A dozen clean energy technologies that enable everything from lightweight, fuel-sipping cars to the expansion of renewable energy and cleaner fossil fuel use are getting a boost at PNNL, thanks to $4.4 million from DOE’s Technology Commercialization Fund.
Nanorods created by PNNL researchers have an unusual property – spontaneously emitting water. After further development, the nanorods could be used for water harvesting and purification, or sweat-gathering fabric.
Researchers are investigating a new material that might help in nuclear fuel recycling and waste reduction by capturing certain gases released during reprocessing more efficiently than today’s technology. The metal-organic framework captures gases at ambient temperature, eliminating an energy-intensive step.
World-class chemist Liyuan Liang of Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been selected as the director of EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory – a Department of Energy user facility on the campus of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Scientists Janet Jansson and Ljiljana Paša-Tolić are part of a core group of scientists leading a national effort to understand communities of microorganisms and their role in climate science, food production and human health.
Learn how researchers assemble experimental batteries at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Advanced Battery Facility.
At the national labs, scientists have clarified the principles underlying basic catalysis science and resolved issues for biofuels, emission control, fuel cells, and more; a special issue of ACS Catalysis features the work from 10 labs, including PNNL
Researchers have used computer modeling to design these liquid materials so that they retain a low viscosity after sponging up carbon dioxide, based on a surprise they found in their explorations. Although the chemists still have to test the predicted liquid in the lab, being able to predict viscosity will help researchers find and design cheaper, more efficient carbon capture materials, they report in Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
About 250 of the world’s leading energy storage experts will gather May 24-26 at the Nine Energy Storage Symposium: Beyond Lithium Ion, where they will discuss the latest battery technologies.
Scientists made a "stop action movie" of tiny ice crystals melting and eventually wetting a platinum surface using a nanoscale technique they devised; the physics of wetting is crucial to making coatings for fibers or surfaces.
Three scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been selected to receive 2016 Early Career Research Program research grants from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Scientists have found that rain triggers the release of a mist of particles from wet soils into the air, a finding with consequences for how scientists model our planet’s climate and future. The evidence comes in the form of tiny glassy spheres, less than one-hundredth the width of a human hair, discovered in the Great Plains.
For the first time, scientists obtained an atomic view of two key processes in batteries as they are charged; this study offers new insights about the underlying principles involved in energy storage.
Hybrid batteries that charge faster than conventional ones could have significantly better electrical capacity and long-term stability when prepared with a gentle-sounding way of making electrodes. Called ion soft-landing, the high-precision technique resulted in electrodes that could store a third more energy and had twice the lifespan compared to those prepared by a conventional method, the researchers report today in Nature Communications.
An unexpected discovery has led to a zinc-manganese oxide rechargeable battery that’s as inexpensive as conventional car batteries, but has a much higher energy density.
Scientists now have access to a powerful new resource – a new 21 Tesla Ultra-High-Resolution Mass Spectrometer – to help them address pressing science challenges related to the environment, biology and energy.
Scientists have found evidence that rising river waters deliver a feast of carbon to hungry microbes where water meets land, triggering increased activity and altering the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Researchers hoping to design new materials for energy uses have developed a system to make synthetic polymers -- some would say plastics -- with the versatility of nature's own polymers, the ubiquitous proteins. Based on an inexpensive industrial chemical, these synthetic polymers might one day be used to create materials with functions as limitless as proteins, which are involved in every facet of life.
A salt plays a critical role in allowing lithium-sulfur batteries to hold a charge after more than 200 uses; this work offers needed design principles for creating long-lasting, high-capacity batteries.
For the first time, researchers have been able to see what makes this titanium alloy so strong - and then make it stronger.
Microbes in soil – organisms that exert enormous influence over our planet’s carbon cycle – may not be as adaptable to climate change as most scientists have presumed, according to the results of a 17-year “soil transplant” on a mountainside in eastern Washington.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will help three small businesses reduce the cost of hydropower, cut building energy use, and make adhesives from plants through new projects announced today by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Small Business Vouchers program.
Inexpensive materials called MOFs pull gases out of air or other mixed gas streams, but fail to do so with oxygen. Now, a team has overcome this limitation by creating a composite of a MOF and a helper molecule in which the two work in concert to separate oxygen from other gases simply and cheaply, they report in Advanced Materials.
Clouds are notoriously hard to simulate in computer programs that model climate. A new study in the Proceedings on the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition suggests why -- either clouds are more variable than scientists give them credit for, or those bright white clouds in the sky are much dirtier than scientists thought.
