Innovation Crossroads welcomes seven entrepreneurs for Cohort 2024
Partnerships at ORNL
Building partnerships that drive the economy, accelerate deployment of lab tech, and grow innovation ecosystems
Seven entrepreneurs comprise the next cohort of Innovation Crossroads a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program node based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory . The program provides energy-related startup founders from across the nation with access to ORNL’s unique scientific resources and capabilities, as well as connect them with experts, mentors and networks to accelerate their efforts to take their world-changing ideas to the marketplace. Read more
Researchers complete pilot commercialization coaching program
Five ORNL researchers recently completed an eight-week pilot commercialization coaching program as part of Safari, a program funded by the DOE Office of Technology Transitions . “The coaching program provides a critical first step to prepare our researchers to take advantage of DOE programs such as Energy I-Corps and to compete for funding from the Technology Commercialization Fund,” said Jennifer Caldwell , director of technology transfer at ORNL. Read more
Energy I-Corps steeps scientists in business, commercialization
Two ORNL teams participated in Cohort 18, which concluded in March, helping commercialize the fruits of their research. Read more
New ORNL inventions
202205168 // Manufacturing // Chemicals
ORNL has identified a panel of novel nylon hydrolases with varied substrate and product selectivity.
Inventors: Joshua Michener , Jack Cahill, Serena Chan, Vilmos Kertész ; Biology and Environmental Sciences at ORNL
202205221 // Materials //?Manufacturing
This technology aims to provide and integrated and oxidation resistant cladding or coating onto carbon-based composites in seconds.
Inventors: Corson Cramer , Trevor G. Aguirre , Christopher Ledford , Michael Kirka , James Klett , Steve Bullock, Beth Armstrong; Energy Science at ORNL and Physical Sciences at ORNL
202305269 // Energy and Utilities // Manufacturing
Additively manufacturing of the windings with a conductor distributed in the cross-section according to the Hilbert curve provides many benefits as it allows for the reduction of the high-frequency losses due to the reduction of the effective winding conductor size. This prevents induction of the eddy currents in the low and medium frequency range of the equivalent?winding resistance of the conductor and as a result, allows for an increase of the switching frequency of the power electronic converter or its power.
Inventors: Chris Fancher , Rafal Wojda, Ph.D. , Alexander Plotkowski , Shajjad Chowdhury ; Energy Science at ORNL
202305342 // Energy and Utilities?// Transportation
Knowing the state of charge of lithium-ion batteries, used to power applications from electric vehicles to medical diagnostic equipment, is critical for long-term battery operation. Existing methods to estimate the state of charge and health using a battery management system (BMS) are time consuming and require extra hardware. This technology is an ultrasonic nondestructive testing method to estimate the state of charge of Li-ion batteries using second harmonic generation for almost instant results.
Inventors: Pradeep Ramuhalli , Hongbin Sun , Ruhul Amin , Ilias Belharouak ; Energy Science at ORNL and Fusion and Fission at ORNL
202305411 //?Manufacturing // Materials
As additive manufacturing technologies advance and 3D printers get larger, there is a constant need for larger extruders with higher throughput to construct larger objects at reasonable time. Extruders can continually be made larger, but their weight requires stiffer and more expensive gantry systems or robots to carry and control them. Larger extruders also suffer from unreliable flow control at low speeds (<10% of maximum throughput),?which can be an issue for small builds and low speed printing operations. This technology uses multiple smaller extruders combined to multiplex the output into a single stream of molten polymer. While multiplexing helps improve the throughput without causing huge weight penalties, the use of smaller and less expensive extruders allows for easier flow rate control on small print jobs, as well as multi-material printability.
Inventors: Halil Tekinalp , Alex Roschli (AMUG??) , Jesse Heineman , Vipin Kumar , Soydan Ozcan , Brian Post , Paritosh Mhatre , Umesh Marathe ; Energy Science at ORNL
202305474 // Energy and Utilities
Performance of heat exchangers greatly suffers due to maldistribution of fluid, which also impacts the performance of the entire HVAC system. One method to reduce fluid maldistribution is to improve the design of the manifold to make the flow evenly distributed. But traditional manufacturing cannot create the complicated designs required for such manifolds. This technology utilizes additive manufacturing to fabricate manifold designs that reduce fluid maldistribution, which otherwise are impossible to fabricate.
Inventors: MINGKAN ZHANG , KAI LI , Kashif Nawaz ; Energy Science at ORNL
202305486 // Transportation //?Energy and Utilities
No readily available public data exists for vehicle class and weight information that covers the entire U.S. highway network. The Travel Monitoring Analysis System, managed by the Federal Highway Administration, covers only less than 1% of the U.S. highway network. This statistical method imputes vehicle class and weight distribution for every segment of the U.S. nationwide major truck highway network.?
