Not all of ORNL’s commercial partners are in East Tennessee, and not all work in carbon fiber or additive manufacturing. Each year, ORNL researchers identify around 200 inventions and discoveries they believe have commercial application—from sophisticated sensors to data analysis tools to advances i...
DNA analysis on a chip
Caliper Life Sciences saw the potential for ORNL’s Microfluidic Lab-on-a-chip and licensed the technology in 2002. The success of the technology contributed to Waltham, Mass.-based PerkinElmer Inc.’s decision to buy Caliper in 2011 for $600 million.
The company produces ...
Looking forward, there’s no reason to doubt ORNL will keep pushing valuable new technologies into the economy. The lab is committed to promoting high-tech industry, and its partners are equally committed.
“It’s not about the money that we get in royalties; it’s about the impact that we can have,”...
The United States is running out of the plutonium-238 used to power decades-long missions to the edge of the solar system and beyond. Plans for producing more rely on two ORNL facilities: the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center, known as REDC, and the High Flux Isotope Reactor, known a...
A natural spruce bog in northern Minnesota contains more than 10,000 years of carbon accumulated from peatlands and may answer questions about how Earth will respond to predicted warming and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
About seven acres of the raised bog is home to SPRUCE, which stan...
Anew project at ORNL is examining the potential for consumers to generate, store and use electrical power via an energy system that includes their homes, their vehicles and the grid—all managed by a common “brain.” The Additive Manufacturing Integrated Energy (AMIE) demonstration may be a bellwether...
Former laboratory director and ORNL patriarch Alvin Weinberg had many gifts, including an innate ability to bridge gaps both political and scientific.
Those who knew him said he was approachable to a degree rare among the world’s scientific elite. So it was only natural to include Weinberg ...