Skip to main content
Jim Szybist, Propulsion Science section head at ORNL, is applying his years of alternative fuel combustion and thermodynamics research to the challenge of cleaning up the hard-to-decarbonize, heavy-duty mobility sector. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy.

What’s getting Jim Szybist fired up these days? It’s the opportunity to apply his years of alternative fuel combustion and thermodynamics research to the challenge of cleaning up the hard-to-decarbonize, heavy-duty mobility sector — from airplanes to locomotives to ships and massive farm combines.

TEDB

It’s been referenced in Popular Science and Newsweek, cited in the Economic Report of the President, and used by agencies to create countless federal regulations.

Burak Ozpineci is a globally recognized leader in power electronics research. He was named an ORNL Corporate Fellow in fall 2021. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Burak Ozpineci started out at ORNL working on a novel project: introducing silicon carbide into power electronics for more efficient electric vehicles. Twenty years later, the car he drives contains those same components.

Nicholas Peters and Raphael Pooser

Of the $61 million recently announced by the U.S. Department of Energy for quantum information science studies, $17.5 million will fund research at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These projects will help build the foundation for the quantum internet, advance quantum entanglement capabilities — which involve sharing information through paired particles of light called photons — and develop next-generation quantum sensors.

ORNL used novel additive manufacturing techniques to 3D print channel fasteners for Framatome’s boiling water reactor fuel assembly. Four components, like the one shown here, were installed at the TVA Browns Ferry nuclear plant. Credit: Framatome

Four first-of-a-kind 3D-printed fuel assembly brackets, produced at the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have been installed and are now under routine operating

L-R: ORNL’s Omer Onar and Veda Galigekere with the dynamic wireless charging test bed at ORNL’s Grid Research Integration and Deployment Center. Credit: Carlos Jones, ORNL/U.S. Dept. of Energy

Consumer buy-in is key to the future of a decarbonized transportation sector in which electric vehicles largely replace today’s conventionally fueled cars and trucks.

Heavy-duty vehicles contribute 23% of transportation emissions of greenhouse gases and account for almost one-quarter of the fuel consumed annually in the U.S. Credit: Chris Bair/Unsplash

Through a consortium of Department of Energy national laboratories, ORNL scientists are applying their expertise to provide solutions that enable the commercialization of emission-free hydrogen fuel cell technology for heavy-duty

Each point on the sphere of this visual representation of arbitrary frequency-bin qubit states corresponds to a unique quantum state, and the gray sections represent the measurement results. The zoomed-in view illustrates examples of three quantum states plotted next to their ideal targets (blue dots). Credit: Joseph Lukens/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A team of researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Purdue University has taken an important step toward this goal by harnessing the frequency, or color, of light. Such capabilities could contribute to more practical and large-scale quantum networks exponentially more powerful and secure than the classical networks we have today.

A Co-Optima research team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jim Szybist in collaboration with Argonne, Sandia and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, created a merit function tool that evaluates six fuel properties and their impact on engine performance, giving the scientific community a guide to quickly evaluate biofuels. Credit: ORNL/U.S. Dept. of Energy

As ORNL’s fuel properties technical lead for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Co-Optimization of Fuel and Engines, or Co-Optima, initiative, Jim Szybist has been on a quest for the past few years to identify the most significant indicators for predicting how a fuel will perform in engines designed for light-duty vehicles such as passenger cars and pickup trucks.

Suman Debnath is using simulation algorithms to accelerate understanding of the modern power grid and enhance its reliability and resilience. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Planning for a digitized, sustainable smart power grid is a challenge to which Suman Debnath is using not only his own applied mathematics expertise, but also the wider communal knowledge made possible by his revival of a local chapter of the IEEE professional society.