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Newswise — Researchers, workers members and licensees from the Division of Vitality’s Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory acquired prime honors within the Federal Laboratory Consortium’s annual awards competitors for excellence in expertise switch, excellence in expertise switch innovation, excellent researcher and regional expertise switch.
The Federal Laboratory Consortium, or FLC, lately introduced 32 award winners, ORNL included, for contributions to expertise switch, which turns cutting-edge analysis into impactful services. The FLC represents greater than 300 federal laboratories, companies and analysis facilities nationwide.
“The switch of lab-developed expertise to business is a important a part of capitalizing on the investments made in science by the Division of Vitality,” mentioned ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer. “In working with our companions, we’re delivering world-changing applied sciences that may influence the lives of many.”
ORNL’s FLC awards embody:
Excellent Researcher
Kyle Gluesenkamp, senior analysis scientist within the Buildings and Transportation Science Division, manages a portfolio of thermal power storage applied sciences and superior tools for buildings, akin to warmth pumps, water heaters and residential home equipment. As ORNL’s subprogram supervisor for Thermal Vitality Storage, Gluesenkamp bridges gaps between science and business by collaborating with producers and different stakeholders to develop merchandise that may scale back power consumption and peak demand to allow a decarbonized power future.
Gluesenkamp has contributed immediately to 3 licenses, 20 nondisclosure agreements and one materials switch settlement. As a lead principal investigator, he has secured greater than $20 million in funding from aggressive solicitations for energy-efficient constructing tools analysis. He has contributed as a group member to initiatives which have garnered an extra $10 million. In a single decade at ORNL, Gluesenkamp has printed greater than 50 journal articles and greater than 100 convention articles and technical reviews, filed 42 invention disclosures and acquired 5 patents and one R&D 100 award — actions that talk to the power group the worth of the improvements developed at ORNL.
Excellence in Expertise Switch
ORNL’s Heartbeat and Situ applied sciences provide new strategies for superior cybersecurity monitoring in actual time. The Heartbeat system collects energy hint measurements immediately from laptop {hardware}, is invisible to malware and is resilient to web service disruption. Situ combines anomaly detection and information visualization to offer a distributed, scalable streaming platform for locating and explaining suspicious habits. The licensed expertise portfolio consists of 5 patents and two registered copyrights.
This expertise switch is notable due to the proactive strategy of licensee U2opia together with help from ORNL to realize a novel resolution to the pressing cyberattack problem going through authorities and business.
After licensing the applied sciences, U2opia quickly secured testing companions and is finishing commercialization testing of each applied sciences. Lastly, recognizing the problem that different small companies face in going by way of the expertise switch course of with a federal lab, U2opia is working with ORNL to create a roadmap of the method to pave the best way for future collaboration.
ORNL honorees embody Andreana Leskovjan, commercialization supervisor; Stacy Prowell, senior cyber safety scientist; and John Goodall, senior workers scientist. U2opia honorees embody Maurice Singleton III, president and chief government officer; Joaneane Smith, chairwoman; and Chris Ford, chief government officer of Golden Applied sciences and scientific adviser to U2opia.
Excellence in Expertise Switch
Researchers at ORNL have developed a negative-emissions direct air seize, or DAC, expertise that has the potential to considerably influence the worldwide skill to take away present carbon dioxide from the environment.
This expertise has a number of advantages over present DAC applied sciences, together with decrease power necessities, decrease temperature wanted to launch the captured CO2, reusable chemistry that decreases prices and easy, scalable processes and tools.
The expertise was licensed by Holocene, a startup co-founded by Anca Timofte. Timofte has a transparent imaginative and prescient for the corporate, benefiting from related alternatives to make sure the success of Holocene.
Timofte joined Cohort 2022 of DOE’s Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program node at ORNL, Innovation Crossroads, in addition to the Spark Incubator Program, an entrepreneurial help program on the College of Tennessee Analysis Park’s Spark Innovation Middle. She can be a Breakthrough Vitality fellow.
A industrial license settlement was signed in 2022. As a part of the Innovation Crossroads program, Holocene entered right into a cooperative analysis and improvement settlement with ORNL and is presently advancing the expertise from the bench scale to pilot scale demonstrations. Holocene is working facet by facet with ORNL researchers, performing experiments that may higher inform the development of their first plant.
