OOF Named Technology of the Year
December 1999
Industry Week magazine has named NIST as one of its 1999 Technology
of the Year award winners for the development of OOF. OOF is an
object-oriented finite-element system for the modeling of real
material microstructures. It was created by Steve Langer, ITL
(Math and Computational Sciences Division), Andy Roosen, MSEL
(Ceramic Division), Ed Fuller, MSEL (Ceramics Division), and Craig
Carter, MIT (formerly of MSEL). The announcement of Industry
Week's 7th annual Technology and Innovation Awards appears in its
December 6th issue.
Each December Industry Week profiles promising new technologies to
"celebrate the link between technological creativity and economic
progress", naming some 25 innovations as Technologies of the Year.
Winners represent a wide range of technologies from both industry
and national laboratories. This year's winners, which were dominated
by information technologies, included Gigibit Ethernet Transceiver
Chip (Broadcom Corp.), Roentgen High-Resolution Flat-Panel Display (IBM),
AllWave Single-Mode Optical Fiber (Lucent), Super-Iron Battery (The
Technion), and Pirius Hybrid Gas/Electric Vehicle (Toyota).
Past winners have included Ultralight Steel Auto Body (American Iron
and Steel Institute, 1998), Double-density flash memory (Intel, 1997),
and Java (Sun, 1995). The 1999 winners can be found in the
December 1999 issue.
OOF is designed to help materials scientists calculate macroscopic
properties from images of real or simulated microstructures. It
is composed of two cooperating parts: ppm2oof and oof. ppm2oof
reads images in the ppm (Portable Pixel Map) format and assigns
material properties to features in the image. oof conducts virtual
experiments on the data structures created by ppm2oof to determine
the macroscopic properties of the microstructure. Currently, the
programs calculate stresses and strains, but work is underway to add
thermal field calculations in a joint venture with General Electric
sponsored by the Department of Energy.
In its description of OOF, Industry Week says, "The OOF advantage
to corporate R&D could be significant. Because OOF replaces weeks
of laboratory experiments with quick computational assays, it can
help researchers run their labs more strategically."
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