TECHNOLOGY LICENSING OPPORTUNITY: Noninvasive Acoustic Pressure Measurement
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Description
The Noninvasive Acoustic Pressure Measurement technology from Los Alamos National Laboratory allows users to determine the pressure inside a sealed container or pipe without opening it, puncturing it, or installing a permanent gauge. The system briefly attaches small devices to the outside of the container, gently vibrates it, and measures how it responds. Because a container’s vibration behavior changes depending on the pressure inside, software can translate those measurements into an accurate pressure reading in just a few minutes. The equipment is portable, relatively low cost and designed for quick “spot-check” use. This provides a safe and practical solution for industries that need to assess pressure in sealed systems—such as gas cylinders, industrial piping, hazardous material storage or waste containers—especially when gauges are missing, unreliable or impractical to install.
The Challenge:
Many industries rely on sealed containers and piping systems where knowing the internal pressure is critical for safety, performance and compliance, yet existing methods typically require built-in gauges, system penetration or prior calibration—options that are not feasible when gauges fail, are absent or when the contents are hazardous or unknown. Noninvasive Acoustic Pressure Measurement addresses that gap by using externally applied vibration sensors to stimulate and measure the natural resonance behavior of a vessel, which shifts in measurable ways with changes in internal pressure.
Problems Solved:
By analyzing a container’s natural vibration patterns using advanced data processing and machine learning trained on comparable systems, Noninvasive Acoustic Pressure Measurement enables accurate estimation of internal pressure entirely from outside a sealed structure. It eliminates the need to open, puncture or permanently instrument vessels, addressing long-standing challenges in situations where pressure gauges are missing, damaged, unreliable or impractical to install. As a result, it provides a safe, noninvasive way to assess sealed systems that were previously difficult, risky or impossible to evaluate—improving safety, reducing operational disruption and expanding inspection capabilities across a wide range of applications.
Key Advantages:
- Fully noninvasive—no puncturing or opening required
- No need for built-in gauges or baseline calibration
- Rapid measurements (minutes per assessment)
- Portable, field-deployable system
- High accuracy across a broad pressure range
- Improves safety when handling hazardous or unknown contents
Market Applications:
- Aerospace & Defense
- Chemical & Materials Processing
- Energy & Utilities
- Environmental & Waste Management
- Food & Consumer Products
- Industrial & Manufacturing
Development Status: TRL 4
US Patent pending
LA-UR-26-21397
LANL Tech Partnerships: Unlock the Innovative Potential
Los Alamos National Laboratory offers a wide range of cutting-edge technologies and capabilities that may provide your company with a competitive edge in the market and unlock the innovative potential that can enhance, refine, and revolutionize your products.
LANL’s licensing program focuses on moving inventions developed by our researchers to commercial innovations. Patented and patent pending inventions and copyrighted software are available to existing and start-up companies through exclusive and non-exclusive licensing agreements. For specific discussions, please contact licensing@lanl.gov.
Note: This is not a call for external services for the development of this technology.
https://www.lanl.gov/engage/collaboration/feynman-center/partner-with-us/licensing-technology
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TECHNOLOGY LICENSING OPPORTUNITY: Noninvasive Acoustic Pressure Measurement
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Antibiotic resistance frequently arises from specific modifications to a cell's machinery, whether inside the cell through inactivating enzymes or at its surface through structures such as efflux pumps, and these differences are usually invisible to tools designed only to separate one species from another. By defining unique tandem fragmentation windows and stepping them across the full mass range, the method gathers MS and MS/MS information that captures those resistance-linked features rather than a coarse profile. The resulting data set is intentionally dense, combining precursor-mass and product ion-level measurements in both ionization modes, and a purpose-built processing pipeline renders it as a single multidimensional mass fingerprint for interpretation. 