Oak Ridge Today

Hardin Valley Academy’s Feldman receives 2015 UT-Battelle Scholarship

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UT-Battelle Scholarship 2015

ORNL Director Thom Mason, left, congratulates UT-Battelle scholarship recipient Samuel Feldman. (Photo: Jason Richards)

 

By Chris Samoray

High school senior Samuel Feldman of Hardin Valley Academy in Knoxville has earned the 2015 UT-Battelle Scholarship to attend the University of Tennessee.

The scholarship, given to a graduating senior planning to study a science field at UT, is renewable for four years and is worth a total of $20,000. The scholarship is awarded annually to a student who has a parent who works at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Samuel’s parents are Matthew and Laura Feldman of Knoxville. His father, Matthew, works in ORNL’s Reactor and Nuclear Systems Division. Sam’s grandparents are Mary and Jim Luttrell of Oak Ridge and Nancy and the late Melvin Feldman, who retired from ORNL, also of Oak Ridge. [Read more…]

Six ORNL researchers receive SAE International awards

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ORNL SAE Award Recipients

ORNL award recipients at the SAE International World Congress are, from left, Derek Splitter, Sujit Das, Jim Szybist, Brian West, Scott Sluder, and Scott Curran. (Submitted photo)

 

Six researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory received awards at last week’s Society of Automotive Engineers International, or SAE, World Congress.

Scott Sluder received SAE’s Lloyd L. Withrow Distinguished Speaker Award, which recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding presentation skills. Recipients must have previously received SAE’s Outstanding Oral Presentation Award more than twice. Sluder was elected a fellow of SAE International in 2014.

Scott Curran, Sujit Das, and Derek Splitter were presented the Forest R. McFarland Award for their role in facilitating technical information dialogue by planning and organizing technical meetings, conferences, and professional development programs in adherence with the SAE engineering meetings board. [Read more…]

ORNL scientists generate landmark DOE hydropower report

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2014 Hydropower Market Report Cover

The 2014 Hydropower Market Report provides comprehensive data and trends useful for industry and policymakers. (Submitted by ORNL)

 

For the first time, industry and policymakers have a comprehensive report detailing the U.S. hydropower fleet’s 2,198 plants that provide about 7 percent of the nation’s electricity.

The 98-page report by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers Rocio Uria-Martinez, Patrick O’Connor, and Megan Johnson is a resource that describes key features of the nation’s hydro resources and systematically tracks trends that have influenced the industry in recent years.

“The people who make critical decisions about U.S. hydropower can now turn to one place to find information that has broad implications,” said Uria-Martinez, who noted that the existing fleet has been constructed over the course of an entire century. “Hydropower has a long history but also a promising future as it continues to grow and play a key role in the nation’s power system.”

People who access the report can easily search the database to make highly informed decisions that have a direct impact on the lives of potentially millions of people, Uria-Martinez said. [Read more…]

ORNL researchers contribute to major UN bioenergy, sustainability report

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Keith Kline and Virginia Dale

ORNL researchers Keith Kline and Virginia Dale contributed to a major United Nations report on bioenergy and sustainability. (Photo courtesy ORNL)

A major United Nations report on bioenergy and sustainability released Tuesday concludes the sustainable production of bioenergy can be an important tool for addressing climate change.

Two researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory contributed to the multinational UN document, which offers science-based evaluations of bioenergy issues—including food and energy crop production and bioenergy—as a climate change mitigation strategy.

Keith Kline of ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division contributed to a chapter on land use for the UN Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) Bioenergy and Sustainability Report.

“Misconceptions about the availability of land needed for growing food crops and about the opportunities and synergies possible from combined production systems could undermine investment in a key strategy for climate change mitigation,” Kline said. [Read more…]

U.S. scientists celebrate the restart of the Large Hadron Collider, which involves ORNL

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Note: Oak Ridge National Laboratory has led an eight-year upgrade of the electromagnetic calorimeter used for LHC’s experiment called ALICE  (for A Large Ion Collider Experiment). This detector measures the energies of high-energy electrons and gamma rays to learn more about the conditions of the early universe. Thomas M. Cormier leads the LHC Heavy Ion Group in ORNL’s Physics Division.

