Hubs, Centers, and Institutes

Night view of the Joint Institute for Biological Sciences, which houses BioEnergy Science Center offices and laboratories

ORNL is home to—and a partner in—a number of Hubs, Centers, and Institutes.  The laboratory is home to the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) Energy Innovation Hub, and a partner in the Critical Materials Institute Energy Innovation Hub.  CASL was the first DOE Energy Innovation Hub, established in July 2010 while the CMI is the latest hub to be funded.

Innovation Hubs

The Department of Energy's Innovation Hubs are integrated research centers that combine basic and applied research with engineering to accelerate scientific discovery that addresses critical energy issues.

ORNL plays a key role in two of these hubs: the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, which focuses on improving nuclear reactors through computer-based modeling, and the Critical Materials Institute, which develops solutions for rare earth elements and other materials critical to a growing number of clean energy technologies.

Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors

The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) is the first DOE Energy Innovation Hub established in July 2010, for the purpose of providing advanced modeling and simulation (M&S) solutions for commercial nuclear reactors.

Critical Materials Institute

The Critical Materials Institute will focus on technologies that will make better use of the materials we have access to as well as eliminate the need for materials that are subject to supply disruptions.

Centers

BioEnergy Science Center (BESC)

The BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) is a multi-institutional (17 partners), multidisciplinary research (biological, chemical, physical and computational sciences, mathematics and engineering) organization focused on the fundamental understanding and elimination of biomass recalcitrance.

DOE Energy Frontier Research Centers

The Energy Frontier Research Centers program aims to accelerate such transformative discovery, combining the talents and creativity of our national scientific workforce with a powerful new generation of tools for penetrating, understanding, and manipulating matter on the atomic and molecular scales. ORNL is also home to two DOE Energy Frontier Research Centers, the Fluid Interface, Reactions, Structures and Transport (FIRST) Center and the Energy Dissipation to Defect Evolution (EDDE) EFRC. The goal of the FIRST CFRC is to address the fundamental gaps in our current understanding of interfacial systems of high importance to future energy technologies, including electrical energy storage (batteries, supercapacitors) and heterogeneous catalysis for solar energy and solar fuels production. The CDP aims to develop a quantitative understanding of the mechanisms of defect formation, evolution and interactions that determine material behavior under irradiation. 

Other centers

These centers also call ORNL home: 

• National Center for Computational Sciences
• Center for Molecular Biophysics
• Center for Transportation Analysis
• Fuels, Engines, and Emissions Research Center (FEERC)
• NanoApplications Center
• Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC)
• U.S. ITER Project Office

Institutes

Climate Change Science Institute

The Climate Change Science Institute was formed in 2009 to integrate climate science activities across ORNL. CCSI’s priorities are to create the science, experiments, data, and community capacity needed to:

• Strengthen the predictive capabilities and effectiveness of climate and biogeochemical models.
• Identify and understand how extreme events and climate tipping points impact the resiliency of human and natural land-energy-water systems.
• Participate in national and international climate assessments and response option analysis.
• Develop useful climate adaptation and mitigation tools and information in collaboration with land-energy-water system stakeholders.

Urban Dynamics Institute

The world is urbanizing rapidly, experiencing an unprecedented rate of population growth that is increasing demand for energy, food, water, and other natural resources and raising concern about environmental impacts and matters of human security such as poverty, crime, and pandemics. 

With this growth has come an explosion in Big Data, fed by citizens’ billions of inputs on social media as well as countless other cyber platforms. In this sea of information lies a singular opportunity to understand and anticipate human dynamics in urban environments.

The Urban Dynamics Institute at the ORNL was established to develop novel science and technology to observe, measure, analyze, and model urban dynamics—from the city to the global scale. UDI’s work gives researchers a data-driven understanding of complex urban systems, governed by the rigor of both physical and behavioral sciences.

Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials

The Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials is being formed with the specific objective of catalyzing advances in imaging technologies integrated with deep data. The Institute will be a leader in fostering the emerging synergy between imaging-related areas and computational sciences. IFIM will bring together teams with expertise in imaging instrumentation, fundamentals in physical and chemical imaging processes, and data analytics. 

Joint Institutes

ORNL, in partnership with the Science Alliance of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a number of cooperative ventures in science and engineering research programs.  One facet of that partnership includes five UT-ORNL joint institutes that link distinct, complementary resources in select, high-priority scientific and engineering fields at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Those Joint Institutes are:

Joint Institute for Advanced Materials

The Joint Institute for Advanced Materials (JIAM) promotes interdisciplinary research and education related to developing new materials with superior properties (such as greater toughness and high-temperature strength) or those that can be tailored to support new technologies (such as pocket-sized supercomputers).

