DOE Collaboratory Project Focuses on Engine Efficiency & Emission Controls
March 21,1997
By Ron Kolb, RRKolb@LBL.gov
The vision of DOE 2000, according to briefing host Martha Krebs, director of
DOE's Office of Energy Research, is to enable the nationwide use of unique
scientific resources via the Internet without regard to geographic boundaries.
A conferencing demonstration linking researchers at Berkeley, Argonne and Oak
Ridge national labs, using the MBone protocol and coordinated through the
Washington office, vividly depicted the promise that networking technologies
hold for distant scientific collaborations.
The systems and programs that enable the development of "virtual" shared
laboratories will be prototyped in two three-year projects, both of which
include Berkeley Lab as a partner: the Materials Microcharacterization
Collaboratory, which was awarded $10.8 million in funding, and the Diesel
Combustion Collaboratory, funded at $7.1 million. The pilots were chosen from
among 13 competitive proposals.
Grants were announced by Krebs, DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy
Efficiency and Renewable Energy Tom Gross, and Jim Eberhard, director of the
Office of Heavy Vehicle Technologies. Kevin Mills, science program director of
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, commented on how collaborative
technologies will also assist the government's military efforts.
Both pilot projects focus on engine efficiency and emission control. The
combustion collaboratory, which includes Sandia, Lawrence Livermore and Los
Alamos national labs and the University of Wisconsin, will study the design of
more powerful diagnostic experiments to control diesel engine emissions. The
materials collaboratory, with Oak Ridge, Argonne, the University of Illinois,
and the National Institute of Science and Technology, will research catalyst
poisoning and potential corrosion-free materials.
They will be part of the national effort "to reduce the reliance on foreign oil
by developing new generation vehicles that are more efficient and
environmentally acceptable," Eberhard said. "The combustion lab will focus on
what is happening in the cylinder of the diesel engine. The materials work is
needed for exhaust applications, to get rid of the particulates."
The combustion collaboratory will feature remote access to Sandia's Combustion
Research Facility devices, while the materials collaboratory will utilize
electron microscopes at Berkeley Lab's National Center for Electron Microscopy
and instruments at Argonne, Illinois and Oak Ridge. The High-Temperature
Materials Lab at Oak Ridge will play an important role.
Stu Loken, Berkeley Lab's ICSD Division Director and coordinator of the DOE
2000 effort, introduced the demonstration, which featured Brian Tonner of the
University of Wisconsin gathering data at an Advanced Light Source beamline.
Loken called the ALS experiment "an early prototype of a collaboratory."
Tonner's work on environmentally contaminated soils has involved biologists,
soil chemists, and x-ray microscopists.
"It has allowed these three groups to work together on a project at the same
time--as the data is being gathered," Tonner said via the MBone link, appearing
from Berkeley in one of the remote access windows displayed on a Washington
monitor. He called the program a "tremendous advantage" because it allows his
colleagues in Milwaukee to participate in the experiment in real time, and to
operate the machine from a distance.
Rick Stevens, director of Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science Division,
then showed his Washington audience an animated "virtual" reproduction of the
ALS, to simulate scientists' interaction within this shared world. This attempt
to re-create reality through technology, in a cyberspace simultaneously
occupied by participants from multiple locations, is among the efforts designed
to make collaboratories more than mere teleconferences.
Krebs said this capability will be especially important in the 21st century,
when huge international research projects like the Large Hadron Collider at
CERN--with its 500 collaborating physicists in the U.S. alone--begins
collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data.
Berkeley Lab's high-tech Washington, D.C., Projects Office was center stage for
a March 5 Department of Energy press briefing announcing two pilot projects in
the "DOE 2000" national collaboratory initiative.
