Argonne National Laboratory researchers have invented a technology for recovering oil and other petroleum products from bodies of water that surpasses similar technologies that are currently on the market in several key aspects.

Water contamination from oil and other petroleum products carries with it huge environmental, economic and health impacts. Argonne’s invention, known as Oleo Sponge, offers promise for dramatically improving our ability to combat this problem – whether it be a catastrophic oil spill that devastates the Gulf Coast of the United States or chronic issues with contamination in harbors and ports around the world.

Oleo Sponge offers multiple critical advantages over current industry-standard technologies:

• The technology is the first and only option to effectively and efficiently adsorb oil and other petroleum products below the water surface. Current industry-standard technologies only address the surface.
• Oleo Sponge is reusable (you simply wring the reclaimed oil into a holding tank). This dramatically reduces waste resulting from the clean-up process and enables a small amount of adsorbent to mitigate enormous spills. Current sorbent technologies soak up oil in a single use, and the oil-saturated materials must then be disposed of.
• Oleo Sponge is environmentally friendly – doing no harm to sea life, animals or the larger environment – a key advantage when compared with chemical dispersants or burning techniques that are used today.
• Oleo Sponge demonstrates unparalleled sorption performance.
• The oil and other petroleum products that are recovered by Oleo Sponge can be salvaged for future use.

Technology available for licensing: The invention is simplified methods of multiple-patterning photolithography using sequential infiltration synthesis (SIS) to modify the photoresist such that it withstands plasma etching better than unmodified resist and replaces one or more hard masks and/or a freezing step in MPL processes including litho-etch-litho-etch photolithography or litho-freeze-litho-etch photolithography. Potential applications of these methods and system extend to virtually all technologies in which periodic nanomaterial structures are desirable, including optoelectronics, sensors, membranes, photonic crystals, dielectric materials, and electronics.

Benefits

• Process for preparing lower-cost, high-throughput multiple patterning photolithography.
• Can increase the plasma etch resistance and/or render a photoresist layer insoluble in photoresist solvents, thus obviating the need for one or more steps of present techniques of multiple-patterning lithography.
• Utilizes alternating exposures to gas phase precursors that infiltrate the organic or partially organic resist material to form a protective component within the resist layer, modifying the standard multiple-patterning lithography techniques to reduce the number of steps and/or decrease the cost and time that these techniques presently require

Technology available for licensing: The SIS process forms the protective component within the bulk resist material through a plurality of alternating exposures to gas phase precursors which infiltrate the resist material.

Benefits

• The plasma etch resist material may be initially patterned using photolithography, electron-beam lithography or a block copolymer self-assembly process.
• The modified resist material is characterized by an improved resistance to a plasma etching or related process relative to the unmodified resist material, and
• Thereby allowing formation of patterned features into a substrate material, which may be high-aspect ratio features.

Argonne’s SAS4A/SASSYS-1 safety analysis code system is a simulation tool that can perform deterministic transient safety analysis of anticipated operational events, as well as design-basis and beyond-design-basis accidents for advanced nuclear reactors. The original code development was for sodium-cooled fast reactors, and sodium boiling can be modeled. However, basic core thermal-hydraulics and systems analysis features are applicable to other liquid-metal cooled reactor concepts.

Applications

• Safety analysis of fast reactors
• Simulations for operational, design-basis and beyond-design-basis events
• Passive heat removal and natural circulation flow predictions
• Severe accident modeling with sodium boiling, fuel melting and pin failure

Features

The current version (version 5) features:

• Detailed code manual
• Single-pin assembly models for rapid evaluation of transients
• Detailed thermal-hydraulic sub-channel models for subassembly pin bundles
• Support for three-dimensional visualization of sub-channel temperatures
• Support for liquid-metal coolants such as sodium, NaK, lead and LBE, as well as other single-phase coolants
• Full-plant coolant system models to simulate passive heat removal and natural shutdown
• Oxide fuel models for fuel melting, in-pin motion, pin failure, and ex-pin fuel dispersal and freezing
• Metal fuel models for fuel-clad eutectic formation and cladding failure
• High-fidelity decay heat models
• Built-in support for ANS standard decay heat properties
• Built-in support for alternative coolants in decay heat removal loops
• Support for line-based comments in input files
• Support for an unlimited number of time steps
• Support for coupling to third-party computational fluid dynamics tools (such as STAR-CCM+) for representing thermal stratification in large volumes
• Support for coupling to DIF3D-K for reactor spatial kinetics

Technical Details/Requirements

• Executable versions are available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
• Source code is compliant with Fortran 90/95 free-formatted source format and can be compiled on a variety of operating systems including Unix, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. A standards-compliant Fortran compiler is required.

The new materials have potential application in lithium-ion batteries with anodes such as graphite, graphene, and silicon. There is also potential application in batteries utilizing lithium metal anodes.

In this invention, cathode precursors that contain a large amount of lithium can be extracted electrochemically at high potentials to load metal or metal alloy substrates with lithium. In one example, lithium and oxygen ions are released from the cathode during an initial preconditioning charge of the cell. This process leaves a structurally modified compound in the charged cathode that can react with lithium on a subsequent discharge. In principle, the preconditioning step (i.e., the initial charge reaction) is largely irreversible, whereas the second step (the initial charge reaction) can be either reversible or irreversible. This technology is available for license.

Applications

High capacity electrodes used in lithium batteries for:

• Electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles;
• Stationary energy storage devices;
• Portable electronic devices;
• Medical devices; and
• Space, aeronautical, and defense-related devices.

It generates broad-group, cell-average microscopic cross sections from ENDF/B basic nuclear data.

MC2-3 handles the complicated resonance self-shielding in fast spectrum systems by directly accounting for the resonance interactions in detail and performing calculations (2082 ultrafine group + 400,000 hyperfine group) on conventional lattice cells or simplified R-Z core models. The resulting microscopic cross sections are used for fast reactor design and analysis calculations.

Applications

• Nuclear fast reactor simulations and analysis

Features

• Code library includes almost all isotopes of the ENDF/B-VII data.
• Resolved resonance self-shielding using the numerical integration of pointwise cross sections based on the narrow resonance approximation
• Unresolved resonance self-shielding using the generalized integral method with the increased number of energy grids
• Anisotropic inelastic scattering
• 1-Dimensional (1-D) transport calculation using ultrafine or hyperfine groups
• Improved equivalence theory for the 1D heterogeneity effect in resonance self-shielding
• Efficient algorithm for solving the hyperfine group transport equation
• Option to use 2-D transport solutions (TWODANT) for group condensation
• Fortran 90/95 memory structure
• Keyword-based input system and built-in data conversion capability

Technical Details/Requirements

Developed using the Compaq Visual Fortran on the Microsoft Windows operating system (OS), the MC2-3 code can be installed and executed on the Windows, Macintosh, Unix and Linux OS environments. The memory requirements depend upon the problem. The current version requires more than 1G byte of memory. The memory management system in the current version does not use scratch files to save memory. Thus, more than 4G byte of memory may be required for large problems with many isotopes, hyperfine groups, and/or one-dimensional geometry. A Fortran compiler is required to compile the included source code. Minor changes may be required for code compilation.

The software is written in Fortran 90/95 and can be run on a variety of operating systems including Unix, Linux, Mac OS and Windows. The software includes comments in the source code and the method/user/programmer manual with several examples. An engineer with neutronics experience can learn to run the code in anywhere from a day to a week.