Joint Institute for Biological Sciences

The Joint Institute for Biological Sciences (JIBS) supports interdisciplinary, crosscutting research that accelerates progress in complex bioenergy and bioenvironmental systems. It also aids access by UT-ORNL faculty, staff, and students to state-of-the-art capability in genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic analysis of biological and environmental systems.

Joint Institute for Computational Sciences

The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS) advances scientific discovery and state-of-the-art engineering and computational modeling and simulation. JICS takes full advantage of the petascale and beyond computers in the Department of Energy National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS).

Joint Institute for Heavy Ion Research

The Joint Institute for Heavy Ion Research (JIHIR) links UT, ORNL, and Vanderbilt University research that explores the structure of atomic nuclei, via several types of experimental programs and an extensive UT-ORNL theoretical nuclear physics initiative.

Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences

The Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences (JINS) promotes worldwide neutron scattering collaboration among researchers in biological and life sciences, energy sciences, polymer science, condensed matter physics, and computational sciences.

 

Source : Hubs, Centers, and Institutes

Regions Foundation Gift Buys Bloomberg Terminals for Haslam College of Business

A recent gift from the Regions Foundation has allowed UT’s Haslam College of Business to purchase four additional Bloomberg terminals, a system that allows finance professionals to monitor and analyze real-time market data, and place trades.

Jim Wansley, department head of finance, Haslam College of Business; Kevin Crateau, vice president of Regions; Mike McNamee, area president of Regions; Steve Mangum, dean, Haslam College of Business; Laura Seery Cole, director of the Masters Investment Learning Center, Haslam College of Business; and Bruce Duggins, senior vice president of Regions.

The additions mean the college will have the second highest number of terminals among its Southeastern Conference peers.

“Bloomberg is considered the gold standard amongst financial databases,” said Laura Seery Cole, director of the Masters Investment Learning Center. “Practical experience with this software differentiates Haslam students in the job market when competing against candidates from other universities.”

The Haslam College of Business, which will now have sixteen terminals, is one of the few business schools in the nation to integrate Bloomberg training into its curriculum.

“Given the expense of each Bloomberg terminal, most competing universities only have a few,” said Cole. “With more terminals, we are able to train more business students—not just finance majors, but accounting, supply chain, and economics students, too. And we are now able to do so at a deeper level.”

A check presentation was held in the Masters Investment Learning Center on December 2 recognizing Regions’ contribution. Dean Steve Mangum thanked Mike McNamee, Regions’ area president for East Tennessee and North Carolina, along with Kevin Crateau, Regions’ vice president for marketing, and Bruce Duggins, a senior vice president at Regions.

“At Regions, we value the hard work, dedication, and personal drive that students at the University of Tennessee display when it comes to their education,” said McNamee. “This will open up a vast array of financial tools to hundreds of additional students in the Haslam College of Business every year.”

Regions is a longtime supporter of the college, but this is its largest donation to date. By contributing to the Masters Investment Learning Center, Regions hopes to help cultivate greater business acumen and economic growth in the area.

“We believe a solid education is the key to making good decisions and reaching your goals in life,” said McNamee. “Supporting the Haslam College of Business and the Masters Investment Learning Center not only helps the school become a more competitive institution, but helps its students become more competitive for the rest of their lives.”

The new Bloomberg software will be installed and available for student use in spring semester 2016.

Source : Regions Foundation Gift Buys Bloomberg Terminals for Haslam College of Business  

Students’ Research to Potentially Become Cherokee Biographies for Children

A group of UT students spent this fall delving into the lives of Cherokees who called East Tennessee home in the 1800s, before they were forcibly removed and relocated west of the Mississippi River.

The students’ research and recovery of the lost stories of Cherokee people could be translated into the Cherokee language and become children’s books that would find their way to immersion schools, cultural centers, and local museums.

“It helps us understand that history is not just a jumble of dates but an explanation of how we all came to be the way we are now,” said Katie Myers, a College Scholar and UT junior.

Julie Reed holds a children’s biography of Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation.

She added that the biographies will help children relate better to history, noting that

“It’s really important for people to know their own story and know the stories of people who are just like them.”

Myers was one of five students in the upper-level course, Not Just Sequoyah and John Ross: Cherokee History through Biography, which is tied to this year’s Smart Communities Initiative, a service-learning partnership between UT and the Southeast Tennessee Development District. The SETDD is a consortium of thirteen counties in southeast Tennessee and northeast Georgia dedicated to fostering community and economic development in the area. One of the organization’s goals is to develop promotional materials for the region and the students’ research could factor into that work.