Inventors: Adam Siekmann , Hyeonsup Lim , Vivek Sujan, PhD ; Energy Science at ORNL
202305540 // Analytical Instrumentation
Neutron beams are used around the world to study materials for various purposes. Materials samples that are examined using a neutron beam in academic research and for industrial uses must be manually and singly loaded into a cryogenic vessel in a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. This technology is a low-cost, belt-driven device that reduces and automates the menial task of manual single sample changeouts in a cryogenic system, providing an efficient and inexpensive method for sample changeout.
Inventors: John Wenzel, Mark Loguillo; Neutrons at ORNL
202405570 //?Energy and Utilities
An ORNL invention proposes using 3D printing to make conductors with space-filling thin-wall cross sections. Space-filling thin-wall profiles will maximize the conductor volume while restricting the path for eddy currents induction. The developed conductors will simultaneously achieve lower AC loss of Litz wire with good thermal performance and scalability of hairpin windings.
Inventors: Rafal Wojda, Ph.D. , Vandana Rallabandi , Praveen Kumar ; Energy Science at ORNL
202405604 //?Manufacturing // Materials
Materials produced via additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, can experience significant residual stress, distortion and cracking, negatively impacting the manufacturing process. The substrate, a base that supports the deposition of materials for printing, has a large impact on these variables. The substrate design and how it is clamped to the machine table can influence these problems. This technology largely solves that problem by using modeling and simulation to optimize the design of the substrate along with intentionally designed fixturing to balance all those factors.
Inventors: Brian Gibson , Jesse Heineman , Ritin Mathews , John Potter, JR Matheson; Energy Science at ORNL
202405605 //?Materials?// IT and Communications
Electrochemistry synthesis and characterization testing ?typically occurs manually at a research facility. This requires controlling instruments using custom graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and collecting measurements and transferring them to specialized computing workstations for analysis. This in turn affects the tempo and accuracy due to the limits of manual experiment repetition. This technology consists of design and development of hardware and software to support autonomous chemistry workflow, real-time measurement transfer, and analysis on remote high-performance computing systems across an ecosystem of computing and instrument platforms, thereby reducing or eliminating many of the challenges of manual testing.
Inventors: Nageswara (Nagi) Rao , Anees Al-Najjar , Craig Bridges , Sheng Dai; Computing at ORNL and Physical Sciences at ORNL
202405610 //?Energy and Utilities?//?Materials
An ORNL design?aims to leverage the advantages of CO2 solubility and selectivity offered by materials with selective sorption of adsorbents. This hybrid system was used in the direct air capture of CO2 by the aqueous phase as probed by various techniques. The improved CO2 capture observed is attributed to the high solubility for CO2, thus serving as a concentration stage that ultimately enhances the transport to the aqueous phase via chemical gradients. Additionally, the introduction of a phase can reduce interfacial barriers and influence the distribution at the polymer-aqueous interface. These three effects lead to the enhancement in CO2 capture by the aqueous phase. The current study provides important model design, which could have significant implications for developing DAC as a negative emissions technology.
Inventors: vera bocharova , Benjamin Doughty, Santanu Roy , Uvinduni Premadasa ; Physical Sciences at ORNL
领英推荐
202405621 //?Materials //?Manufacturing
ORNL has developed enzymatic routes to synthesize amide oligomers with defined sequence for polymerization into new materials.
Inventors: Joshua Michener , Jeff Foster , Liangyu Qian , Isaiah Dishner ; Biology and Environmental Sciences at ORNL and Physical Sciences at ORNL
202405625 // Healthcare and Biology // Detectors and Sensors
Detection of gene expression in plants is critical for understanding the molecular basis of plant physiology and plant responses to drought, stress, climate change, microbes, insects and other factors. Current technologies for RNA analysis all require destructive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming measurements. This biosensor is a transformative method for in-vivo detection of RNAs in plants that does not destroy the sample and enables the design of plant-based biosensors for monitoring plant response’s stressors that can be seen by the naked eye or with a microscope.
Inventors: Yang Liu, Gerald Tuskan, Ilenne Del Valle , Paul Abraham , Xiaohan Yang; Biology and Environmental Sciences at ORNL
202405628 //?Energy and Utilities
Water heaters and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems collectively consume about 58% of home energy use. Managing these systems is crucial for managing peak demand, carbon emission, energy consumption, electricity price and integrating distributed renewables into older grid systems. However, model forecasts lack anomaly detection systems which are essential for efficient use of devices as they can allow to study the behavior of the model, improve forecasting load accuracy, and implement error correction schemes. This technology is an autonomous system that can perform data curation, data cleaning, conduct error analysis, and detect anomalies of model forecasts of HVAC and water heater systems.
Inventors: Viswadeep Lebakula , Eve Tsybina; National Security Sciences at ORNL and Energy Science at ORNL
202405631 //?Analytical Instrumentation
Pyrolysis evolved gas analysis – mass spectrometry (EGA-MS) and pyrolysis gas chromatography – MS (GC-MS) – are powerful analytical tools for polymer characterization. However, to obtain both EGA-MS and GC-MS data two separate experiments must be performed requiring twice the amount of sample, and an exchange of columns between experiments. This leads to significant down time between experiments and a disconnect between the thermal profile from EGA-MS and detected products from GC-MS. This technology solves these problems by running EGA-MS and GC-MS in tandem from the gas stream of a single pyrolysis experiment providing both data sets for one sample.
