Recycling polyolefin materials is challenging. One waste management strategy is plastic upcycling. New work demonstrates a single-step upcycling route coupling cracking and alkylation, recycling carbon and keeping valuable resources active.
Resolving how nanoparticles come together is important for industry and environmental remediation. New work predicts nanoparticle aggregation behavior across a wide range of scales for the first time.
A poem inspired by radioactive tank waste—“Can a Scientist Dream it Alone?”—was awarded first place in the Department of Energy’s Poetry of Science Art Contest.
IDREAM research shows that keeping only the most important two- and three-body terms in reactive force fields can decrease computational cost by one order of magnitude, while preserving satisfactory accuracy.
A PNNL innovation uses steam to recover heat from the high-temperature reactor effluent in the HTL process, substantially reducing the propensity for fouling and potentially reducing costs.
A PNNL-developed computational framework accurately predicts the thermomechanical history and microstructure evolution of materials designed using solid phase processing, allowing scientists to custom design metals with desired properties.