On Sunday, April 5, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator began its second act. After two years of upgrades and repairs, proton beams once again circulated around the Large Hadron Collider, located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

With the collider back in action, the more than 1,700 U.S. scientists who work on LHC experiments are prepared to join thousands of their international colleagues to study the highest-energy particle collisions ever achieved in the laboratory.

These collisions—hundreds of millions of them every second—will lead scientists to new and unexplored realms of physics, and could yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe. [Read more…]

ORNL part of project to study how tropical forests respond to climate change

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Amazon Tropical Rainforests

The future of tropical rainforests in the Amazon (pictured) and worldwide is the focus of a new research project that combines field experiments and predictive modeling. (Photo courtesy ORNL)

 

Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory will play key roles in an expansive new project that aims to bring the future of tropical forests and the climate system into much clearer focus by coupling field research with the development of a new ecosystem model.

The project is called the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics, or NGEE-Tropics. Its goal is the development of a model that represents how tropical forests interact with Earth’s climate in much greater ecological detail than ever before. This will help scientists explore, more accurately than is possible today, how rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, increasing greenhouse gas levels, and other natural and human-induced changes affect tropical forests’ influence on Earth’s climate.

Led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the effort includes collaborators from Oak Ridge, Brookhaven, Los Alamos, and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. The study also includes researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA, and several institutions from other nations. [Read more…]

Regional firms receive ORNL’s 2015 Small Business Impact Awards

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ORNL Small Business Impact Awards

ORNL Small Business Impact Award winners, pictured, left to right: Jeremy Shoop, City-State LLC; T.J. Kocak and Roger Claiborne, Pellissippi Investors LLC; Cindy and Michael Hollander, Innovative Design Inc.; Vicki Dyer and Wendi Arnold, Scientific Sales Inc.; Elizabeth Vacanti, ORNL; Beau Scherer, Scientific Sales Inc.; Barry Stephenson, Materials and Chemistry Laboratory Inc. (MCLinc); Gabe Beck, City State LLC; Debbie Pohanka, Scientific Sales Inc.; and Brittany Voigt, Innovative Design LLC. (Photo courtesy ORNL)

 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory recognized local and regional companies with annual Small Business Impact Awards on March 27 at the weekly meeting of the East Tennessee Economic Council in Oak Ridge.

The companies were honored in categories emphasizing their specific capabilities.

The Above and Beyond Award went to the small business Pellissippi Investors LLC. The company is the landlord for ORNL’s National Transportation Resource Centers I and II, which house several highly advanced research laboratories. Pellissippi Investors was instrumental in ensuring that tenant improvements to the facilities were executed properly despite demanding research schedules and tight budgets.

The Innovator Award was given to Materials and Chemistry Laboratory, or MCLinc. This commercial applied research firm is a small business located in Oak Ridge. MCLinc developed a unique method used for the analysis of filters from the cooling system at the Spallation Neutron Source, despite a challenging analytical scenario. [Read more…]

ORNL-led team demonstrates desalination with graphene membrane

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Nature Nanotech Pores

Researchers created nanopores in graphene (red, and enlarged in the circle to highlight its honeycomb structure) that are stabilized with silicon atoms (yellow) and showed their porous membrane could desalinate seawater. Orange represents a non-graphene residual polymer. (Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

 

By Dawn Levy

Less than 1 percent of Earth’s water is drinkable. Removing salt and other minerals from our biggest available source of water—seawater—may help satisfy a growing global population thirsty for fresh water for drinking, farming, transportation, heating, cooling, and industry. But desalination is an energy-intensive process, which concerns those wanting to expand its application.

Now, a team of experimentalists led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has demonstrated an energy-efficient desalination technology that uses a porous membrane made of strong, slim graphene—a carbon honeycomb one atom thick. The results are published in the March 23 advance online issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

“Our work is a proof of principle that demonstrates how you can desalinate saltwater using free-standing, porous graphene,” said Shannon Mark Mahurin of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division, who co-led the study with Ivan Vlassiouk in ORNL’s Energy and Transportation Science Division.

