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The sun sets behind the ORNL Visitor Center in this aerial photo from April 2023. Credit: Kase Clapp/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

In fiscal year 2023 — Oct. 1–Sept. 30, 2023 — Oak Ridge National Laboratory was awarded more than $8 million in technology maturation funding through the Department of Energy’s Technology Commercialization Fund, or TCF.

Madhavi Martin portrait image

Madhavi Martin brings a physicist’s tools and perspective to biological and environmental research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, supporting advances in bioenergy, soil carbon storage and environmental monitoring, and even helping solve a murder mystery.

Clouds of gray smoke in the lower left are funneled northward from wildfires in Western Canada, reaching the edge of the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean. A second path of thick smoke is visible at the top center of the image, emanating from wildfires in the boreal areas of Russia’s Far East, in this image captured on July 13, 2023. Credit: NASA MODIS

Wildfires have shaped the environment for millennia, but they are increasing in frequency, range and intensity in response to a hotter climate. The phenomenon is being incorporated into high-resolution simulations of the Earth’s climate by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a mission to better understand and predict environmental change.

Reuben Budiardja, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory computational scientist, worked with the early users who helped prepare Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer, for scientific operations. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

With the world’s first exascale supercomputer now fully open for scientific business, researchers can thank the early users who helped get the machine up to speed.

HFIR

Creating energy the way the sun and stars do — through nuclear fusion — is one of the grand challenges facing science and technology. What’s easy for the sun and its billions of relatives turns out to be particularly difficult on Earth.

The Fuel Pellet Fueling Laboratory at ORNL is part of a suite of fusion energy R&D capabilities and provides test equipment and related diagnostics for carrying out experiments to develop pellet injectors for plasma fueling applications. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

ORNL will team up with six of eight companies that are advancing designs and research and development for fusion power plants with the mission to achieve a pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade.

This newly manufactured fixed guide vane of a hydropower turbine system was printed at the DOE Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S Dept. of Energy

A new report published by ORNL assessed how advanced manufacturing and materials, such as 3D printing and novel component coatings, could offer solutions to modernize the existing fleet and design new approaches to hydropower.

From left are UWindsor students Isabelle Dib, Dominik Dziura, Stuart Castillo and Maksymilian Dziura at ORNL’s Neutron Spin Echo spectrometer. Their work advances studies on a natural cancer treatment. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A scientific instrument at ORNL could help create a noninvasive cancer treatment derived from a common tropical plant.

Heat is typically carried through a material by vibrations known as phonons. In some crystals, however, different atomic motions — known as phasons — carry heat three times faster and farther. This illustration shows phasons made by rearranging atoms, shown by arrows. Credit: Jill Hemman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Warming a crystal of the mineral fresnoite, ORNL scientists discovered that excitations called phasons carried heat three times farther and faster than phonons, the excitations that usually carry heat through a material.

When an electron beam drills holes in heated graphene, single-atom vacancies, shown in purple, diffuse until they join with other vacancies to form stationary structures and chains, shown in blue. Credit: Ondrej Dyck/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers serendipitously discovered when they automated the beam of an electron microscope to precisely drill holes in the atomically thin lattice of graphene, the drilled holes closed up.