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Diana Hun likes ORNL's state-of-the-art facilities and range of expertise.

When Diana Hun left her home in Panama City, Panama, to attend school at the University of Texas in Austin, she knew she wanted to be an engineer. Exactly which branch of engineering to pursue was not quite as straight-forward. Hun studied both mechanical and electrical engin...

Cristian I. Contescu
The American Carbon Society recently recognized Cristian I. Contescu, a researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as the 2015-2016 George D. Graffin Lecturer. Contescu, a senior staff scientist in ORNL's Materials Science and Technolo...
Nidia C. Gallego
Nidia C. Gallego, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected fellow of the American Carbon Society. Gallego leads the Graphite Development and Performance team in the Materials Science and Technology Division. The fe...
Theoretical condensed matter physicist Cristian Batista brings advanced knowledge of theory to expand upon the experimental physics research conducted at ORNL. (Image credit: Genevieve Martin)
Theory and experiment push each other to expand the frontiers of physics. Now, the Neutron Sciences Directorate at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has both. Cristian Batista, a theoretical condensed matter physicist with a joint appointment at ORNL and th...
A 32-face 3-D truncated icosahedron mesh was created to test the simulation’s ability to precisely construct complex geometries.
Designing a 3-D printed structure is hard enough when the product is inches or feet in size. Imagine shrinking it smaller than a drop of water, smaller even than a human hair, until it is dwarfed by a common bacterium. This impossibly small structure can be made a reality with fo...
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s PenDoc makes sampling the surface of a strawberry for pesticides, for example, quick and easy.
Mass spectrometry and direct sampling come together in a powerful way with a new technology that can identify a material in mere seconds. PenDoc, invented by Gary Van Berkel and Vilmos Kertesz of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, could help in drug discovery, medical diagnostics, food ...
By wet-sieving stream sediment, (from left) Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Kenneth Lowe, Melanie Mayes and John Dickson sort sediment into different particle size in this stream near Rocky Top.

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study is providing an unprecedented watershed-scale understanding of mercury in soils and sediments. Researchers focused on evaluating mercury and soil properties along the banks of a mercury-contaminated stream in Oak Ridge, Tenn., sampling 145 loca...

The SaltX heating system offers better efficiency than today’s best furnaces and a potential payback of just three to four years.

Salt and ammonia are key ingredients of a high-efficiency natural gas-fired heat pump system being developed by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rheem and ClimateWell. Potentially, the SaltX system could provide 43 percent greater efficiency than today’s best furn...

Melanie Debusk collects soot samples from a reactivity controlled compression ignition engine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s National Transportation Research Center.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are taking a closer look at previously uncharacterized, microscopic soot particles collected during lab experiments on light-duty, multi-cylinder advanced combustion engines. The ORNL-led team is widely known for advancing a combustion te...

A 90-kilogram 430-bar prototype of the steel-concrete composite vessel has been manufactured, and is undergoing fatigue testing.
A stationary vessel developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers Zhili Feng and Yanli Wang could be the key to less expensive hydrogen storage, making it possible for more hydrogen-powered vehicles to hit the road in the near future. Feng and Wang have designed a...