News By Location

The United States could triple its current bioeconomy by producing more than 1 billion tons per year of plant-based biomass for renewable fuels, while meeting projected demands for food, feed, fiber, conventional forest products and exports, according to the Department of Energy’s latest Billion-Ton Report led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

A team of researchers at ORNL demonstrated that a light-duty passenger electric vehicle can be wirelessly charged at 100-kW with 96% efficiency using polyphase electromagnetic coupling coils with rotating magnetic fields.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are taking cleaner transportation to the skies by creating and evaluating new batteries for airborne electric vehicles that take off and land vertically. Researchers are developing new energy-dense materials, learning how these materials degrade under extreme conditions, and developing battery control systems.

Collaborative research that combined experiments at Yale University and molecular dynamics simulations at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory provides new insights into solving a major technical obstacle to efficient and sustainable industrial operations.

For kids in underserved communities, access to STEM experiences does not come as a given. Candice Halbert, YO-STEM founder and chemist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is working to change this. Halbert devotes her time outside the lab to building STEM opportunities for youth in nearby communities.

YO-STEM, or Youth Outreach in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, has served the local community for seven years, and this marks year three for its competitive co-ed robotics teams. Currently, YO-STEM robotics teams, Radium and Gr8ness, rank 16 and 17 out of 145 teams in Tennessee registered for the middle-school robotics competition hosted by VEX on March 8 and 9 in Hendersonville, Tenn. The two teams are also the only Knox County teams in the state’s top 20 for this robotics competition. 

Fengqui "Frank" Li is a computational developer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who uses his background in architecture and interest in crosscutting research to pursue a landscape of ideas related to building energy usage and urban systems.

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, or OLCF, to conduct computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, 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.

Though artificial intelligence decreases human error in experimentation, human experts outperform AI when identifying causation or working with small data sets. 

To capitalize on AI and researcher strengths, ORNL scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, developed a human-AI collaboration recommender system for improved experimentation performance. 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s managing contractor, UT-Battelle, presented a donation of $186,000 to Socially Equal Energy Efficient Development, or SEEED, to support the nonprofit’s third green solar home as part of their Green Construction Program. 

Some of the ORNL AGU23 attendees share their thoughts on this year’s meeting and how they’re looking at the future of geophysical sciences in their areas.