Engineering topics

Ryan, Matthew

Publications and source records attributed to Ryan, Matthew.

3 records

DOE OSTI2022

Paintable Reflective Coatings (CRADA Final Report)

As part of the Cyclotron Road LEEP, the Cypris Materials project team conducted research on the viability of a new reflective coating technology based on a novel advanced materials platform. Building off of nearly a decade of academic research spanning multiple institutions, research efforts were designed to tackle the familiar problem of maturing a project into a minimum viable product. Fundamental technologies spawned from academic research are fraught with both scientific and technical risk, as the barriers to a successful peer reviewed publication are much lower than a commercial product with a paying customer base. It is common, especially when maturing chemical or material innovations, to encounter a number of critical assumptions or features that support the performance of the technology in an unsustainable fashion. At the outset of the project, the platform technology of Cypris Materials was no different. Specific research thrusts regarding scale-up, process optimization, technoeconomic modeling, market specific weathering performance, and market specific optical performance were tackled during the CRADA project.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2021

Local summer insolation and greenhouse gas forcing drove warming and glacier retreat in New Zealand during the Holocene

Geological climate archives from the Holocene Epoch provide baseline information concerning natural climate variability. Temperate mountain glacier extent is sensitive to summer air temperature, thus geological records of past glacier length changes are a useful proxy for this climatic variable. Here we present a new cosmogenic 10 Be chronology of glacier length changes at Dart Glacier in the Southern Alps, New Zealand. Prominent moraines deposited 321 ± 44 yr ago (n = 11) and 7.8 ± 0.3 ka (n = 5) show glaciers during the Little Ice Age were less extensive than during the early Holocene. This pattern of net Holocene glacier retreat is consistent with emerging data from other catchments in New Zealand and across the southern mid-latitudes. Using the physical framework of a transient global climate model simulation, we suggest that cool summers in the early Holocene were promoted by the local summer insolation minimum, together with low atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, causing an early Holocene austral glacial maximum. An insolation-driven reduction in seasonality at southern mid-latitudes may reconcile differences between early Holocene temperature reconstructions where climate proxies have different seasonal sensitivities. Furthermore, we suggest that rising greenhouse gas concentrations after 7 ka caused regional-scale glacier retreat and appear to be the dominant driver of multi-millennial summer temperature trends in the southern mid-latitudes during the present interglacial.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2020

Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges

The field of microbiome research has evolved rapidly over the past few decades, and has become a topic of great scientific and public interest. As a result of this rapid growth in interest covering different fields, we are lacking a clear commonly agreed definition of the term ‘microbiome’. Moreover, a consensus on best practices in microbiome research is missing. Recently, a panel of international experts discussed the current gaps in the frame of the European-funded MicrobiomeSupport project. The meeting brought together about 40 leaders from diverse microbiome areas, while more than a hundred experts from all over the world took part in an online survey accompanying the workshop. This article excerpts the outcomes of the workshop and the corresponding online survey embedded in a short historical introduction and uture outlook. We propose a definition of microbiome based on the compact, clear and comprehensive description of the term provided by Whipps et al. in 1988, amended with a set of novel recommendations considering the latest technological developments and research findings. We clearly separate the terms microbiome and microbiota, and provide a comprehensive discussion considering the composition of microbiota, the heterogeneity and dynamics of microbiomes in time and space, the stability and resilience of microbial networks, the definition of core microbiomes and functionally relevant keystone species as well as co-evolutionary principles of microbe-host and inter-species interactions within the microbiome. These broad definitions together with the suggested unifying concepts will help to improve standardization of microbiome studies in the future, and could be the starting point for an integrated assessment of data resulting in a more rapid transfer of knowledge from basic science into practice.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