News By Location

Employees of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory contributed over $828,000 to local nonprofits through the lab’s employee giving programs in 2023. ORNL’s managing contractor, UT-Battelle, provided an additional $139,600 in support of employee efforts.

In addition, ORNL employees recorded over 1,497 volunteer hours, serving 56 nonprofits. With the value of these volunteer hours estimated at $36,232, total employee-led contributions for 2023 were valued at more than $1 million.

Building on $180 million in joint energy-related research, EPB and Oak Ridge National Laboratory marked 10 years of collaboration Friday with the announcement of the new Collaborative for Energy Resilience and Quantum Science, or CERQS.

The new joint research effort will focus on utilizing Chattanooga’s highly advanced and integrated energy and communications infrastructure to develop technologies and best practices for enhancing the resilience and security of the national power grid while accelerating the commercialization of quantum technologies. 

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are using a new modeling framework in conjunction with data collected from marshes in the Mississippi Delta to improve predictions of climate-warming methane and nitrous oxide emissions from soils in coastal ecosystems. 

Researchers, staff members and licensees from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory received top honors in the Federal Laboratory Consortium’s annual awards competition for excellence in technology transfer, excellence in technology transfer innovation, outstanding researcher and regional technology transfer.

Corning Incorporated, a manufacturer of innovative glass, ceramics and related materials, invests a tremendous amount of resources into studying the stability of different types of glass. Recently, Corning researchers found that understanding the stability of the rings of atoms in glass materials can help them predict the performance of glass products. This capability is important because the most widely used glass is silicate glass, which consists of different sizes of atomic rings connected in three dimensions.

Conducting neutron scattering experiments at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL and Corning scientists discovered that as the number of smaller, less-stable atomic rings in a glass increases, the instability, or liquid fragility, of the glass also increases. The results of the neutron experiments, published in Nature Communications, reveal a clear correlation between the medium-range atomic ring structure of a silicate glass and its liquid fragility. The viscosity of the liquid glass changes considerably when it is cooled to the glass transition temperature. A more fragile liquid will have a larger viscosity change with a given temperature change.

Researchers demonstrated that stainless steel and other metal alloys coated with hexagonal boron nitride, or hBN, exhibit non-stick or low-friction qualities along with improved long-term protection against harsh corrosion and high-temperature oxidation in air.

A new computational framework created by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers is accelerating their understanding of who’s in, who’s out, who’s hot and who’s not in the soil microbiome, where fungi often act as bodyguards for plants, keeping friends close and foes at bay.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has named Robert Wagner associate laboratory director for the Energy Science and Technology Directorate, effective Feb. 1.

Scientists at ORNL have developed a technique for recovering and recycling critical materials that has garnered special recognition from a peer-reviewed materials journal and received a new phase of funding for research and development.

The Department of Energy’s latest Fuel Economy Guide includes 2024 model vehicle fuel efficiency data compiled by ORNL researchers, as well as a tool for mapping the most economical driving route.