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ORNL researcher Xiaobing Liu  works in the laboratory’s Building Technologies Research and Integration Center.

As a boy growing up in China, Xiaobing Liu knew all about Oak Ridge and the World War II Manhattan Project. He had no idea that he would one day work at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Secret City’s successor. Liu is a lead researcher in geothermal heat pump (GHP) techn...

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have produced the next generation of the National Hydropower Map – a visualization tool that provides updated statistics on overall capacity and performance on the nation’s hydropower fleet. The map is part of the lab’s National Hydropower ...
Superhydrophobic water droplets
Samsung Electronics has exclusively licensed optically clear superhydrophobic film technology from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to improve the performance of glass displays on smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices. O...
ORNL’s Michael Manley led a study to discover the key to the success of modern materials used in ultrasound machines and other piezoelectric devices.

The lighter wand for your gas BBQ, a submarine’s sonar device and the ultrasound machine at your doctor’s office all rely on piezoelectric materials, which turn mechanical stress into electrical energy, and vice versa. In 1997, researchers developed piezoelectric...

To direct-write the logo of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists started with a gray-scale image.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are the first to harness a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) to directly write tiny patterns in metallic “ink,” forming features in liquid that are finer than half the width of a hum...
Paul Kent of Oak Ridge National Laboratory directs the Center for Predictive Simulation of Functional Materials.

The US Department of Energy announced today that it will invest $16 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers. 

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...
ORNL’s Huiyuan Zhu places a sample of boron nitride, or “white graphene,” into a furnace as part of a novel, nontoxic gas exfoliation process to separate 2D nanomaterials.
A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a novel way to produce two-dimensional nanosheets by separating bulk materials with nontoxic liquid nitrogen. The environmentally friendly process generates a 20-fold ...
After running a simulation proving calcium-48 was a magic isotope, ORNL researchers were surprised to find experimental data and simulations that suggested calcium-52 was not magic, as expected.
​A multi-institution team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Gaute Hagen used computation to corroborate experimental findings throwing calcium-52’s status as a magic isotope into question.
A 3-D printed table was manufactured using 10 percent bamboo fiber, an initial step toward sustainable practices using bio-derived materials
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are using bamboo fiber in 3-D printing experiments to determine whether bio-based feedstock materials are feasible in additive manufacturing.