National Innovator of the Year Honor Goes to PNNL Energy Storage Expert
PNNL materials scientist Ji-Guang (Jason) Zhang won the Department of Energy's (DOE's) inaugural Innovator of the Year Award, recognizing his contributions to research and his efforts to bring the benefit of new technologies to society as quickly as possible. Zhang is at the forefront of efforts to produce an EV battery that can pack more energy and last longer. His work has had global impact in the drive toward better electric vehicle batteries. Read more about the Innovator of the Year award on PNNL's website
City Sprawl Now Large Enough to Sway Global Warming Over Land
Once thought to cover too little of the Earth’s surface to affect climate at larger scales, a new study published in One Earth suggests that urbanization does indeed have a detectable influence on global warming over land, with more to potentially follow as cities continue growing.
The effect is most dramatic in some of the world’s most rapidly urbanizing areas. In the bustling Yangtze River Basin, for example, home to more than 480 million people (one third of China’s total population), urban sprawl contributed nearly 40 percent of the area’s increased warming between 2003 and 2019.
Researchers Harvest Acid From Seawater to Feed Beneficial Algae
How to make algae cultivation for aquaculture more carbon neutral? PNNL-Sequim researchers may have an answer: couple algae cultivation with marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). In a new paper published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters, the team showed that the acid byproduct of an electrochemical process used to increase ocean alkalinity can be used to grow more algae, faster.
Not only are these results a possible boon to the aquaculture industry, but they could also address the need for a sustainable way to use the acid byproduct—a main barrier today to scaling-up some electrochemical mCDR techniques. Read more about marine carbon dioxide removal on PNNL's website
Metal Alloys that Can Take the Heat
Research Partner: North Carolina State University
Scientists and engineers are designing metal alloys that can resist extreme environments for applications such as nuclear fusion reactors, hypersonic flights, and high-temperature jet engines. For such extreme applications, scientists are experimenting with complex combinations of many metals mixed in equal proportions in what are called multi-principal element alloys or medium- to high-entropy alloys.
Now, a multidisciplinary research team led by scientists at PNNL and North Carolina State University combined atomic-scale experiments with theory to create a tool to predict how such high-entropy alloys will behave under high-temperature oxidative environments. The new research was published in Nature Communications. Read more about metal alloys on PNNL's website
Staff Highlights & More
Day-Lewis
Lab Fellow and geophysicist Frederick Day-Lewis was named the 2024 recipient of the Geological Society of America Public Service Award. The award honors outstanding contributions to public awareness of the Earth sciences and contributions to the scientific resolution of Earth-science problems of significant societal concern. Day-Lewis’s research focuses on applied and basic science in hydrogeophysics for groundwater resources, environmental remediation, climate impacts, critical minerals, and other problems. Read more about Frederick Day-Lewis on PNNL's website
Whalen
Scott Whalen, a chief scientist in PNNL's Applied Materials and Manufacturing group, has been named 2023 PNNL Inventor of the Year. Whalen is the primary inventor who developed intellectual property around the process, product, and tooling for PNNL’s Shear Assisted Processing and Extrusion (ShAPE™) technology. His contributions are advancing a radically different method for the way metal is extruded—uniquely mixing and deforming solid feedstocks without melting or external heat treating. Read more about Scott Whalen on PNNL's website
Join us on our Richland campus on August 2 for the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Women in Engineering International Leadership Summit. Learn more about the summit on PNNL's website
