP oil spill and found himself frustrated with the cleanup response.

“My wife asked ‘Can you separate oil from water?’ and I said ‘Maybe I could magnetize it!'” Warner recalled. “But that was just something I said. Later that night while I was falling asleep, I thought, you know what, that’s not a bad idea.”

Sleep forgone, Warner began experimenting in his garage. With shavings from his shovel, a splash of engine oil and a refrigerator magnet, Warner witnessed the preliminary success of a concept that could revolutionize the process of oil spill damage control.

Warner has received patent approval on the cleanup method.

The concept is simple: Take iron particles or magnetite dust and add them to oil. It turns out that these particles mix well with oil and form a loose colloidal suspension that floats in water. Mixed with the filings, the suspension is susceptible to magnetic forces. At a barely discernible 2 to 6 microns in size, the particles tend to clump together, and it only takes a sparse dusting for them to bond with the oil. When a magnetic field is applied to the oil and filings, they congeal into a viscous liquid known as a magnetorheological fluid. The fluid’s viscosity allows a magnetic field to pool both filings and oil to a single location, making them easy to remove. (View a 30-second video of the reaction.)

“It doesn’t take long — you add the filings, you pull them out. The entire process is even more efficient with hydrophobic filings. As soon as they hit the oil, they sink in,” said Warner, who works in the Accelerator Division. Hydrophobic filings are those that don’t like to interact with water — think of hydrophobic as water-fearing. “You could essentially have a device that disperses filings and a magnetic conveyor system behind it that picks it up. You don’t need a lot of material.”

Warner tested more than 100 oils, including sweet crude and heavy crude. As it turns out, the crude oils’ natural viscosity makes it fairly easy to magnetize and clear away. Currently, booms, floating devices that corral oil spills, are at best capable of containing the spill; oil removal is an entirely different process. But the iron filings can work in conjunction with an electromagnetic boom to allow tighter constriction and removal of the oil. Using solenoids, metal coils that carry an electrical current, the electromagnetic booms can steer the oil-filing mixture into collector tanks.

Unlike other oil cleanup methods, the magnetized oil technique is far more environmentally sound. There are no harmful chemicals introduced into the ocean — magnetite is a naturally occurring mineral. The filings are added and, briefly after, extracted. While there are some straggling iron particles, the vast majority is removed in one fell, magnetized swoop — the filings can even be dried and reused.

“This technique is more environmentally benign because it’s natural; we’re not adding soaps and chemicals to the ocean,” said Cherri Schmidt, head of Fermilab’s Office of Partnerships and Technology Transfer. “Other ‘cleanup’ techniques disperse the oil and make the droplets smaller or make the oil sink to the bottom. This doesn’t do that.”

Warner’s ideas for potential applications also include wildlife cleanup and the use of chemical sensors. Small devices that “smell” high and low concentrations of oil could be fastened to a motorized electromagnetic boom to direct it to the most oil-contaminated areas.

“I get crazy ideas all the time, but every so often one sticks,” Warner said. “This is one that I think could stick for the benefit of the environment and Fermilab.”

Hanae Armitage

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This article appeared in Fermilab Today on July 24, 2014.

Fermilab engineer Jim Hoff has invented an electronic circuit that can guard against radiation damage. Photo: Hanae Armitage

Fermilab engineer Jim Hoff has invented an electronic circuit that can guard against radiation damage. Photo: Hanae Armitage

Fermilab engineer Jim Hoff has received patent approval on a very tiny, very clever invention that could have an impact on aerospace, agriculture and medical imaging industries.

Hoff has engineered a widely adaptable latch — an electronic circuit capable of remembering a logical state — that suppresses a commonly destructive circuit error caused by radiation.

There are two radiation-based errors that can damage a circuit: total dose and single-event upset. In the former, the entire circuit is doused in radiation and damaged; in an SEU, a single particle of radiation delivers its energy to the chip and alters a state of memory, which takes the form of 1s and 0s. Altered states of memory equate to an unintentional shift from logical 1 or logical 0 and ultimately lead to loss of data or imaging resolution. Hoff’s design is essentially a chip immunization, preemptively guarding against SEUs.

“There are a lot of applications,” Hoff said. “Anyone who needs to store data for a length of time and keep it in that same state, uncorrupted — anyone flying in a high-altitude plane, anyone using medical imaging technology — could use this.”

Past experimental data showed that, in any given total-ionizing radiation dose, the latch reduces single-event upsets by a factor of about 40. Hoff suspects that the invention’s newer configurations will yield at least two orders of magnitude in single-event upset reduction.

The invention is fondly referred to as SEUSS, which stands for single-event upset suppression system. It’s relatively inexpensive and designed to integrate easily with a multitude of circuits — all that’s needed is a compatible transistor.

Hoff’s line of work lies in chip development, and SEUSS is currently used in some Fermilab-developed chips such as FSSR, which is used in projects at Jefferson Lab, and Phoenix, which is used in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The idea of SEUSS was born out of post-knee-surgery, bed-ridden boredom. On strict bed rest, Hoff’s mind naturally wandered to engineering.

“As I was lying there, leg in pain, back cramping, I started playing with designs of my most recent project at work,” he said. “At one point I stopped and thought, ‘Wow, I just made a single-event upset-tolerant SR flip-flop!'”

While this isn’t the world’s first SEUSS-tolerant latch, Hoff is the first to create a single-event upset suppression system that is also a set-reset flip-flop, meaning it can take the form of almost any latch. As a flip-flop, the adaptability of the latch is enormous and far exceeds that of its pre-existing latch brethren.

“That’s what makes this a truly special latch — its incredible versatility,” says Hoff.

From a broader vantage point, the invention is exciting for more than just Fermilab employees; it’s one of Fermilab’s first big efforts in pursuing potential licensees from industry.

Cherri Schmidt, head of Fermilab’s Office of Partnerships and Technology Transfer, with the assistance of intern Miguel Marchan, has been developing the marketing plan to reach out to companies who may be interested in licensing the technology for commercial application.

“We’re excited about this one because it could really affect a large number of industries and companies,” Schmidt said. “That, to me, is what makes this invention so interesting and exciting.”

Hanae Armitage

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