Groundwater withdrawals are expected to peak in about one-third of the world’s basins by 2050, potentially triggering significant trade and agriculture shifts, a new analysis finds.
An international team using neutrons set the first benchmark (one nanosecond) for a polymer-electrolyte and lithium-salt mixture. Findings could produce safer, more powerful lithium batteries.
ORNL climate modeling expertise contributed to a project that assessed global emissions of ammonia from croplands now and in a warmer future, while also identifying solutions tuned to local growing conditions.
ORNL researchers have developed a novel way to encapsulate salt hydrate phase-change materials within polymer fibers through a coaxial pulling process. The discovery could lead to the widespread use of the low-carbon materials as a source of insulation for a building’s envelope.
ORNL researchers demonstrated that an additive made from polymers and electrolytes improves the thermal performance and stability of salt hydrate phase change materials, or PCMs, a finding that could advance their integration into carbon-reducing heat pumps.
Almost 80% of plastic in the waste stream ends up in landfills or accumulates in the environment. Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have developed a technology that converts a conventionally unrecyclable mixture of plastic waste into useful chemicals, presenting a new strategy in the toolkit to combat global plastic waste.
An advance in a topological insulator material — whose interior behaves like an electrical insulator but whose surface behaves like a conductor — could revolutionize the fields of next-generation electronics and quantum computing, according to scientists at ORNL.
Scientists at ORNL developed a competitive, eco-friendly alternative made without harmful blowing agents.
A tool developed by ORNL researchers gives building owners and equipment manufacturers and installers an easy way to calculate the cost savings of a heating and cooling system that utilizes geothermal energy and emits no carbon.
Warming a crystal of the mineral fresnoite, ORNL scientists discovered that excitations called phasons carried heat three times farther and faster than phonons, the excitations that usually carry heat through a material.