PNNL

The US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has found a way to potentially change the 34 billion gal (128 billion liters) of raw sewage that Americans create every day into 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year.

Scientists at PNNL in Richland, Washington have developed a piezoelectric self-charging tracking tag that generates electricity from the fish's own movements, allowing researchers to keep tabs on them more accurately for longer periods of time.​

Learning from your mistakes is a key life lesson. After unintentionally creating nanorods, researchers realized their accidental invention behaves weirdly with water, demonstrating a 20-year old theory and potentially paving the way to low-energy water harvesting systems and sweat-removing fabrics.

Zinc-manganese batteries are back in the spotlight now that a team of researchers has made them much more reliable, with greater numbers of charging cycles than ever before. And all for around the same price as a standard lead-acid car battery.

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed the strongest​ titanium alloy ever made. They believe the new material could be used in the production of lighter and cheaper vehicle components, and lead to the development of other high strength alloys.

A new flow battery technology promises to drastically lower the cost and sustainability of running energy storage systems. The battery uses low-cost and sustainable organic materials for electrolytes rather than the usual commodity metals, and it could be retrofitted to existing batteries.

Dendrites – thin conductive filaments that form inside lithium batteries – reduce the life of these cells and are often responsible for them catching fire. Now researchers claim to have produced an electrolyte that completely eliminates them while also boosting carrying capacity and efficiency.

A new redox flow battery developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) more than doubles the amount of energy that this type of cell can pack in a given volume, approaching the numbers of lithium-ion batteries.

In order to study how salmon are affected by swimming through hydroelectric dams, scientists have traditionally equipped them with surgically-implanted acoustic tracking tags. Now, however, a team has developed a much lighter acoustic tag, that can be injected into fish using a needle.

Migrating salmon in the Pacific Northwest are set to be helped on their journey by Sensor Fish. Developed by PNNL, these devices record and analyze the physical stressors faced by the fish on their trek and provide hydroelectric dams with data to become more fish-friendly.

American offshore wind energy is set to be studied in depth at two potential sites courtesy of some advanced data measurement buoys that will examine, for example, how powerful winds are at typical turbine blade heights of up to 600 feet above the ocean.

The US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed a smartphone attachment, that turns the phone into a 1,000x microscope. What's more, it's made from less than one dollar's worth of material.