“So many of the problems I face teaching students come from misinformation from a younger age,” said Julie Reed, a Cherokee historian and UT assistant professor of history, who taught the class. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. “They learn about the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, and other incredibly tragic moments in Native American history. But I want them to understand the richness of Native American history then and now. Whatever images we have drawn for ourselves of what an Indian looks like are probably wrong.”

Reed, who first taught the class in fall 2014, provided students with the names of Cherokee people who lived and worked in the area at the time of the Indian Removal and those who were held in stockades awaiting removal. Very little is known about them except perhaps a line listed in government records after they made claims for property losses.

Students selected a name and then developed the person’s biography, researching the period and the area in which the Cherokees lived by visiting public libraries, reading other biographies and investigating government documents.

Myers researched Polly Mocking Crow, a woman who lived in what is now Polk County, Tennessee.

“For someone who grew up in the Internet age, finding things in books is embarrassingly difficult,” she said. “Not every public record has been put on the Internet. I had to research her circumstances and area more than her name. I found that was a better way to tell her story—through all the things that existed around her.”

Myers discovered that Polly Mocking Crow left Tennessee with a group called the Hildebrand detachment. Prior to that, she owned half an acre of onions, cabbage, and other plants and vegetables. Myers learned that Polly Mocking Crow lived a typical Cherokee life for that period, since women were responsible for a lot of the agriculture. She would eventually ask for repayment for her featherbed, among other goods, which indicated she may have been a woman of means.

“This has been important to me, to research someone who was not a chief or any important person but a really normal person and a woman—a housewife with children,” Myers said. “This story is so seldom told and I wanted to tell that story.”

Reed is collecting Myers’s work and that of her peers, as well as that of the students in the fall 2014 class. She plans to partner with members of the Cherokee Nation to translate the students’ work into the Cherokee language. She also will contact Cherokee artists who are interested in illustrating the books.

“They could be a resource that we can give back to the Cherokee Nation,” Reed said.

The biographies would also be beneficial to non-Cherokee people, Reed added, noting that “local museums and heritage centers are not geared toward children but nerdy adults who are into history.”

“This is a good way for children to understand history because the materials are child-specific,” Reed said.

 

Source : Students’ Research to Potentially Become Cherokee Biographies for Children

National Security

National Security at ORNL

ORNL plays an important role in national and global security by virtue of its expertise in advanced materials, nuclear science, supercomputing and other scientific specialties. Discovery and innovation in these areas are essential for protecting US citizens and advancing national and global security priorities. ORNL supports these missions by using its signature strengths to meet complex national security challenges in a number of areas.

Nuclear Nonproliferation – The laboratory’s expertise and experience covers the spectrum of nuclear nonproliferation work, from basic R&D to “boots-on-the-ground” implementation. This work ranges from uranium fuel cycle research to detection technologies and nuclear forensics. ORNL’s non-proliferation activities include developing, coordinating and helping to implement policies designed to reduce threats from a variety of sources, including nuclear weapons and “dirty bombs.”

National Defense – ORNL works with the US Department of Defense to respond to global challenges by developing and delivering advanced technologies in areas such as special materials; information management, synthesis and analysis; advanced sensor technology; energy efficiency technologies; early warning systems for chemical and biological threats; and unmanned air, ground and sea systems.

Homeland Protection – The laboratory provides critical support to federal and state agencies with homeland security missions in the areas of preventing, mitigating, and responding to natural and man-made disasters. Some notable areas of research and support include developing technologies to provide real-time information and logistical support to first responders, providing information and analysis for protective actions, assessing the security of shipping, and providing technical support for issues surrounding the control of materials that could be used in nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile applications.

Intelligence Community – ORNL also supports the US intelligence community by applying the breadth of its scientific expertise to address critical challenges in areas such as cybersecurity, knowledge discovery, communications, nuclear fuel cycle analysis and biometrics.

 

Source : National Security

Advanced Materials

Advanced Materials Research at ORNL

ORNL has the nation’s most comprehensive materials research program and is a world leader in research that supports the development of advanced materials for energy generation, storage, and use. We have core strengths in three main areas: materials synthesis, characterization, and theory. In other words, we discover and make new materials, we study their structure, dynamics and functionality, and we use computation to understand and predict how they will behave in various applications.

