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The Chemical Transformations Initiative (CTI) has been launched at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory! The CTI is funded through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program as a lab-level initiative to develop foundational capabilities at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for chemical conversion processes having minimal or no environmental impact.
Scientific discovery is being revolutionized by AI and autonomous systems, yet current autonomous laboratories remain isolated islands unable to collaborate across institutions. We present the Autonomous Interconnected Science Lab Ecosystem (AISLE), a grassroots network transforming fragmented capabilities into a unified system that shorten the path from ideation to innovation to impact and accelerates discovery from decades to months. AISLE addresses five critical dimensions: (1) cross-institutional equipment orchestration, (2) intelligent data management with FAIR compliance, (3) AI-agent driven orchestration grounded in scientific principles, (4) interoperable agent communication interfaces, and (5) AI/ML-integrated scientific education. By connecting autonomous agents across institutional boundaries, autonomous science can unlock research spaces inaccessible to traditional approaches while democratizing cutting-edge technologies. This paradigm shift toward collaborative autonomous science promises breakthroughs in sustainable energy, materials development, and public health.
Increasing the fuel burnup limit in light water reactors is sought to enhance fuel cycle economics and requires establishing a technical basis. Experimental observations of severe fuel fragmentation under loss-of-coolant-accident conditions at Halden and Studsvik had raised the need for additional considerations during the development of this technical basis. These test data suggested that the burnup threshold for high burnup fuel fragmentation may be influenced by pre-transient power. Additional loss-of-coolant-accident test data is therefore valuable to complement these tests and enhance the current state of understating. Oak Ridge National Lab has developed the Severe Accident Test Station capable of examining the oxidation kinetics and accident response of irradiated fuel and cladding materials for design basis accident and beyond design basis accident scenarios. Severe Accident Test Station provides various temperature profiles, steam, and the thermal shock conditions necessary for integral loss of coolant accident testing, defueled oxidation quench testing, and high-temperature beyond design basis accident testing. Severe Accident Test Station has been successfully installed and demonstrated in the Irradiated Fuels Examination Laboratory at Oak Ridge National Lab. Furthermore, descriptions of the in-cell re-fabrication capabilities and assembly of the loss-of-coolant-accident test train are provided. Installation of the Severe Accident Test Station system and in-cell re-fabrication restores United States capability to examine postulated and extended loss-of-coolant-accident conditions on spent fuel and cladding and provides a platform for evaluating advanced fuel and accident-tolerant fuel cladding concepts. Lastly, three in-cell integral loss-of-coolant-accident test were performed in the Severe Accident Test Station and compared to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sponsored loss-of-coolant-accident test as well as the original loss-of-coolant-accident test performed at Argonne National Lab. Finally, the results of these tests as well as all publicly available integral loss-of-coolant-accident test were used to validate a threshold for high burnup fuel fragmentation.
As a part of the effort to expand the capabilities of CE-BAF 12 GeV (Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility) at Jefferson Lab, the addition of a polarized positron source is considered. This capability would provide acceleration of high duty-cycle polarized posi-trons, with spin >60% polarization, through the same main CEBAF accelerator machine with appropriate mag-net field reversals and linac phasing to the four CEBAF experimental halls. To produce this positron beam, a high average current (3-10 mA) highly polarized electron beam with energy of 100 ? 150 MeV is required at the positron source target. The focus of this paper is the de-sign of that polarized electron beam injector. We will describe the production and delivery of a >3 mA highly polarized electron beam. We will discuss different aspects of the design, the photocathode gun, beam dynamics simulation results, spin manipulation, bunching and accelerating process and final electron beam parameters.
This report highlights the development of advanced analytical capabilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to characterize PuO 2 powder to support the Multi-Lab Plutonium Process Signatures Campaign in FY 2022. Two samples from a batch of 76 statistical precipitation runs were packaged and shipped from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the beginning of FY 2022. Techniques were used to characterize the sample, including powder X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. A brief description of each technique, the results and discussion, and future work are described in this report. Opportunities to expand current capabilities and include additional analytical capabilities for the next campaign will also be discussed.
U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories host world-class advanced computing and modeling capabilities. The National Renewable Energy Labowratory (NREL) inaugurated the Infrastructure Perception and Control Laboratory (IPC Lab) to advance mobility reach into real-world applications.
Major advances in pulsed power technology and applications over the last twenty years have expanded the mission areas for pulsed power and created compelling new opportunities for the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP). This summary document is a forward look at the development of pulsed power science and technology (PPS&T) capabilities in support of the next 20 years of the SSP. This outlook was developed during a three month long tri-lab study on the future of PPS&T research and capabilities in support of applications to: (1) Dynamic Materials, (2) Thermonuclear Burn Physics and Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), and (3) Radiation Effects and Nuclear Survivability. It also considers necessary associated developments in next-generation codes and pulsed power technology as well as opportunities for academic, industry, and international engagement. The document identifies both imperatives and opportunities to address future SSP mission needs.
