New ORNL inventions

Novel Enzymes for Hydrolytic Nylon Depolymerization
202205168 // Manufacturing // Chemicals
ORNL has identified a panel of novel nylon hydrolases with varied substrate and product selectivity.

Integrated Coating Using High Energy Cladding
202205221 // Materials // Manufacturing
This technology aims to provide and integrated and oxidation resistant cladding or coating onto carbon-based composites in seconds.

Additively Manufactured Copper Windings with Hibert Distribution Cross Section
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.

Second Harmonic Generation for Estimating the State of Charge of Li-ion Batteries
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.

Multiplexed Extrusion System Development
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.

A Design of Manifold for Maldistribution Reduced Heat Exchangers for Additive Manufacturing
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.

Commercial Vehicle Distributions in Road NETwork (CV-DRNET) – Sequential Network Element Imputation Method
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. 

Cryogenic Belt Driven Sample Changer
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.

3D-Printed Windings with Space-Filling Thin-Wall Profiles
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.

Limited Center Constraint of Optimal Thickness Build Substrates for Additive Manufacturing
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.

Cross-Facility Orchestration for Electrochemistry Experiments and Computations
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.

Hybrid Systems for Passive CO2 Capture from Air
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.

Enzymatic Synthesis of Amide Oligomers
202405621 // Materials // Manufacturing
ORNL has developed enzymatic routes to synthesize amide oligomers with defined sequence for polymerization into new materials.

A Biosensor for Detecting Plant Gene Expression
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.

Autonomous Anomaly Detection of Model Forecasts of Controllable Devices in Residential Communities
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.

Tandem Pyrolysis – Evolved Gas – Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry
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.

Upcycling PET Waste into Vitrimer Materials of Closed-Loop Circularity
202405637 // Materials //  Chemicals
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.