Engineering Annual Summary 1998

Unlike most research and development laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is responsible for delivering production-ready designs. Unlike most industry, LLNL is responsible for R and D that must significantly increase the nation's security. This rare combination of production engineering expertise and national R and D agenda identifies LLNL as one of the few organizations today that conducts cutting-edge engineering on grand-scale problems, while facing enormous technical risk and undergoing diligent scrutiny of its budget, schedule, and performance. On the grand scale, cutting-edge technologies are emerging from our recent ventures into ''Xtreme Engineering{trademark}.'' Basically, we must integrate and extend technologies concurrently and then push them to their extreme, such as building very large structures but aligning them with extreme precision. As we extend these technologies, we push the boundaries of engineering capabilities at both poles: microscale and ultrascale. Today, in the ultrascale realm, we are building NIF, the world's largest laser, which demands one of the world's most complex operating systems with 9000 motors integrated through over 500 computers to control 60,000 points for every laser shot. On the other pole, we have fabricated the world's smallest surgical tools and the smallest instruments for detecting biological and chemical agents used by antiterrorists. Later in this Annual Summary, we highlight some of our recent innovations in the area of Xtreme Engineering, including large-scale computer simulations of massive structures such as major bridges to prepare retrofitting designs to withstand earthquakes. Another feature is our conceptual breakthrough in developing the world's fastest airplane, HyperSoar, which can reach anywhere in the planet in two hours at speeds of 6700 mph. In the last few years, Engineering has significantly pushed the technology in structural mechanics and micro-instrumentation. For example, our DYNA code is widely used both by government and industry to model the behavior of structures under large deformation conditions, such as automobile and aircraft collisions. Today, our codes have expanded to run on the world's most powerful Tflop/s class computer, in the massively parallel, coupled/-multi-physics domain. More recently, in microtechnology, we have been designing and fabricating unique microinstruments using lithographic processing. Building on Engineering's pioneering work in precision engineering, we are now able to fabricate complete biomedical and biochemical instruments, often at far less than one-tenth size, with improved performance over current ''state-of-the-art'' laboratory instruments. These developments are helping us make unique contributions in the fields of proximal and remote sensing related to nonproliferation and counterproliferation of weapons of mass destruction (such as nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons) and in biotechnology, where we actively support LLNL's significant involvement in human genome sequencing