Feature Articles

Fengqui "Frank" Li is a computational developer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who uses his background in architecture and interest in crosscutting research to pursue a landscape of ideas related to building energy usage and urban systems.

Since 2019, a team of NASA scientists and their partners have been using NASA’s FUN3D software on supercomputers located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or OLCF, to conduct computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, simulations of a human-scale Mars lander. The team’s ongoing research project is a first step in determining how to safely land a vehicle with humans onboard onto the surface of Mars.

Some of the ORNL AGU23 attendees share their thoughts on this year’s meeting and how they’re looking at the future of geophysical sciences in their areas.

Chelsea Chen, a polymer physicist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is studying ion transport in solid electrolytes that could help electric vehicle battery charges last longer. “The challenge with current EVs is to further increase driving range, and that means higher energy density,” said Chen. “This requires revolutionary design of the battery chemistry.”

A modeling analysis led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory gives the first detailed look at how geothermal energy can relieve the electric power system and reduce carbon emissions if widely implemented across the United States within the next few decades.

Researchers at the Statewide California Earthquake Center, or SCEC, are unraveling the mysteries of earthquakes by using physics-based computational models running on high-performance computing systems at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team’s findings will provide a better understanding of seismic hazards in the Golden State. 

Research led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Marti Checa and Liam Collins has pioneered a groundbreaking approach, described in the journal Nature Communications, toward understanding the behavior of an electric charge at the microscopic level. 

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are looking for a happy medium to enable the grid of the future, filling a gap between high and low voltages for power electronics technology that underpins the modern U.S. electric grid.

Scientists at ORNL have developed a technique for recovering and recycling critical materials that has garnered special recognition from a peer-reviewed materials journal and received a new phase of funding for research and development.