Skip to main content
Default image of ORNL entry sign

Less than 1 percent of Earth’s water is drinkable. Removing salt and other minerals from our biggest available source of water—seawater—may help satisfy a growing global population thirsty for fresh water for drinking, farming, transportation, heating, cooling and industry. But desalination is an energy-intensive process, which concerns those wanting to expand its application.

Default image of ORNL entry sign

Graphene, a strong, lightweight carbon honeycombed structure that’s only one atom thick, holds great promise for energy research and development. Recently scientists with the Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures, and Transport (FIRST) Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC), led by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, revealed graphene can serve as a proton-selective permeable membrane, providing a new basis for streamlined and more efficient energy technologies such as improved fuel cells.

Default image of ORNL entry sign
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a population distribution model that provides unprecedented county-level predictions of where people will live in the U.S. in the coming decades.
ORNL Image
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has signed a contract with IBM to bring a next-generation supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
ORNL Image
Dr. Michael Simpson, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Corporate Fellow and Group Leader of the Nanofabrication Research Laboratory Group in the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at ORNL, has been appointed the next director of the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Biological Sciences (JIBS). This appointment is in addition to his role at CNMS.
ORNL Image

Knoxville-based Fiveworx has licensed an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology that will help consumers reduce their utility bills by analyzing their home energy usage.

ORNL Image

Treating cadmium-telluride (CdTe) solar cell materials with cadmium-chloride improves their efficiency, but researchers have not fully understood why.

ORNL Image

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville have pioneered a new technique for forming a two-dimensional, single-atom sheet of two different materials with a seamless boundary.

Default image of ORNL entry sign
Robert Wagner of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been chosen to receive the 2014 International Leadership Citation from the Society of Automotive Engineers.
ORNL Image
If scientists can control cellular functions such as movement and development, they can cripple cells and pathogens that are causing disease in the body.