New polymer materials under development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory could enable safer, more stable batteries needed for electric vehicles and grid energy storage.

Polymers are promising electrolytes for solid-state lithium batteries for their low cost, flexibility and processability, but performance needs to be improved.

“Typically, you can increase flexibility to enhance conductivity, but you sacrifice strength. Our approach bypasses this trade-off by adding flexibility selectively in ion-conducting blocks,” said ORNL’s Guang Yang.

A study led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers promises to help sharpen accuracy for climate-change models and enable more reliable predictions of extreme weather.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University are using advanced microscopy to nanoengineer promising materials for computing and electronics in a beyond-Moore era.

Historically, computers have become faster and more powerful by Moore’s Law, an observation that technology advances as transistor sizes shrink. Today’s nanometer-scale transistors are reaching practical limits and new approaches are needed to scale existing technology.

A new capability to identify urban neighborhoods, down to the block and building level, that are most vulnerable to climate change could help ensure that mitigation and resilience programs reach the people who need them the most.