Dana Dattelbaum

SCIENCE ON TAP NEWS

Join the Bradbury Science Museum and the Los Creative District on Monday, Nov. 19 at 5:30 p.m. at UnQuarked Wine Room for the next Science On Tap. Dana Dattelbaum, program manager for the Dynamic Materials Properties Campaign, and an R&D Scientist within M division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, will be presenting about work she’s leading at the Lab focused on materials at the mesoscale…that’s the spatial scale where a material’s structure strongly influences its macroscopic behaviors, like strength and durability.

Dattelbaum’s experiments in shock sensitivity and dynamics of explosives support simulations of nuclear weapons performance and enhance the safety of the nation’s nuclear stockpile. She uses the Lab’s unique experimental platforms and diagnostics to examine fundamental science issues that affect materials in the stockpile. Gas guns investigate materials properties of explosives at conditions similar to those found in nuclear weapons. The shock waves in the gas guns start chemical reactions in explosives, which eventually lead to detonation.

Dattelbaum develops diagnostics to measure the chemical species as they evolve at very fast reaction rates behind the shock front. This information is used to develop models of the performance of nuclear weapons and to enhance the safety of the stockpile.

Dattelbaum received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and joined the Laboratory as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow.

The American Physical Society named Fellow her to based on her pioneering studies of the dynamic properties of materials.