From its beginnings in World War II’s Manhattan Project, ORNL has had a distinctive materials science program. Today, materials science research benefits from ORNL’s integration of basic and applied research programs and strong ties among computational science, chemical science, nuclear science and technology, neutron science, engineering, and national security. This broad approach to research is allowing ORNL to develop a variety of new materials for energy applications and transfer these new materials to industry. For example, an understanding of how defects form at the atomic level allows creation of improved materials that approach their theoretical strength, such as radiation-resistant steels for next-generation nuclear reactors and lightweight materials for energy-efficient transportation. In electrical energy storage, we are studying how chemical processes occur at the interface of electrodes and electrolytes and using supercomputers to predict how battery systems will perform. We develop “soft” materials, including polymers and carbon-based materials, used as membranes for batteries, fuel cells, and carbon capture, solar cells, and as precursors for the carbon fiber used in lighter cars and planes. We’ve also discovered ways to improve materials processing, using photon, microwave and magnetic field-assisted processing to increase the performance of new materials while reducing processing costs.   These advances have resulted in a broad portfolio of ORNL materials and technologies in the nuclear, automotive, and structural materials industry.

ORNL researchers are improving analytical tools used to characterize the structure and function of advanced materials, including electron microscopy, scanning probes, chemical imaging, and a variety of neutron scattering capabilities. Many of these capabilities are available through DOE user programs at ORNL, including the two neutron user facilities (the Spallation Neutron Source and the High Flux Isotope Reactor), the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, and our microscopy user facility (the Shared Research Equipment User Facility—which will be incorporated in the CNMS later this year). Complementing our experimental research is one of the nation’s largest collections of materials theorists who take full advantage of ORNL’s leadership computational facility to understand and design new materials, as well as processes that occur at materials interfaces. Together, these research capabilities in materials synthesis, characterization, and theory contribute to our leadership in basic and applied materials science that ultimately will lead to new technologies for meeting tomorrow’s energy needs. 

 

Source : Advanced Materials

Physicist Helped Discover New Elements Recently Added to Periodic Table

A UT physicist has been instrumental in the discovery of four new super-heavy chemical elements—atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118—recently added to the periodic table.

Robert Grzywacz stands at the neutron detector array he and a UT team built at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Robert Grzywacz, along withcollaborators at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, developed the software used in the equipment that detects the new elements and helps analyze data from the experiments. He is a co-author of recent papers, representing a collaboration between US and Russian scientists, that present new data on elements 113, 115, 117, and 118.

The International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry recently announced formal verification of the four new chemical elements and recognized ORNL for the discovery of two: 115, temporarily named ununpentium (Uup, element 115), and 117, temporarily named ununseptium (Uus, element 117).

The four new elements complete the seventh row of the periodic table.

“The super-heavy element research is one of the most interesting efforts in nuclear physics,” said Grzywacz, a professor in the UT Department of Physics and Astronomy. “It concerns the core question of how protons and neutrons form bound systems—the nuclei. For us experimentalists, it is a formidable experimental challenge because the synthesis of super-heavy elements is incredibly difficult. It takes a concerted effort of many people to make it work. It is a fantastic but very also very time- and labor- intensive research program.”

Grzywacz is director of the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Nuclear Physics and Applications (JINPA). He was formerly an ORNL Wigner Fellow.

Grzywacz and the ORNL team developed a data acquisition technology that uses a new type of digital signal processing to measure very fast nuclear decays down to a microsecond—one millionth of a second. Because the system was relatively untested, he and former UT postdoctoral researchers David Miller and Nathan Brewer tested and debugged the system, which resulted in a reliable process. The data acquisition system initially applied in the ORNL-based experiments was already used in studies searching for and detecting super-heavy nuclei in laboratories in Dubna, Russia, and Darmstadt, Germany.

The ORNL team worked with scientists from Russia and the United States on the discovery of two of the new elements. Russian scientists used actinide targets and intense 48Ca beams to manufacture new super-heavy elements. The ORNL group supplied the target material to produce the new elements, which can be synthesized only at an ORNL reactor facility. The UT-ORNL collaboration recently provided a new, more sensitive detection system used in experiments in Russia.

The ORNL team will have the honor of helping name elements 115 and 117. New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property, or a scientist.

At the moment, there is no direct application for the two new elements because the quantities that can be produced are very small and unstable against decay, Grzywacz said. The properties of these elements may help scientists predict more new elements that can be synthesized, with some of them predicted to be more stable.

Grzywacz noted that one of the beauties of research is that every theoretical claim has to be verified experimentally.

“Experiments produce surprises for theories; theories make unexpected predictions for experiments,” he said. “This will never stop. There will be always an exciting problem to solve—and by the way, sometimes, and often unexpectedly, the solution is actually useful for everyone.”

Source : Physicist Helped Discover New Elements Recently Added to Periodic Table