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Automated calibration software for building efficiency studies, developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers Jibonananda Sanyal (left) and Joshua New, is now available as an open source code.
There are many ways to save energy in residential and commercial buildings. There are products that use less energy for lighting, heating and cooling; materials that better insulate and seal building envelopes; and architectural and engineering designs that lower utility bills through efficient use of space and renewable energy.
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Complex oxides have long tantalized the materials science community for their promise in next-generation energy and information technologies. Complex oxide crystals combine oxygen atoms with assorted metals to produce unusual and very desirable properties.
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If you were to do an internet search for what causes engine knock, you’d receive a number of answers. Ramanan Sankaran—a scientific computing specialist at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and joint faculty member at the University of Tennessee—wants to take Titan through the fuel lines to help identify the right one.
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When Orlando Rios first started analyzing samples of carbon fibers made from a woody plant polymer known as lignin, he noticed something unusual. The material’s microstructure -- a mixture of perfectly spherical nanoscale crystallites distributed within a fibrous matrix -- looked almost too good to be true.
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Blowing bubbles may be fun for kids, but for engineers, bubbles can disrupt fluid flow and damage metal.
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Traditional science and business are coming together in a way that Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education student Beth Papanek believes will help graduates advance their careers.
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A new concept in metallic alloy design – called “high-entropy alloys” - has yielded a multiple-element material that not only tests out as one of the toughest on record, but, unlike most materials, the toughness as well as the strength and ductility

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Keeping food fresh is no easy feat. Trials of transporting ice over long distances and the hazards of systems that rely on toxic gases riddle the pages of refrigeration history. And although cooling science has come a long way in the past two centuries, modern refrigeration has an environmental cost...
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Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory got a surprise when they built a highly ordered lattice by layering thin films containing lanthanum, strontium, oxygen and iron. Although each layer had an intrinsically nonpolar (symmetric) distribution of electrical charges, the lattice had an asymmetric distribution of charges. The charge asymmetry creates an extra “switch” that brings new functionalities to materials when “flipped” by external stimuli such as electric fields or mechanical strain. This makes polar materials useful for devices such as sensors and actuators.
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Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered they can control chemical reactions in a new way by creating different shapes of cerium oxide, a rare-earth-based catalyst.