Major advances in pulsed power technology and applications over the last twenty years have expanded the mission areas for pulsed power and created compelling new opportunities for the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP). This summary document is a forward look at the development of pulsed power science and technology (PPS&T) capabilities in support of the next 20 years of the SSP. This outlook was developed during a three-month-long tri-lab study on the future of PPS&T research and capabilities in support of applications to: (1) Dynamic Materials, (2) Thermonuclear Burn Physics and Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), and (3) Radiation Effects and Nuclear Survivability. It also considers necessary associated developments in next-generation codes and pulsed power technology as well as opportunities for academic, industry, and international engagement. The document identifies both imperatives and opportunities to address future SSP mission needs. This study was commissioned by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). A copy of the memo request is contained in the Appendix. NNSA guidance received during this study explicitly directed that it not be constrained by resource limitations and not attempt to prioritize its findings against plans and priorities in other areas of the national weapons program. That prioritization, including the relative balance amongst the three focus areas themselves, must of course occur before any action is taken on the observations presented herein. This unclassified summary document presents the principal imperatives and opportunities identified in each mission and supporting area during this study. Preceding this area-specific outlook, we discuss a cross-cutting opportunity to increase the shot capacity on the Z pulsed power facility as a near-term, cost-effective way to broadly impact PPS&T for SSP as well as advancing the science and technology to inform future SSMP milestones over the next 5-10 years. The final page of the summary presents two timelines that couch the opportunities discussed here in terms of the broader strategic timelines encapsulated in the fiscal year 2017 Stockpile Stewardship Management Plan (SSMP).
The recent development of microcrystal electron diffraction (MicroED) in electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM) has addressed many of the challenges of X-ray crystallography [1], filling a long-standing need in organic chemistry for rapid and accurate high-resolution structural characterization [2]. Like X-ray crystallography, this is also a diffraction technique requiring crystalline specimens, but because high energy electrons have a more favorable ration of elastic to inelastic scattering [3], MicroED can acquire data using crystals that are orders of magnitude smaller than those needed for X-ray crystallography—even as small as 50 nm in length [4]. Additionally, the instrumentation required for MicroED is readily available, as many chemistry and biology labs already have access to cryo-capable transmission electron microscopes (TEM).
Following the IAEA Technical Meeting on 'Advanced Methodologies for the Analysis of Materials in Energy Applications Using Ion Beam Accelerators', our work reviews the current status of ion beam analysis (IBA) techniques and some aspects of ion-induced radiation damage in materials for the field of materials relevant to fusion. Available facilities, apparatus development, future research options and challenges are presented and discussed. The analysis of beryllium and radioactivity-containing samples from future experiments in JET or ITER represents not only an analytical but also a technical challenge. A comprehensive list of the facilities, their current status, and analytical capabilities comes alongside detailed descriptions of the labs. A discussion of future issues of sample handling and the current status of facilities at JET complete the technical section. To prepare the international IBA community for these challenges, the IAEA technical meeting finalizes the necessity for determining new nuclear reaction cross-sections and improving the inter-laboratory comparability by defining international standards and testing these via a round-robin test.
The 12 GeV upgrade to the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab will enable a new generation of experiments in hadronic nuclear physics, seeking to address fundamental questions in our understanding of QCD. The existence of exotic states, suggested by both quark models and lattice calculations, would allow gluonic degrees of freedom to be explored, and may help explain the role played by gluons in the QCD interaction. This article will review the meson spectroscopy program being planned at the lab following the 12 GeV upgrade, utilising real and quasi-real photon beams in two of the lab's four experimental halls, whose distinct capabilities will enable an extensive set of spectroscopy experiments to be performed at the same facility.
Ferrofluid microrobots have emerged as promising tools for minimally invasive medical procedures. Their unique properties to navigate complex fluids and reach otherwise inaccessible regions of the human body have enabled new applications in targeted drug delivery, tissue engineering, and diagnostics. Here, this paper proposes a model-predictive controller for the external magnetic manipulation of ferrofluid microrobots in three dimensions (3D). The internal optimization routine of the controller determines appropriate changes in the applied electromagnetic field to minimize the deviation between the actual and desired trajectories of the microrobot. A linear system governing locomotion is derived and used as the equality constraints of the optimization problems associated with the feedback index. In addition to ferrofluid droplets, the controller presented in this work may be applied to other magnetically-pulled microrobots. Several experiments are performed to validate the controller and showcase its ability to adapt to changes in system parameters such as the desired tracking trajectory and the size, orientation, deformation, and velocity of the microrobot. The accuracy of the controller is analyzed for each experiment, and the average error is found to be within 0.25 mm for small velocities. An additional experiment is performed to demonstrate significant improvement over a PID controller that is optimally tuned using Bayesian optimization. The results presented in this paper suggest that the proposed control algorithm could enable new microrobotic capabilities in minimally invasive medical procedures, lab-on-a-chip applications, and microfluidics.
