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Rose Ruther and Jagjit Nanda have been collaborating to develop a membrane for a low-cost redox flow battery for grid-scale energy storage.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have developed a crucial component for a new kind of low-cost stationary battery system utilizing common materials and designed for grid-scale electricity storage. Large, economical electricity storage systems can benefit the nation’s grid ...

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory–led team has developed super-stretchy polymers with amazing self-healing abilities that could lead to longer-lasting consumer products.

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory–led team has developed super-stretchy polymers with amazing self-healing abilities that could lead to longer-lasting consumer products.

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For the past six years, some 140 scientists from five institutions have traveled to the Arctic Circle and beyond to gather field data as part of the Department of Energy-sponsored NGEE Arctic project. This article gives insight into how scientists gather the measurements that inform t...

Julie Smith

It may take a village to raise a child, according to the old proverb, but it takes an entire team of highly trained scientists and engineers to install and operate a state-of-the-art, exceptionally complex ion microprobe. Just ask Julie Smith, a nuclear security scientist at the Depa...

Materials—Polymer-theory-problem

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have conducted a series of breakthrough experimental and computational studies that cast doubt on a 40-year-old theory describing how polymers in plastic materials behave during processing.

Composites scientist and engineer Vlastimil Kunc with the latest large-scale 3Dprinter at the MDF.

Vlastimil Kunc grew up in a family of scientists where his natural curiosity was encouraged—an experience that continues to drive his research today in polymer composite additive manufacturing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “I’ve been interested in the science of composites si...

From left, Andrew Lupini and Juan Carlos Idrobo use ORNL’s new monochromated, aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope, a Nion HERMES to take the temperatures of materials at the nanoscale. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A scientific team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a new way to take the local temperature of a material from an area about a billionth of a meter wide, or approximately 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. This discove...

ORNL researcher Miaofang Chi refines her microscopy techniques toward understanding how and why materials have certain properties.

Material surfaces and interfaces may appear flat and void of texture to the naked eye, but a view from the nanoscale reveals an intricate tapestry of atomic patterns that control the reactions between the material and its environment. Electron microscopy allows researchers to probe...