Shift Thermal, a member of Innovation Crossroads’ first cohort of fellows, is commercializing advanced ice thermal energy storage for HVAC, shifting the cooling process to be more sustainable, cost-effective and resilient. Shift Thermal wants to enable a lower-cost, more-efficient thermal energy storage method to provide long-duration resilient cooling when the electric grid is down.
Three ORNL intellectual property projects with industry partners have advanced in DOE's Office of Technology Transitions Making Advanced Technology Commercialization Harmonized, or Lab MATCH, prize, which encourages entrepreneurs to find actionable pathways that bring lab-developed intellectual property to market.
College intern Noah Miller is on his 3rd consecutive internship at ORNL, currently working on developing an automated pellet inspection system for Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Plutonium-238 Supply Program. Along with his success at ORNL, Miller is also focusing on becoming a mentor for kids, giving back to the place where he discovered his passion and developed his skills.
Since 2019, a team of NASA scientists and their partners have been using NASA’s FUN3D software on supercomputers located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to conduct computational fluid dynamics simulations of a human-scale Mars lander. The team’s ongoing research project is a first step in determining how to safely land a vehicle with humans onboard onto the surface of Mars.
Students with a focus on building science will spend 10 weeks this summer interning at ORNL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Pacific Northwest Laboratory as winners of the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Building Technologies Office sixth annual JUMP into STEM finals competition.
A modeling analysis led by ORNL gives the first detailed look at how geothermal energy can relieve the electric power system and reduce carbon emissions if widely implemented across the United States within the next few decades.
Three staff members in ORNL’s Fusion and Fission Energy and Science Directorate have moved into newly established roles facilitating communication and program management with sponsors of the directorate’s Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Division.
A key industrial isotope, iridium-192, has not been produced in the U.S. in almost 20 years. DOE's Isotope Program and QSA Global Inc. announced a joint product development agreement to initiate U.S. production of iridium-192.
ORNL researchers have developed a novel way to encapsulate salt hydrate phase-change materials within polymer fibers through a coaxial pulling process. The discovery could lead to the widespread use of the low-carbon materials as a source of insulation for a building’s envelope.
In summer 2023, ORNL's Prasanna Balaprakash was invited to speak at a roundtable discussion focused on the importance of academic artificial intelligence research and development hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. National Science Foundation.