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ORNL’s tough new plastic is made with 50 percent renewable content from biomass. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy; conceptual art by Mark Robbins
Your car’s bumper is probably made of a moldable thermoplastic polymer called ABS, shorthand for its acrylonitrile, butadiene and styrene components. Light, strong and tough, it is also the stuff of ventilation pipes, protective headgear, kitchen appliances, Lego bri...
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When lots of energy hits an atom, it can knock off electrons, making the atom extremely chemically reactive and initiating further destruction. That’s why radiation is so dangerous. It’s also why high-resolution imaging techniques that use energetic electron beams ...
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Two-dimensional electronic devices could inch closer to their ultimate promise of low power, high efficiency and mechanical flexibility with a processing technique developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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Experts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will help nine small companies move their innovative manufacturing, buildings, fuel cell, geothermal and vehicle technologies closer to the marketplace. The businesses are among 33 selected t...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers re-evaluated used nuclear fuel rods from a commercial reactor and reduced data uncertainties by an order of magnitude compared with previous measurements taken at a different lab.

Nearly 100 commercial nuclear reactors supply one-fifth of America’s energy. For each fuel rod in a reactor assembly, only 5 percent of its energy is consumed before fission can no longer be sustained efficiently for power production and the fuel assembly must be replaced. Power plan...

ORNL’s Jim Keiser and Mike Stephens (on stepladder) prepare to install samples in a Keiser rig, a furnace for exposing materials to corrosive gases, crushing pressures and calamitous heat. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy;
The global marketplace demands constant improvements in performance and efficiency of aircraft engines, power turbines and other modern mainstays of energy technology. This progress requires advanced structural materials, such as ceramic composites and metal alloys with higher-t...
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Three U.S. Department of Energy-funded research centers – the BioEnergy Science Center (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (University of Wisconsin–Madison and Michigan State University), and the Joint BioEnergy Institute (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) – are making progress on a shared mission to develop technologies that will bring advanced biofuels to the marketplace, reporting today the disclosure of their 500th invention.

In pure water, lignin adopts a globular conformation (left) that aggregates on cellulose and blocks enzymes. In a THF-water cosolvent, lignin adopts coil conformations that are easier to remove during pretreatment. (ORNL image)
Breaking down cellulosic biomass for biofuel is a costly and complex process, requiring lots of acid, water, and heat. Experimental pretreatments, however, hold the promise of driving down these costs by making more biomass available to enzymes for fermentation. To gain a better...
A new app developed at ORNL makes fuel economy and other information more readily accessible to car buyers.

Fuel economy data, sticker price, emissions information, safety ratings and much more is available at your fingertips with the latest Find-a-Car tool, an app designed specifically for easy searches on mobile devices. FuelEconomy.gov, maintained by the Department of Energy with d...

This prototype heat pump installed at the Ohio field test site in January 2015 produced savings of more than 40 percent compared to the baseline heat pump.

People in cold climates who heat with electricity could realize savings of up to 70 percent with a new heat pump developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Emerson Climate Technologies. The tandem compressor system, developed through a cooperative research and development ag...