Electron beam irradiation near 10 MeV is suitable for wastewater treatment. The Upgraded Injector Test Facility (UITF) at Jefferson Lab is a CW superconducting linear accelerator capable of providing an electron beam of energy up to 10 MeV and up to 100 µA current. This contribution presents the beam transport simulations for a beamline to be used for the irradiation of wastewater samples at the UITF. The simulations were done using the code General Particle Tracer with the goal of obtaining an 8 MeV electron beam of radius (3-σ) of ~2.4 cm. The achieved energy spread is ~74.5 keV. The space charge effects were investigated when the bunch charge is varied to be up to 1000 times and the results showed that they do not affect the beam quality significantly.
This is the final report of "Low-Cost Titanium Casting Technology" project. Titanium alloys have attracted increasing attentions as structural materials for high performance and weight-sensitive applications in aerospace and biomedical fields. However, in mass-production of civil applications like automotive components, titanium alloys are scarcely used due to the unaffordable costs in manufacturing compared with other metallic materials, such as aluminum, magnesium and steel. Therefore, there is a need to reduce the manufacturing cost of titanium alloys so that titanium alloys can be more competitive in terms of property and cost considerations. In this 4-year project, we started from exploring new low-cost titanium alloy systems with the guidance of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering – Calculation of Phase Diagram (ICME-CALPHAD) framework, and determined several promising alloy systems, alloying elements including Ti-Al-Fe-Mn-B-C, that can allow further development (lab-scale and industry-scale) in the future. During the new alloy system exploration, considerable amount of scientific work was completed regarding CALPHAD modeling, microstructure morphology, mechanical properties, and processing of the new alloy systems. The relevant ternary titanium alloy systems, Ti-Al-Mn and Ti-Al-Fe, were examined and reassessed both computationally and experimentally, leading to more comprehensive understanding of these alloy systems. Based on this above study, a new low-cost casting titanium alloy was developed, Ti-6Al-5Fe-0.05B-0.05C (designated as T65-0.05BC), which has competitive as-cast strength level with current commercial titanium alloys but relatively low ductility. However, in this project, since the target application, automotive engine connecting rod, is a fatigue-limited component and does not require high ductility, this alloy shall suffice as the deliverable alloy in this project. After designing and confirming the potent of the new alloy, we designed and built a lab-scale manufacturing equipment aided by computational tools at OSU labs to conceptually prove that this alloy can be manufactured with permanent mold casting, which is low-cost and potentially a mass production process. We produced a lab-scale prototype connecting rod demonstrating the capability of permanent mold casting of this new alloy.
The LANSCE accelerator is an important tool in the assessment and certification of the nation’s nuclear stockpile. LANSCE provides critical materials and nuclear data needed to develop a predictive capability for the performance of nuclear weapons. As the stockpile ages, materials are replaced, and manufacturing processes change, it is critical that we understand how these changes impact device performance. Dynamic proton radiography and neutron diffraction are ideally suited to contribute to this need. These capabilities are essential to enabling the NNSA labs to become more responsive and agile in advancing the deterrent of the future.
Transit electrification is difficult, requiring the consideration of many factors including route dynamics, vehicle utilization, and local ambient temperatures. Incumbent planning tools typically rely upon static vehicle efficiency numbers which do not consider local factors specific to each fleet. This paper summarizes a collaboration between NREL and Microgrid Labs, which produced an automated sizing tool capable of producing vehicle battery and motor sizing for drop-in electrification. Furthermore, the workflow also exports the electric-vehicle supply equipment needed to support fleet electrification. The paper summarizes the model theory and includes a sample pilot study performed in support of the Via Mobility transit fleet.
The overall objective of this project is the development of a lab-on-a-chip (LOC) electrochemical sensor capable of accurately measuring heavy metal (lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), and arsenic (As)) concentrations in complex aqueous streams such as wastewater. The specific goals include: i) identify how heavy metal speciate and transform during the different stages of the wastewater treatment train, and explore pre-treatment methods that will de-complex heavy metals, making them available to ASV, ii) develop appropriate electrodes for ASV using organic/inorganic nanomaterials, and iii) integrate pre-treatment steps and specialized electrodes into an LOC sensor device capable of autonomously determining heavy metal concentrations in complex wastewater streams.
Electron beam irradiation near 10 MeV is suitable for wastewater treatment. The Upgraded Injector Test Facility (UITF) at Jefferson Lab is a CW superconducting linear accelerator capable of providing an electron beam of energy up to 10 MeV and up to 100 µA current. This contribution presents the beam transport simulations for a beamline to be used for the irradiation of wastewater samples at the UITF. The simulations were done using the code General Particle Tracer with the goal of obtaining an 8 MeV electron beam of radius (3-σ) of ~2.4 cm. The achieved energy spread is ~74.5 keV. The space charge effects were investigated when the bunch charge is varied to be up to 1000 times and the results showed that they do not affect the beam quality significantly.