Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists ingeniously created a sustainable, soft material by combining rubber with woody reinforcements and incorporating “smart” linkages between the components that unlock on demand.
When scientists pushed the world’s fastest supercomputer to its limits, they found those limits stretched beyond even their biggest expectations. In the latest milestone, a team of engineers and scientists used Frontier to simulate a system of nearly half a trillion atoms — the largest system ever modeled and more than 400 times the size of the closest competition.
Rigoberto “Gobet” Advincula, a scientist with joint appointments at ORNL and the University of Tennessee, has been named a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
ORNL’s Erin Webb is co-leading a new Circular Bioeconomy Systems Convergent Research Initiative focused on advancing production and use of renewable carbon from Tennessee to meet societal needs.
Chelsea Chen, a polymer physicist at ORNL, is studying ion transport in solid electrolytes that could help electric vehicle battery charges last longer.
In a win for chemistry, inventors at ORNL have designed a closed-loop path for synthesizing an exceptionally tough carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer, or CFRP, and later recovering all of its starting materials.
Corning uses neutron scattering to study the stability of different types of glass. Recently, researchers for the company have found that understanding the stability of the rings of atoms in glass materials can help predict the performance of glass products.
Electric vehicles can drive longer distances if their lithium-ion batteries deliver more energy in a lighter package. A prime weight-loss candidate is the current collector, a component that often adds 10% to the weight of a battery cell without contributing energy.
The 2023 top science achievements from HFIR and SNS feature a broad range of materials research published in high impact journals such as Nature and Advanced Materials.
Four scientists affiliated with ORNL were named Battelle Distinguished Inventors during the lab’s annual Innovation Awards on Dec. 1 in recognition of being granted 14 or more United States patents.