Research Teams and Partnerships Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop (1999) / Chapter Skim
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8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study
8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study
Pages 97-106
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From page 97... ...
Conversely, industry found out that the laboratories were neither totally removed from the real world nor ignorant of the important technical issues confronting industry. Industry learned what the laboratories and their primary customer, the DOE, valued and what pressures the labs faced in a time of shrinking federal research budgets.
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From page 98... ...
Why not do A together and share the risk, share the effort, share the cost? And while we're at it, their scientists rub elbows with ours, and naturally they exchange expertise and suggest changes in current procedures, so the laboratory is also acting as a consultant, while the lab personnel get a reality check from business." With this as its prototype for laboratory-industry research, Sandia actively encourages industrial interactions that are mission related and enriching to the scientific base of the missions and to Sandia's technical staff.
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From page 99... ...
of critical infrastructures, including energy. Clearly, catalysis contributes to energy security in a number of ways: Most chemical production is dependent on petroleumbased feedstocks that are synthesized using catalysts; catalysts allow the production of liquid transportation fuels from alternative sources such as natural gas or biomass; and better catalysts produce more efficient industrial production of chemicals leading to less environmental waste, greater economic viability, and less energy usage.
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From page 100... ...
The SBCR was built where it could have access to the air storage tanks for the wind tunnel facility, which allowed Sandia to test highvelocity flow rates in industrially relevant diameter reactors. This is an experimental setup that would never be possible in a facility that had to depend on gas cylinders as a gas source.
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From page 101... ...
The American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, a private funding source, also supports a small amount of catalysis research at universities. The scattered approach to catalysis funding leaves catalysis without a strong advocate within the federal funding structure.
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From page 102... ...
The effort to get the national laboratories to work closely together is an effort to create a virtual catalysis community where "critical mass" is achieved. It is also an effort to leverage and capitalize on programs technically related to catalysis, to fully utilize all DOE materials facilities (such as the synchrotron at Brookhaven and neutron diffraction at Los Alamos)
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From page 103... ...
Only by appealing to industry will the laboratories be able successfully to increase the profile and advocacy for catalysis within the United States. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to Dan Hartley, vice president, Sandia National Laboratories, for his advice, his willingness to share his insights, and his relentless support of partnerships.4 This work was supported by the DOE under contract DE-AC04-94AL850000.
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From page 104... ...
As you look ahead, is this really not a basis for going forward? We have found that virtually no technology exists at the universities in the United States or national labs that actually solves the problem on the time scale that we have to solve it.
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From page 105... ...
So there is a mechanism. Second, as far as gaining influence with Congress, along with calling your local representative and seeing him or her in the local office, there is a Congressional Visits Day, which is organized every year by coalitions for science and technology partnerships and for science funding, that musters over 200 individuals representing organizations that we all belong to under an umbrella group to descend on the Hill and advocate science funding and other subjects related to science that interest us.
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From page 106... ...
But what Nancy Jackson has told us is an example of this decline in the willingness in our political culture, and I mean its industrial cultural element, to support national analytical capabilities that are not immediately responsive to particular individual corporate interests. We could lose the whole thing over time unless there's a much greater sense of corporate stewardship as well as national stewardship with regard to these matters (supporting national analytical capacity)
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