On July 15, the editors of R&D Magazine will announce the winners of the 47th annual R&D 100 Awards. As always, these are the cream of the crop in high-tech products from a wide spectrum of innovators. We’ll see winners from tiny start-up companies boldly entering new markets. We’ll see highly refined instruments from top science OEMs. We’ll see elegant solutions to problems deceptively simple and horrendously complex. And we’ll probably see some wild stuff from research labs around the country and abroad.
Whether we’ll also glimpse a winner that has an extra “wow” factor that makes it household name (think fax machine, Blu-Ray, Kodak film) for decades remains to be seen, but it’s safe to predict that, behind the scenes, many of this year’s R&D 100 Awards winners will have a lasting impact.
The frequent newsmaking ability of former winners leads me to this conclusion. Earlier this week, research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan announced that it had presented NeXolve Corp. with a product innovation award for its CORIN polyimide, which was a 2008 R&D 100 winner entered by NeXolve’s parent corporation, ManTech International. The colorless, transparent, organic/inorganic nanocomposite material has been tapped as a lightweight replacement for glass in space-borne photovoltaic arrays. Such arrays will likely become far more commonplace as efforts like the International Space Station and lunar exploration proceed.
On the national laboratory side of things, software advances have given rise to whole new pseudo-agencies, such as DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, which is devoted to solving complex and numerically immense physical problems using massively parallel supercomputers. In June of this year, a 2005 R&D 100 winner, VisIt, was stretched to new performances levels by leveraging up to 32,000 processing cores to process datasets of a staggering 500 billion to 2 trillion zones, or grid points. VisIt is the sort of fluids visualization tool that will be used to characterize reactions like those that will take place in the National Ignition Facility. Understanding exactly how these reactions might take place will be crucial to cracking the puzzle of fusion, and colorful visuals are a fast way to gain insights into the mathematics of the processes.
These are just two recent examples of R&D 100 Awards winners making a splash. It will be interesting to see in a couple of weeks what new waves will be set in motion.
