PNNL’s Electron Microscopy and Vapor Detection Technologies Win Federal Laboratory Consortium Awards
RICHLAND, Wash.—Two technologies from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have won 2026 Federal Laboratory Consortium Awards. FLC Awards annually recognize federal laboratories and industry partners for pushing scientific discoveries toward real-world applications quickly and efficiently.
SenseAI is an electron scanning microscopy technology that will help scientists acquire a deeper understanding of real-world chemical dynamics; VaporID is a technology that detects drugs, explosives and other chemical threats and fits the operational needs of ports of entry, airports and beyond.
SenseAI: revolutionizing electron microscopy with compressive sensing
Electron scanning microscopes allow scientists to peer into the atomic world and study new materials for technology or new drugs for disease treatments. These microscopes operate by shooting a narrow beam of electrons at a sample and revealing their surface topography. Although the electron beam reveals details a human eye can’t capture, it also slowly destroys the sample by sometimes breaking atomic bonds.
Enter compressive sensing technology, originally developed by a PNNL group led by Nigel Browning. Rather than capturing a complete image, a microscope equipped with compressive sensing technology only needs to capture a few key pieces.
The technique then employs the information gained from those pieces to build a “dictionary” of spatial features to reconstruct the missing components, achieving remarkable accuracy in only a fraction of the time. Compared with conventional imaging approaches, compressive sensing provides up to 100 times faster image capture and data processing with only 1 percent of the material damage and no loss of image fidelity.
Since its original development, Browning founded SenseAI to bring compressive sensing to the market. Industry has already adopted the technology in a number of scientific endeavors. The CNR Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems, based in Europe, has used SenseAI’s compressive sensing software in scanning electron microscopy; the Rosalind Franklin Institute, a leading UK life sciences research institute, has used the software for the discovery of new medicines and diagnostics; and the Centre for Ultrastructural Imaging at King’s College London has used the software to decrease damage when evaluating cryogenically prepared samples.
VaporID: portable, rapid, noncontact detection of fentanyl and drug vapors
Materials like fentanyl are challenging to detect because they have low vapor pressures, which means they don’t evaporate quickly and release few molecules into the air.
VaporID overcomes this challenge by using an atmospheric flow tube (developed at PNNL) paired with a mass spectrometer to sense molecules in the ambient air. The atmospheric flow tube provides a longer ion-molecule reaction time (a few seconds compared to milliseconds for typical mass spectrometers), enhancing sensitivity by several orders of magnitude. In the laboratory, the system can detect fentanyl and other substances—including cocaine, methamphetamine, and explosives like TNT, RDX and nitroglycerin—at levels of just 10 parts per quadrillion. That’s the equivalent of identifying a single pine needle from all the pine trees in the state of Washington.
VaporID—developed by PNNL’s Robert Ewing, Elizabeth Denis, and team—originally was a refrigerator-sized unit weighing around 400 pounds. In 2022, they partnered with BaySpec Inc., which later licensed the technology and developed a more portable unit the size of a microwave weighing approximately 50 pounds. Although the smaller version isn’t quite as sensitive, it can still detect faint wisps of fentanyl and other chemicals within seconds.
In 2025, the PNNL-BaySpec collaboration made national headlines after the successful demonstration of contactless, real-time fentanyl detection at the Nogales Port of Entry in Arizona, one of the nation’s busiest border crossings.
“These technology transfer efforts represent a profound example of the power of collaboration over competition in advancing scientific research and discovery, in alignment with the mission of DOE and its national laboratories,” said Kannan Krishnaswami, senior commercialization manager at PNNL. Krishnaswami was specifically recognized for his role in commercializing both SenseAI and VaporID.
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