One of the world’s top particle accelerators has reached a milestone, achieving its “first turns” – circulating beams of particles for the first time. Japan’s SuperKEKB accelerator is at the forefront of the “intensity frontier” and is designed to deliver more than 40 times the rate of collisions between particles than its predecessor.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will manage the newly formed Lightweight Materials National Laboratory Consortium or LightMAT -- a network of nine national labs with technical capabilities that are relevant to lightweight materials development and use.
Allison Campbell and Louis Terminello have been selected as the inaugural associate laboratory directors of two recently created science directorates at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Software that helps cybersecurity analysts prevent hacks and a microbial disinfecting system that kills with an activated salt spray are two of the latest innovations Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has successfully commercialized with the help of business partners. The Federal Laboratory Consortium has honored the two teams with 2016 Excellence in Technology Transfer awards.
PNNL is helping to create open-access power grid datasets for use in testing new grid technologies.
Scientists have made a “vitamin mimic” – a molecule that looks and acts just like a natural vitamin to bacteria – that offers a new window into the inner workings of living microbes.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers get new opportunities to shape the country's power grid for the future.
Seashells and lobster claws are hard to break, but chalk is soft enough to draw on sidewalks. Though all three are made of calcium carbonate crystals, the hard materials include clumps of soft biological matter that make them much stronger. A study today in Nature Communications reveals how soft clumps get into crystals and endow them with remarkable strength.
Renewable energy can be stored for less with PNNL’s new organic aqueous flow battery, which uses inexpensive and readily available materials. The new battery is expected to cost about 60 percent less than today’s standard flow batteries.
Six scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are included in a new analysis of scientists whose work is cited most often by their peers. Their research is in disciplines where PNNL is highly regarded internationally – climate science, energy storage, materials science, and chemistry.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and its partners are developing a unique way to balance the increasingly complex power grid: an incentive-based coordination and control system for distributed energy devices such as rooftop solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.
In a study published in Science today, PNNL scientists and their colleagues show that nations’ pledges to reduce greenhouse gases have the potential to reduce the probability of the highest levels of warming, and increase the probability of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
PNNL and its partners are developing three new technologies to improve the power grid, make biofuel from seaweed and produce hydrogen with grants from DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.
The creation of a new kind of rice which gives off nearly zero greenhouse gas emissions during its growth has earned kudos for a team of scientists from three continents. The new kind of rice grows in a manner that nearly eliminates the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Technologies that impact cyber security, increase our ability to detect trace amounts of chemicals, convert sewage into fuel, view energy processes under real-world conditions and forecast future electric needs are among the newest R&D 100 award winners at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
In the quest for renewable fuels, scientists are taking lessons from a humble bacterium that fills our oceans and covers moist surfaces the world over. Cyanothece 51142, a type of bacteria also called blue-green algae, produces hydrogen in robust fashion, and scientists have found that it taps into an unexpected source of energy to do so.
Hot on the tail of this year's Nobel prize in physics, another prize came to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration -- the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The honor went to researchers -- six of whom are now at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory -- "for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics."
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Washington State University and the University of Washington are teaming develop and test transaction-based controls where buildings and equipment “speak” to each other to better manage energy use to save energy, money and be responsive to the needs of the power grid.
PNNL's data analytics capabilities and advanced computer modeling capabilities will support the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center.
A study published in Nature Communications suggests that the weather patterns known as El Nino and La Nina could lead to at least a doubling of extreme droughts and floods in California later this century.
A new memorandum of understanding between PNNL and Arizona State University formalizes the institutions' research collaboration on topics involving energy security, climate science and sustainability and other aspects of global security.
Malin M. Young, a biochemist with extensive experience leading bioenergy and national security research programs, has been named deputy director for science and technology at PNNL.
PNNL researchers and industry are now better equipped to tackle top challenges in grid modernization and buildings efficiency with the opening this week of the new Systems Engineering Building. The facility links real-time grid data, software platforms, specialized laboratories and advanced computing resources for the design and demonstration of new tools to modernize the grid and increase buildings energy efficiency.
PNNL has developed a new tool to forecast for future energy needs that is up to 50 percent more accurate than several commonly used industry tools, showing potential to save millions in wasted electricity. The advancement was selected a 'best paper' at the IEEE Power & Energy general meeting.
Using a climate model that can tag sources of soot and track where it lands, researchers have determined which areas around the Tibetan Plateau contribute the most soot -- and where. The model can also suggest the most effective way to reduce soot on the plateau, easing the amount of warming the region undergoes. The study, which appeared in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics in June, might help policy makers target pollution reduction efforts.
Rice is the staple food for more than half of the world’s population, but the paddies it’s grown in contributes up to 17 percent of global methane emissions -- about 100 million tons a year. Now, with the addition of a single gene, rice can be cultivated to emit virtually no methane, more starch for a richer food source and biomass for energy production, as announced in the July 30 edition of Nature and online.
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