Sandia LabNews

Honoring excellence


NNSA recognizes Sandians for national security contributions

PROUD MOMENT — Sandia’s Eric Neuman displays the NNSA Defense Programs Award of Excellence he accepted on behalf of his teammates at an awards ceremony on Dec. 19. Eric and his team received one of seven awards at Sandia for significant achievements supporting stockpile stewardship. (Photo by Craig Fritz)
PROUD MOMENT — Sandia’s Eric Neuman displays the NNSA Defense Programs Award of Excellence he accepted on behalf of his teammates at an awards ceremony on Dec. 19. Eric and his team received one of seven awards at Sandia for significant achievements supporting stockpile stewardship. (Photo by Craig Fritz)

The Defense Programs Award of Excellence are accepting 2024 nominations starting this week. The nomination period is Jan. 29-Mar. 3.

NNSA honored one Sandia employee and six Sandia teams with the prestigious Defense Programs Award of Excellence. The teams include more than 275 employees from Sandia, the U.S. national security enterprise and the United Kingdom’s AWE.

Each year since the early 1980s, when the award was established, defense programs recognize significant achievements including quality, productivity, cost savings, safety and creativity that support stockpile stewardship.

During a ceremony at Sandia on Dec. 19, NNSA Acting Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs David Hoagland said both the application and review process for the award are rigorous.

“I feel privileged to serve with all of you at this time,” Hoagland said. “The stakes are so incredibly high,” he added, referring to the current state of geopolitics.

Sandia’s Laura McGill asked the 2023 award recipients to take the opportunity to appreciate their own accomplishments.

“The work you do helps secure the entire nation,” Laura said. “Most people won’t know your contributions, but we do.”

Individual award

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Drew Hollowell

Drew Hollowell was recognized for his significant contributions to the DOD Nuclear Weapons Innovation Process. Drew helped coordinate NNSA efforts to execute the pilot Nuclear Weapons Innovation Process in record time. The goal is for the DOD and DOE to jointly identify advanced technology concepts that are deemed useful to accomplish Combatant Command mission objectives. Tight integration aligns DOE Research and Development with DOD needs and allows for rapid assessment of concept viability. Drew works in nuclear deterrence at Sandia and is currently on assignment with the NNSA Office of Engineering and Technology Maturation.

Team awards

Active Ceramics Manufacturing Team

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The Active Ceramics Manufacturing team at Sandia completed a five-year multimillion-dollar modernization effort to produce ceramic used in parts for nuclear deterrence missions. Prior to establishing this capability, external vendors provided the ceramic needed to produce the parts. The team established a culture of quality, instituting regular process checks throughout production, increasing product yields from about 50% to about 75%, and improving lot-to-lot consistency. The team accomplished these activities during the COVID-19 pandemic while meeting ongoing production commitments. The effort resulted in enhanced understanding of processing and properties of ferroelectric materials and nuclear deterrence components, and better-defined material and component requirements.

Anomaly Resolution Team-21

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The Anomaly Resolution Team-21 responded urgently to a technical challenge related to the B61-12 — ultimately meeting national security mission needs. The ART-21 team successfully implemented an immediate mitigation for the technical challenge, methodically determined root cause and developed and qualified a war-reserve component upgrade for the B61-12 in just six months.

The ART-21 team includes experts across a wide variety of disciplines including systems and component engineering, production, reliability, radiation modeling, effects and testing, and statistics. The team persevered under extreme pressure and provided technical excellence via a large collaborative effort across multiple Sandia organizations, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Kansas City National Security Complex and Pantex.

Electronics Assembly A Delivery Team

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The Electronics Assembly A team and its subcomponent product realization teams delivered fully functional development build hardware nine months ahead of schedule to support earlier-than-planned flight tests on the W80-4 Life Extension Program. The team received an Exceptional Achievement Award for its work.

The product realization teams overcame schedule challenges by delivering hardware significantly faster than is typical and integrating the mature major component hardware into ongoing system integration tests.

The team’s collaboration resulted in delivering Application Specific Integrated Circuits to the accelerated schedule; the Electronic Assembly product realization team delivering multiple fully functional assemblies to system tests; and systems completing regression testing to gain confidence in the hardware’s insertion into system test benches. These successes resulted in a significant reduction in the risk associated with a major design change which came late in the program.

Enhanced Nuclear Safety Team

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Credible and innovative component designs to bolster nuclear safety have been matured for the future thanks to the work of the Enhanced Nuclear Safety Team. For more than four years, the diverse multidisciplinary team used resources at Sandia and the U.K. AWE to develop components that can help achieve multipoint safety in future weapon systems. Multipoint safety would represent significant improvement in overall weapon safety for both countries.

Core goals were accomplished in fewer builds than projected, allowing time and resources to integrate components into a subsystem test series. The team also achieved a stretch goal to evaluate impacts of the subsystem on system power sources, remarkably finding negligible impact. Hardware was delivered in 2023, and the component designs are backed by more than 1,000 pages of documentation available to engineers at Sandia and the AWE.

The Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor Team

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In 2023, the Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor Subcomponent Product Realization Team set the record for the largest single diamond-stamped delivery from Sandia to Kansas City National Security Campus with 25,269 parts. The NNSA Field Office diamond stamps the parts to show that they meet all requirements.

The integrated team within the Microsystems Engineering Science and Applications Center is responsible for semiconductor design, epitaxy, fabrication, packaging, test, qualification and product acceptance preparation. The team also successfully completed life-of-program deliveries of compound semiconductors for three major programs in 2023. The team delivered more than 185,000 heterojunction bipolar transistor parts in 41 diamond-stamped-deliveries across eight different products with zero rejections and zero specification exceptions over a multiyear period.

Due to yield above target throughout production, the team proactively revised schedules to complete production nearly two years ahead of schedule and returned $5.8 million to the customer.

Improved plutonium and uranium experiments

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A diverse team of physicists, engineers, safety professionals and technologists from the Sandia, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories collaborated to deliver high-demand dynamic material property data for plutonium and uranium using Sandia’s Z machine. The achievements capped years of work by the team toward authorization and safe execution of new capabilities enabling twice the number of samples for double the data return along with improved quality and reproducibility of the experiments. In all, five experiments supporting nuclear weapon design, certification and assessment were conducted using the improved capabilities in 2023.

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