“It’s a huge advance,” said Vlassiouk, pointing out a wealth of water travels through the porous graphene membrane. “The flux through the current graphene membranes was at least an order of magnitude higher than (that through) state-of-the-art reverse osmosis polymeric membranes.” [Read more…]

ORNL, Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics cooperate on salt-cooled reactors

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ORNL and SINAP Salt-cooled Test Reactors

Representatives from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) met at ORNL to discuss plans for building a salt-cooled test reactor. Pictured in front of ORNL’s molten salt test loop are (from left) David Felde, ORNL; Yang Zou, SINAP; Guanyuan Wu, SINAP; Xiaohan Yu, SINAP; Naxiu Wan, SINAP; Zhimin Dai, SINAP; David Holcomb, ORNL; Kun Chen, SINAP; Kevin Robb, ORNL; Mike Laufer, University of California at Berkeley; Guimin Liu, SINAP; and Weiju Ren, ORNL. (Photo courtesy ORNL)

 

Representatives from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics met at ORNL last week as part of an agreement between the two institutions to work together on the advancement of salt-cooled nuclear reactor technologies.

At the meeting, SINAP staff members were expected to describe their plans for building the first salt-cooled test reactor, and the two sides began planning the next steps in the shared research project.

The Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, or CRADA, between ORNL and SINAP focuses on accelerating scientific understanding and technical development of salt-cooled reactors, specifically fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactors, or FHRs. The project will draw on ORNL’s expertise in fuels, materials, instrumentation and controls, design concepts, and modeling and simulation for advanced reactors, as well as the lab’s experience in the design, construction and operation of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, the only molten salt reactor ever built. [Read more…]

ORNL’s Kalinin awarded Royal Microscopical Society medal

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Sergei Kalinin

With scanning probe microscopy, ORNL’s Sergei Kalinin explores nanoscale phenomena in new materials for energy and data storage to accelerate their discovery, design, and deployment. (Photo courtesy ORNL) 

 

Materials scientist Sergei Kalinin of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been awarded the inaugural Medal for Scanning Probe Microscopy, or SPM, by the Royal Microscopical Society, or RMS.

Kalinin is director of ORNL’s Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials, which melds capabilities in imaging, high-performance computing, and materials theory to guide the design of advanced materials for energy applications. He is also a theme leader at the  Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL, and an adjunct associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. [Read more…]

Science: ORNL researchers tune friction in ionic solids at the nanoscale

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Friction Release

Researchers used electricity and water to control friction levels on ionic surfaces at the nanoscale. As water forms around the nanoscale electrode, it allows for further penetration into the sample surface, thereby increasing or decreasing friction. (Image courtesy ORNL)

Friction impacts motion, hence the need to control friction forces. Currently, this is accomplished by mechanistic means or lubrication, but experiments conducted by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have uncovered a way of controlling friction on ionic surfaces at the nanoscale using electrical stimulation and ambient water vapor.

The research, which demonstrates a new physical effect, was undertaken at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL, and is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Our finding can have a significant technological impact on applications for both macroscopic and nanoscale devices,” said lead author Evgheni Strelcov. “Decreasing or increasing nanoscale friction at will and thus controlling mechanical energy losses and wear of a microelectromechanical system’s parts has enormous implications for applied energy research and opens a new vista for fundamental science studies.” [Read more…]

ORNL model explores location of future U.S. population growth

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ORNL Population Map

This 3-D visualization represents projected changes in U.S. population between 2010 and 2050 as predicted by a new Oak Ridge National Laboratory model. Areas seen in red indicate higher levels of population growth, whereas the vertical spikes signify population growth with new land development. (Image courtesy ORNL)

 

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a population distribution model that provides unprecedented county-level predictions of where people will live in the United States in the coming decades.

Initially developed to assist in the siting of new energy infrastructure, the team’s model has a broad range of implications from urban planning to climate change adaptation. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We do a census every 10 years because those data help us do long-term socioeconomic planning,” said Budhendra Bhaduri, who leads ORNL’s Geographic Information Science and Technology group. “Population projection numbers are important, but many pressing societal needs also require an understanding of where people are going to be. This has always been a challenge; we’ve never had a good method to make future projections spatially explicit.” [Read more…]