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Story tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, December 2019

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

ORNL story tips: An additively manufactured polymer layer applied to specialized plastic proved effective to protect aircraft from lightning strikes in lab test; injecting shattered argon pellets into a super-hot plasma, when needed, could protect a fusion reactor's interior wall from runaway electrons; ORNL will celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Liane Russell on December 20.

Journal: Composites Science and Technology
Funder: Advanced Manufacturing Office, DOE/US Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

3D printing improves tiny electrodes for medical sensors

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A new 3D-printing method allows manufacturers to better customize carbon microelectrodes used as biomedical implants. These implants are used to record signals from the brain or nervous system.

New study analyzes viability of sustainable fuels developed through ORNL process

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A technology developed at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and scaled up by Vertimass LLC to convert ethanol into fuels suitable for aviation, shipping and other heavy-duty applications can be price-competitive with conventional fuels while retaining the sustainability benefits of bio-based ethanol, according to a new analysis.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Funder: Center for BIoenergy Innovation, US Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Vertimass LLC, US Department of Energy's Office of Science

New material captures and converts toxic air pollutant into industrial chemical

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A team led by the University of Manchester has developed a metal-organic framework material providing a selective, reversible and repeatable capability to capture a toxic air pollutant, nitrogen dioxide, which is produced by combusting fossil fuels. The material then requires only water and air to convert the captured gas into nitric acid for industrial use. The gas uptake mechanism was characterized by researchers using neutron scattering at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Journal: Nature Chemistry
Funder: University Of Manchester, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy's Office of Science

High school students' data science contributions boost biomineralization research

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Two high school students developed software to analyze images of diatoms--algae that produce silicon for constructing cell walls--to determine the differences between wild and genetically modified strains of these organisms. This work was instrumental to a research team interested in optimizing diatoms for biomineralization, the process of making materials from biological systems.

A four-way switch promises greater tunability of layered materials

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A scientific team from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University has made the first experimental observation of a material phase that had been predicted but never seen. The newly discovered phase couples with a known phase to enable unique control over material properties -- an advance that paves the way to eventual manipulation of electrical conduction in two-dimensional materials such as graphene.

Journal: Nature Materials
Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program

In its 15th year, INCITE advances open science with supercomputer grants to 47 projects

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Grant and Award Announcement

The US Department of Energy's Office of Science announced allocations of supercomputer access to 47 science projects for 2020 -- awarding 60 percent of the available time on some of the nation's most powerful supercomputers, with the ultimate goal of accelerating discovery and innovation. In 2020, 14 projects will run on Theta and 39 projects on Summit, where six of these projects will receive an allocation on both systems.

Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science

AI for plant breeding in an ever-changing climate

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Dan Jacobson is currently working on numerous projects that form an integrated roadmap for the future of AI in plant breeding and bioenergy. The team's work was featured in Trends in Biotechnology in October. In this Q&A, Jacobson talks about his team's work on a genomic selection algorithm, his vision for the future of environmental genomics, and the space where simulation meets AI.

A New Parallel Strategy for Tackling Turbulence on Summit

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A Georgia Tech team developed an algorithm for simulating turbulence on Summit, the world's most powerful and smartest supercomputer. The team distributed the problem in such a way that the algorithm reached a performance of less than 15 seconds of wall-clock time per time step for more than 6 trillion grid points--a new world record surpassing the prior state of the art in the field for the size of the problem.

Can a UNICORN outrun earthquakes?

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A University of Tokyo Team transformed its UNICORN computing code into an AI-like algorithm to more quickly simulate tectonic plate deformation due to a phenomenon called a "fault slip," a sudden shift that occurs at the plate boundary. The team ran UNICORN at 416 petaflops and gained a 75-fold speedup from a previous state-of-the-art solver by fully leveraging the world's most powerful and smartest supercomputer, the IBM AC922 Summit.

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