Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer

FAA Inspires the Future of Science and Innovation
The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) William J. Hughes Technical Center has fostered a mutually beneficial relationship with the Atlantic County Institute of Technology (ACIT). ACIT is a county-wide high school that includes four academies: Health Sciences and Medicine; Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management; Information Technology; and Math, Engineering and Science. A Department of Education Blue Ribbon School, ACIT was awarded a Bronze Medal in the U.S. News and World Report secondary school assessments. Technical Center personnel have been involved with ACIT for a number of years. Several are on the Advisory Board, have given technical presentations to the students, hosted tours of the Center, been judges for class projects, and made contributions to curriculum development. In 2008, the Technical Center hired four summer interns who had just completed their junior year at the Information Technology Academy. This was so successful that 11 students were hired for summer 2009. The internship is part of the school's curriculum to prepare students for the workplace.

Hi-Tech Fights Lo-Tech
At the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Laboratory, Claudia Dengler is studying the permeation rates of homemade liquid explosives stored in commonly encountered glass and plastic bottles to aid in the development of explosive vapor detection methods.

PPPL Develops Nuclear Detection System
Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a highly accurate and cost-effective nuclear detection system for antiterrorism applications. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Department of Energy (DOE) asked all of its laboratories to identify technologies for antiterrorism applications. Using mostly off-the-shelf components, Charles Gentile and his colleagues in the PPPL Tritium Group configured a small, portable and relatively inexpensive system to identify and locate the radioactive element tritium that had been deposited throughout the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) vacuum chamber. Gentile and his team realized that this system, which they had developed for PPPL's fusion research effort, would be very useful in detecting and identifying specific radionuclides used in a radiological dispersive device (RDD), commonly known as a "dirty bomb."

The PPPL system known as MINDS (miniature integrated nuclear detection system) is very small compared to other systems and has the distinct advantage of being able to differentiate between threatening and nonthreatening materials, thereby significantly reducing false positives. MINDS has applications in transportation and site security, scanning moving vehicles, luggage, and cargo vessels; and it could be employed at workplace entrances, post offices, tollbooths, airports, commercial shipping ports, as well as in police cruisers, to detect the transportation of RDD nuclear materials.

The system has been transferred to a licensee, Insitech, Inc., a partnership intermediary representing the business interests of the Armament Research, Development, and Engineering Center (ARDEC) located at the U.S. Army's Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, New Jersey. In turn, Insitech has sublicensed MINDS for use in a number of locations, including shipping containers at seaports.