Inventors: Derek Dwyer ; National Security Sciences at ORNL
With the ever-increasing problem of plastic waste, several avenues to decrease plastic use and manage waste introduced by disposable plastic products have arisen. Because of the highly tunable properties of plastics and polymeric materials, the desire for circularity within the plastic industry has been quickly gaining popularity. Vitrimers, or polymer networks crosslinked with dynamic bonds, are of great interest due to their thermal processibility and chemical recyclability. After use, vitrimer materials can either be thermally upcycled into new materials, or chemically degraded back to starting materials for use in new plastic goods. These properties allow for used vitrimer products to be reintegrated into the plastic cycle and used in new materials with little concessions made. Furthermore, because of their high chemical recyclability, one vitrimer material with a given set of thermal and mechanical properties can be reconstituted with a new crosslinker to fine tune the polymer network to its new application. While some vitrimer materials are being synthesized with new starting materials, converting already existing plastic waste into vitrimer could help both reduce plastic waste and establish plastic circularity within consumer markets.
Inventor: Mary Danielson ; Physical Sciences at ORNL
202405642 //?Energy and Utilities?//?Materials
Mineral looping is a promising method for direct air capture of CO2. However, reduction of sorbent reactivity after each loop is likely to be significant problem for mineral looping by MgO. This invention provides a rapid pretreatment of MgO in each loop that increases the surface area of the sorbent, and thus the rate of CO2 capture and the longevity of the sorbent.
Inventor: Larry Anovitz ; Physical Sciences at ORNL
202405644 //?Analytical Instrumentation?//?Detectors and Sensors
Distortion in scanning tunneling microscope (STM) images is an unavoidable problem. This technology is an algorithm to identify and correct distorted wavefronts in atomic resolution STM images. This algorithm can be used to correct nonlinear in-plane distortions without prior knowledge of the physical scanning parameters, the characteristics of the piezoelectric actuator, or individual atom positions.
Inventors: Hoyeon Jeon, Saban Hus , Jewook Park , An-Ping Li ; Physical Sciences at ORNL
202405648 //?Energy and Utilities?//?Chemicals
Hydrogen is in great demand, but production relies heavily on hydrocarbons utilization. This process contributes greenhouse gases release into the atmosphere. Each kilogram of hydrogen produced creates approximately 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide, but most of it is not being captured. This technology is a cleaner way to make hydrogen through water electrolysis using designed electrocatalysts, with a focus on oxygen evolution as well targeting for hydrogen, using renewable solar, wind or tidal energy.?
Inventors: Alexey Serov , Xiang Lyu; Energy Science at ORNL
202405650 //?Energy and Utilities?//?Healthcare and Biology
Simulation cloning is a technique in which dynamically cloned simulations’ state spaces differ from their parent simulation due to intervening events. It is a powerful method to carry out what-if analysis by exploring and evaluating the impact of various permutations of intervening events. This technology is a novel, simulation cloning framework that executes a simulation cloning campaign capable of efficiently exploring an exponentially large space of clone simulations created by permutation of intervening events under a finite memory constraint.
Inventors: Srikanth Yoginath , Sudip Seal , James Nutaro , Pratishtha Shukla ; Computing at ORNL
202405652 //?Energy and Utilities
A novel approach is presented herein to improve time to onset of natural convection stemming from fuel element porosity during a failure mode of a nuclear reactor.
Inventors: Prashant Jain , Nathan See ; Fusion and Fission at ORNL
202405654 // IT and Communications?//?Detectors and Sensors
Technologies are described directed to all-fiber automatic polarization compensation using ultra-sensitive detection of coexisting dim reference signals.
Inventor: Joseph Chapman ; Computing at ORNL
202405667 //?Energy and Utilities?//?Detectors and Sensors
Faults in the power grid cause many problems that can result in catastrophic failures. Real-time fault detection in the power grid system is crucial to sustain the power systems' reliability, stability, and quality. However, conventional fault detection systems are vulnerable and do not work on real-world data. This technology is an envelope-detector-based phase fault detection algorithm that can accurately identify the fault region compared to conventional methods.
Inventors: Ozgur Alaca , Ali R?za Ekti , Aaron Wilson, PhD , Elizabeth Piersall , Isabelle Snyder , Nils Markus Stenvig ; Energy Science at ORNL
202405669 //?Energy and Utilities //?Manufacturing
The heat exchanger is a three-medium heat exchanger with phase change material (PCM) stored in the external fin tubes. It allows the refrigerant flowing inside the internal fin tubes and the air to pass through the external fin side. the PCM can exchange heat with either air or refrigerant based on the system operation.
Inventors: Kashif Nawaz , Pengtao Wang , Troy Seay ; Energy Science at ORNL
To learn more about these technologies, email [email protected] or call 865-574-1051.
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