Believing in your ideas and the impact they will have is the foundation of accelerating innovation and leading in modern engineering, according to four Sandians who spoke at the second installment of Goal Getters in October. From electrical grids to facilities, nuclear deterrence and global security, each of these Goal Getters is driven by their motivation to fulfill Sandia’s mission of providing exceptional service in the national interest.

Rachid Darbali-Zamora

A native of Puerto Rico, Rachid’s work is personal. He was living in Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria ravaged the area, severely damaging the electrical grid and causing an 11-month blackout — the longest blackout in U.S. history. Rachid is an electrical engineer at Sandia, specializing in microgrids with renewable energy resources. Currently, he is working with utilities in Puerto Rico, Texas and Alaska to build a framework and machine learning algorithm for dynamic microgrids that utilize clean renewable energy.

Rachid explains that each community has its own unique needs: “In Puerto Rico, heating isn’t important while Alaska doesn’t need cooling.

“The machine learning-based controls used here can adapt to the specific challenges in these regions and optimize the available resources to deliver the most critical services.”

Rachid emphasizes the connection between taking risks and being innovative. “This wasn’t the first proposal I submitted,” he said. “You have to take risks and continue to be confident in what you’re trying to do. I don’t do research for the sake of research but to solve problems that make a difference for real people. My motivation is to help people back home.”

Robert Tsinnijinnie

As a new employee at the Labs, Robert brought fresh ideas to help solve an old problem.

He is a technologist working with the Computer Aided Drafting Team to ensure that the more than 100,000 drawings of various facilities around the Labs are accurate. The challenge Robert and his team face is that many of these drawings are outdated because updates and renovations to facilities over the years are not reflected in the master drawings.

“This creates a challenge for subsequent users who rely on those drawings as part of their work,” Robert said.

To update these drawings, Robert and his team rely on 3D scanning to modernize the master drawings. While Sandia has technology to conduct these scans, Robert explains that it is old and time-consuming, creating its own set of problems.

He successfully championed the effort to modernize the technology by introducing LiDAR scanning backpacks to Sandia. These devices work up to ten times faster than the existing technology. For reference, Robert and his team used both methods to scan the Steve Schiff Auditorium; the old method took five hours, while the LiDAR backpack took just 30 minutes.

“Currently, Sandia is the only national lab in the country that can self-perform 3D scanning in-house and process that data,” Robert said. “Other labs have to outsource this kind of work.”

In the next five years, Robert aims to create a digital twin of the entire Albuquerque campus so that when a building needs to be updated, the information is just a click away.

“Don’t be afraid of new challenges or new technology that can help solve a problem,” Robert said. “Some people keep new ideas to themselves, perhaps because there’s not an immediate budget or for some other reason. But if you have a new idea, share it and keep sharing it.”

Dave Godsey

Dave, an optical engineer, and his team modified a Sandia 2010 design to develop an innovative system to enhance our national Overhead Persistent Infrared sensors, the main mission being missile tracking and missile defense capabilities.

“We started with a clean sheet approach, exploring various telescope designs before ultimately settling on the 2010 design,” Dave said. “With our modifications to the focal plane array and telescope design, the design pushes the state-of-the art technology to meet the needs of this complex mission.”

Dave and his team created a digital twin of the telescope they were designing, and as designs changed, they were able to model and simulate the sensor performance to determine if it still met mission requirements. Dave explains that this helped build confidence during the design phase that the sensor would meet and exceed customer and mission objectives.

“If you believe in something, you have to be persistent,” Dave said. “It took us four years to convince stakeholders that we could use the information from the telescope to characterize targets with high fidelity. When we convinced one government agency, we enlisted them to convince another.”

When asked if it was hard to pivot back to an old design after setting out to create something new, Dave points to the importance of Sandia’s mission.

“It’s all about the mission, which is important to our country,” Dave said. “So, whatever we need to do to deliver, that’s what we’ll do.”

He adds that being aware of past solutions can sometimes be key to innovation. “We need to know how similar challenges were addressed in the past to create the best solutions for the future.”

Joanna Gardner

Persistence is the name of the game for Joanna, a cybersecurity researcher at Sandia. Her project to connect more than 200 devices to the Unclassified Operational Technology Network took just under a decade and involved multiple moving parts.

The project required ensuring cybersecurity while connecting each device to a specially configured enclave of the corporate network. Success resulted from close partnership with Sandia’s Information Technology and cyber teams to do a massive amount of documentation and development over the course of eight years to obtain the necessary accreditation and approvals, and finally connecting all the devices.

“Each one posed its own challenge, and there were constant surprises along the way,” Joanna said.

Joanna points to her patriotism as motivation to keep going.

“I’m very patriotic and driven by our mission,” she said. “For me, the question was, what’s the impact going to be for the mission? The answer was that this work will eventually make a difference by helping us work faster and be more efficient.”

What does Joanna think other Sandians can learn from her story?

“Persistence. If you have a big innovative project that you believe in, stick with it,” Joanna said. “If you can explain the why and help people understand the value of your project, in time, you’ll get there.”