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Caption: Jaswinder Sharma makes battery coin cells with a lightweight current collector made of thin layers of aligned carbon fibers in a polymer with carbon nanotubes. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

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.

ORNL researcher Anne Campbell will present a paper in Korea next year on materials support of carbon-free nuclear energy. Credit: Adam Malin, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Anne Campbell, a researcher at ORNL, recently won the Young Leaders Professional Development Award from the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, or TMS, and has been chosen as the first recipient of the Young Leaders International Scholar Program award from TMS and the Korean Institute of Metals and Materials, or KIM.

Steven Hamilton, an R&D scientist in the HPC Methods for Nuclear Applications group at ORNL, leads the ExaSMR project. ExaSMR was developed to run on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s exascale-class supercomputer, Frontier. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The Exascale Small Modular Reactor effort, or ExaSMR, is a software stack developed over seven years under the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project to produce the highest-resolution simulations of nuclear reactor systems to date. Now, ExaSMR has been nominated for a 2023 Gordon Bell Prize by the Association for Computing Machinery and is one of six finalists for the annual award, which honors outstanding achievements in high-performance computing from a variety of scientific domains.  

A new method to control quantum states in a material is shown. The electric field induces polarization switching of the ferroelectric substrate, resulting in different magnetic and topological states. Credit: Mina Yoon, Fernando Reboredo, Jacquelyn DeMink/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

An advance in a topological insulator material — whose interior behaves like an electrical insulator but whose surface behaves like a conductor — could revolutionize the fields of next-generation electronics and quantum computing, according to scientists at ORNL.

Rigoberto Advincula

Rigoberto Advincula, a renowned scientist at ORNL and professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Tennessee, has won the Netzsch North American Thermal Analysis Society Fellows Award for 2023.

Carinata, pictured in full bloom at a producer’s field in Georgia, is a winter cover crop of interest as a feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel. Credit: Southeast Partnership for Advanced Renewables from Carinata

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists led the development of a supply chain model revealing the optimal places to site farms, biorefineries, pipelines and other infrastructure for sustainable aviation fuel production.

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.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed an eco-friendly foam insulation for improved building efficiency. Credit: Chad Malone/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists at ORNL developed a competitive, eco-friendly alternative made without harmful blowing agents.

One of the proteins identified through a new ORNL-developed approach could be key to communications between poplar trees and beneficial microbes that can help boost poplar trees’ growth, carbon storage and climate resilience. Credit: Andy Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

ORNL researchers have identified specific proteins and amino acids that could control bioenergy plants’ ability to identify beneficial microbes that can enhance plant growth and storage of carbon in soils.

ORNL’s Adam Guss began adapting the SAGE gene editing tool to modify microbes in graduate school. Today, SAGE is rapidly accelerating the design of custom microbes for a variety of applications. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A DNA editing tool adapted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists makes engineering microbes for everything from bioenergy production to plastics recycling easier and faster.