Sandia Labs FY22 Laboratory Directed Research & Development Annual Report

FY22 ANNUAL REPORT

DESIGNING COMPOSITIONALLY COMPLEX OXIDE CATALYSTS TO CONVERT GREENHOUSE GASES INTO VALUABLE CHEMICALS. Exploring a decentralized process for upgrading

characteristic overcomes issues with active particle sintering and excessive coke formation that plague conventional catalysts. Concentrated solar energy was integrated

methane and carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals as a step toward displacement of flaring operations was

the focus of this two-year LDRD project. The team’s involved process converts methane and carbon

as process heat in the longest heated

experiment conducted with the solar furnace at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility. The project, enabled in part through collaboration with Sandia Alliance partner University of

dioxide into synthesis gas (an industrially valuable mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide) via the dry reforming of methane reaction. They successfully designed novel high- entropy oxide catalysts having aluminate spinel crystal structure, that are uniquely capable of structural regeneration. This

New Mexico, resulted in one publication, three Technical Advances, and two provisional patents. (PI: Christopher Ryan Riley)

DETONATION IN MULTILAYER EXPLOSIVES: EFFECTS OF THE CHARACTERISTIC LENGTH SCALE OF MIXING.

Predicting explosive performance at length scales near the minimum needed for a detonation to propagate is often a challenge—surrounding materials, non-ideal interfaces, sample geometry, and local microstructure variations can all significantly impact explosive output. For accurate predictions of performance, reactive burn models are needed that can capture the details around the growth or failure of reactions leading to detonation, which requires

growth of reactions leading to detonation. This data was used to parameterize new burn models, which are enabling predictions of explosive performance at small scales, including the effects of non-ideal interfaces. This work led to two publications in the Journal of Applied Physics in 2022 using high-throughput initiation experiments to calibrate predictive simulations. (PI: Robert Knepper)

detailed experimental information for model parameterization. Researchers on this LDRD team developed a high throughput experimental setup utilizing laser-driven

Sandia’s high-throughput initiation experiment uses an array of laser driven flyers to impact small explosive samples (left), providing data on the growth of reactions leading to detonation (middle), which can be used to parameterize predictive simulations (right).

flyers with photon Doppler velocimetry diagnostics and an array of vapor-deposited explosive films to characterize both initiation thresholds and the

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