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Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory developed the Spectrometer Purposed for Accelerator Testing and Characterization (SPATC) — a portable, easy-to-use device that allows the safe measurement of the power and energy of electron beams from particle accelerators, helping labs test and fine-tune equipment more efficiently. How it Works: SPATC uses a smart, compact design to deliver high-precision beam diagnostics conveniently. At its core, SPATC employs two precisely controlled aluminum wedges that slide together to vary thickness, allowing engineers to analyze how an electron beam’s energy interacts with the material. As the beam passes through these layers, sensors record how much energy is absorbed versus transmitted, and a graphite block captures the remaining beam for accurate current readings. Controlled remotely via computer, SPATC provides real-time data on beam energy and current—without breaking vacuum or requiring complex setup. Designed for flexibility and speed, it offers industries a reliable, low-cost, and portable solution to ensure accelerator performance meets exacting standards for research, manufacturing, or medical applications. Key Advantages: Portable and Compact: Fits into a single rugged case for easy transport and setup at any facility. Fast, Accurate Measurements: Determines beam energy and current in under an hour, minimizing downtime. Remote Operation: Fully controllable from outside the accelerator vault, improving safety and efficiency. Non-invasive Testing: Performs measurements in open air without breaking the accelerator’s vacuum. Precision Engineering: Stepper motor-driven wedges provide fine control over measurement thickness for high accuracy. Enhanced Safety: Reduces radiation exposure by eliminating the need for manual adjustments near the beam. Market Applications: Medical and Radiation Therapy Facilities: Ensures precise calibration of electron beams used in cancer treatment systems. Industrial Accelerator Operations: Enables quick verification of beam performance for material processing, sterilization, and imaging. Research Laboratories and Universities: Provides affordable, portable diagnostics for accelerator-based experiments. Accelerator Manufacturers: Offers a built-in quality assurance tool for testing and characterizing new accelerator systems. Defense and Security Applications: Supports beam validation in systems used for cargo inspection or nondestructive testing. Equipment Service and Maintenance Providers: Allows on-site testing and troubleshooting of accelerators without large diagnostic setups. Development Status: TRL 7 US Patent Pending LA-UR-26-27021 LANL Tech Partnerships: Unlock the Innovative Potential Los Alamos National Laboratory offers a wide range of cutting-edge technologies and capabilities that may provide your company with a competitive edge in the market and unlock the innovative potential that can enhance, refine, and revolutionize your products. LANL’s licensing program focuses on moving inventions developed by our researchers to commercial innovations. Patented and patent pending inventions and copyrighted software are available to existing and start-up companies through exclusive and non-exclusive licensing agreements. For specific discussions, please contact licensing@lanl.gov. Note: This is not a call for external services for the development of this technology. https://www.lanl.gov/engage/collaboration/feynman-center/partner-with-us/licensing-technology m.lanl.gov/tech-search | Special Notice | 334516 | No Set-Aside | 08/05/2026 | 02/01/2027 | Los Alamos, NM | |
Unlike conventional multichannel atomic magnetometers that require one vapor cell and one optical system for each sensing channel, the patented Multi-Channel Atomic Magnetometer (MCAM) architecture from Los Alamos National Laboratory replaces many independent atomic magnetometers with a single shared vapor cell and optical system that simultaneously generates multiple independent sensing channels. MCAM is a non-cryogenic multi-channel optical quantum sensor in a single module that captures ultra-faint biomagnetic signals from the brain, heart and other sources with sensitivity approaching that of the cryogenic SQUID-based systems that have defined the field for decades. MCAM delivers that performance at roughly one-tenth the per-channel cost without a drop of liquid helium. The module pairs one large alkali-metal vapor cell with broad pump and probe laser beams read out by a photodiode array, providing 16 independent sensing channels in a single housing, scaling into helmet-style arrays of hundreds of channels, and flexing around the patient rather than forcing the patient into a fixed cryogenic dewar. Together, these attributes more easily allow for magnetoencephalography, magnetocardiography and magnetic-particle imaging while accelerating overall magnetic imaging workflows. Ongoing development is aimed at extending the sensing architecture from the centimeter scale characterized in the current prototype toward micrometer-scale spatial resolution, opening a path into cellular-scale magnetic imaging that current cryogenic and room-temperature arrays cannot address. How it Works The MCAM module operates on the spin-exchange relaxation-free (SERF) regime, in which atomic spins of alkali-metal atoms inside a large, sealed vapor cell are aligned by a circularly polarized broad pump laser beam through optical pumping and then interrogated by a linearly polarized broad probe beam propagating along a nearly parallel path. An external magnetic field of interest tilts the aligned atomic spins by an angle proportional to the field strength, and that tilt rotates the polarization plane of the probe beam through the Faraday effect; a photodiode array reads the optical rotation simultaneously at multiple points across the cell, with each photodiode pixel reporting on its own localized