Due to this effort, by the tip of the last decade, Holocene can have scaled their carbon seize course of thrice utilizing off-the-shelf tools and will probably be eradicating 500,000 to 1 million tons of CO2 from the environment per yr.
ORNL honorees embody Dan Miller, Innovation Crossroads program lead; Kelly Wampler, Innovation Crossroads enterprise specialist; Alex DeTrana, senior commercialization supervisor; and Jose Zavala, a former ORNL commercialization supervisor. Timofte, CEO and co-founder of Holocene, additionally is called within the award.
Regional Expertise Switch
The Protected Impression Resistant Electrolyte, or SAFIRE, developed at ORNL, is the world’s solely patented and proprietary drop-in additive for lithium-ion batteries that forestalls hearth and explosion by way of an instantaneous liquid-to-solid transformation upon kinetic impacts, akin to ballistic occasions or electrical car, or EV, crashes.
ORNL researcher Gabriel Veith and his group — together with Beth Armstrong, Sergiy Kalnaus, Hsin Wang, Katie Browning and Kevin Cooley — developed and superior the expertise over a decade. ORNL gained funding from the Superior Analysis Initiatives Company-Vitality, ARPA-E, program and was accepted into ORNL’s Expertise Innovation Program for strategic funding. The group participated within the FedTech Spring 2020 Startup Studio the place they met Michael Grubbs, co-founder of Safire Expertise Group, which was BTRY on the time. Quickly after, ORNL’s Expertise Switch Workplace started negotiations with Safire Group for an unique license. The settlement was signed in 2022 for a five-patent portfolio, which enabled Safire Group to draw investments from United States enterprise capital teams.
Right now, Safire Group has a lab on the College of Tennessee, Knoxville, Spark Innovation Middle and continues to work intently with ORNL through a strategic partnership undertaking. The corporate has been awarded a number of Small Enterprise Innovation Analysis contracts to combine SAFIRE expertise in varied prototypes for the U.S. Air Pressure and is presently conducting testing with a number of EV tools producers and battery producers. Safire Group intends to construct a ten,000-square-foot facility within the Knoxville space, which is able to guarantee financial benefits for the area.
ORNL honorees embody Eugene Cochran, expertise commercialization group chief; Veith, distinguished workers scientist within the Chemical Sciences Division; and Grubbs.
Expertise Switch Innovation
Profitable expertise commercialization packages rely upon shut collaborations with researchers to establish, mature, market and deploy laboratory-developed applied sciences. To extend researcher engagement in expertise switch, ORNL led a group of 11 DOE nationwide laboratories in launching the Expertise Switch Researcher Liaison, or TTRL, program. This system was initially supported by DOE’s Practices to Speed up the Commercialization of Applied sciences, or PACT, Laboratory Name.
The TTRL program offered greater than 60 researchers with 40 hours of funding to function liaisons between expertise switch places of work, or TTOs, and researchers. Liaisons had been recruited and educated to be embedded expertise scouts, subject material specialists and ambassadors to their TTOs and to function advisors for his or her laboratories. Liaisons assisted their friends in figuring out and disclosing new innovations. Additionally they coached their friends on the way to work together successfully with potential licensees and offered help with the expertise switch course of.
Over a two-year interval, collaborating laboratories noticed an 8% common enhance within the variety of invention disclosures and a 12% enhance in first-time inventors reporting innovations. Though the PACT-supported pilot undertaking was accomplished in Might 2022, ORNL has continued its TTRL program with help from its royalty fund.
ORNL honorees embody Jennifer Caldwell, director of expertise switch; Michael Paulus, director of partnerships; and Alex DeTrana, senior commercialization supervisor.
By way of training, promotion and the facilitation of relationships and partnerships, the FLC helps these expertise switch group to shepherd applied sciences out of government-funded laboratories and into {the marketplace}, the place they enhance the economic system, society and nationwide safety.
Award recipients will probably be honored in the course of the FLC Nationwide Assembly, April Sep 11, in Dallas, Texas. Including to the celebration, this yr marks the fiftieth anniversary of the FLC.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Division of Vitality’s Workplace of Science, the only largest supporter of fundamental analysis within the bodily sciences in the USA. The Workplace of Science is working to deal with a number of the most urgent challenges of our time. For extra data, go to power.gov/science.
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