Sandia Labs

Sandia engineers have developed the most durable metal alloy ever created. Made up of a combination of platinum and gold, the new material is 100 times more wear-resistant than high-strength steel, and the first metal alloy to join the same class as diamond. It also produces its own lubricant.

To ensure that moving spent radioactive fuel is being carried out with the minimum of risks, Sandia National Laboratories recently completed a nuclear "triathlon" of a simulated cargo of spent fuel rods over 14,500 mi to record the stress and jolts that fuel undergoes in transit.

Concentrating solar power (CSP) plants can be a key part of a renewable energy strategy, but progress is often focused on larger facilities. Now, engineers from Sandia National Laboratories are improving the efficiency of smaller plants, designing a new receiver that can absorb much more sunlight.

Sandia National Laboratories is up to big things. After having recently replicated the energy found around black holes, the facility has just delivered proof of concept for a method of testing rocket parts using a 60-foot-long (18 m) compressed nitrogen gun that makes the process greener and safer.

Using the most powerful X-ray-generating machine on the planet, researchers have reproduced what happens to matter just before it is devoured by a black hole. Their findings show that a long-standing theory regarding the giant gravitational sinkholes may be completely wrong.

Despite not getting the headlines it did last year, Zika remains an ongoing issue that needs addressing. A team from Sandia National Laboratories has developed a low-cost, portable device for quickly detecting Zika and similar viruses in a sample, driven by a smartphone app.

​Sandia National Laboratories is raising the stakes in its quest to develop fusion power by introducing tritium into its experiments with its Z machine. Tritium, the heaviest of the three hydrogen isotopes promises to boost energy output by a factor of 500.

In one more step on the road to a functional quantum computer, researchers at Harvard University and Sandia Ion Beam Laboratory claim to have created the very first "bridge" that could effectively link strings of quantum computers together in a single networked unit.

Capturing carbon emissions at the source is an important weapon in the fight against climate change​. Now scientists have developed an efficient low-cost technique that makes use of an ultra-thin membrane, like a bubble, to filter CO2 out of flue gas.

An international team of researchers has found a way to create microscopically-small lasers directly from silicon, unlocking the possibilities of direct integration of photonics on silicon, and a significant step towards light-based computers.

Sandia National Laboratories has revealed its plans for the extreme-scale Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR). The turbines are built to deal with the extreme conditions of an offshore farm, featuring a folding build to cope with high winds.

In the exhibition area at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, a pair of humanoid prototypes built by SRI and Sandia National Laboratories hit the treadmills to demonstrate new technology that allows robots to operate longer on a single battery charge.