sensing volume. A buffer gas inside the cell restricts atomic motion so that the small cell volumes behind each pixel behave as independent sensing channels, a rear mirror folds the beams back through the cell to shorten the stand-off distance to the magnetic source, and transparent Pyrex wire heaters hold the cell at the operating temperature needed for SERF operation. Technology Description The patented shared-cell architecture generates multiple independent sensing channels from a single vapor cell, a single pump beam, a single probe beam, and a single detector array. A pair of broad, co-propagating laser beams, one for optical pumping and the other for probing, traverses the shared vapor cell to manipulate the internal atomic spins, converting the local magnetic field distribution into a spatially resolved optical signal that is read out by a multi-pixel photodetector. Because the buffer gas inside the cell restricts atomic diffusion, each pixel of the detector reports on its own small, spatially distinct region of the cell; therefore, the single module yields a two-dimensional map of the local magnetic field rather than a single-point measurement. Operation in the SERF regime, together with an integrated heating and shielding arrangement and a fold-back optical geometry that shortens the distance from the sensing volume to the magnetic source, sets the sensitivity floor in the low tens of femtotesla per root hertz at low frequency. A development path has been identified to reduce the effective sensing-volume scale from the roughly 1 cm per-channel footprint of the current prototype toward the 1 μm range, which would extend the platform from whole-organ mapping into micro-scale magnetic imaging regimes. Architecturally, the MCAM module is engineered for arrays. Because all channels within a single module share one vapor cell, one laser pair, and one optics assembly, the per-channel parts count and tuning effort drop sharply versus designs that stack many single-channel sensors. Fiber-optic coupling between the laser sources and each sensor head lets modules be repositioned independently, so many modules can be tiled into a conformal helmet or surface array that adapts to head or torso shape and supports configurations that rigid large-cell predecessors cannot accommodate. The design is compatible with several alkali-metal and buffer-gas options and with per-module bias coils that allow each module to be tuned individually inside a larger array. Advantages Development path toward micrometer-scale spatial resolution, a roughly four-order-of-magnitude improvement over the current centimeter-scale prototype and an enabler of cellular-scale magnetic imaging Sensitivity at the low tens of femtotesla per root hertz, comparable to cryogenic SQUID arrays, while using a warm vapor, non-cryogenic architecture Roughly tenfold per-channel cost reduction by sharing one vapor cell, one laser pair and one optics set across 16 channels No liquid cryogens, eliminating recurring cryogen costs and simplifying siting, maintenance and shielding Fiber-coupled, repositionable sensor heads that conform to the patient rather than forcing the patient into a fixed dewar Scalable into helmet-style arrays of hundreds of channels, including a size-adjustable pediatric configuration Shorter sensor-to-source stand-off via rear-mirror beam folding, sharpening spatial resolution of biomagnetic sources Market Applications Medical Diagnostic Imaging (magnetoencephalography systems for epilepsy, stroke and neurodegenerative workups; magnetocardiography for arrhythmia and ischemia screening) Pediatric and Adaptive Neuroimaging (size-adjustable MEG helmets, point-of-care brain monitoring) Micro-scale Biomagnetic Imaging (single-neuron and small-circuit brain activity mapping, high-resolution cardiac tissue mapping) Cancer Diagnostics (magnetic nanoparticle imaging for tumor localization and targeted-therapy tracking) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (low-field/ultra-low field, portable MRI, functional brain imaging) Sensing (low-frequency antennas for underground or undersea links, geomagnetic surveying) Instrumentation (fundamental physics, biomagnetism laboratories, multichannel sensor R&D) Development Status: TRL 4 U.S. Patent No. 11,105,865 LA-UR-26-25904 LANL Tech Partnerships: Unlock the Innovative Potential Los Alamos National Laboratory offers a wide range of cutting-edge technologies and capabilities that may provide your company with a competitive edge in the market and unlock the innovative potential that can enhance, refine, and revolutionize your products. LANL’s licensing program focuses on moving inventions developed by our researchers to commercial innovations. Patented and patent pending inventions and copyrighted software are available to existing and start-up companies through exclusive and non-exclusive licensing agreements. For specific discussions, please contact licensing@lanl.gov. Note: This is not a call for external services for the development of this technology. https://www.lanl.gov/engage/collaboration/feynman-center/partner-with-us/licensing-technology m.lanl.gov/tech-search | Special Notice | 334516 | No Set-Aside | 07/17/2026 | 12/13/2026 | Los Alamos, NM |
Additional Details
Solicitation Number
S-167750
Archive Date
Mar 15, 2027
Office Address
Columbus, OH, 43201