Tag Archives: PNNL

Extending catalyst life for oil and gas

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A July 6, 2015 news item on Nanowerk describes the progress on determining exactly how catalysis is achieved when using zeolite (Note: A link has been removed),

Despite decades of industrial use, the exact chemical transformations occurring within zeolites, a common material used in the conversion of oil to gasoline, remain poorly understood. Now scientists have found a way to locate—with atomic precision—spots within the material where chemical reactions take place, and how these spots shut down.

Called active sites, the spots help rip apart and rearrange molecules as they pass through nanometer-sized channels, like an assembly line in a factory. A process called steaming causes these active sites to cluster, effectively shutting down the factory, the scientists reported in Nature Communications (“Determining the location and nearest neighbours of aluminium in zeolites with atom probe tomography”). This knowledge could help devise how to keep the factory running longer, so to speak, and improve catalysts that help produce fuel, biofuel and other chemicals.

A July 6, 2015 Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL) news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the collaboration and the research in more detail (Note: Links have been removed),

The team included scientists from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, petroleum refining technology company UOP LLC and Utrecht University. To make this discovery, they reconstructed the first 3-D atomic map of an industrially relevant zeolite material to track down its key element, aluminum.

When things get steamy, structure changes

Zeolites are minerals made up of aluminum, silicon and oxygen atoms arranged in a three-dimensional crystalline structure. Though they look like white powder to the naked eye, zeolites have a sponge-like network of molecule-size pores. Aluminum atoms along these pores act like workers on an assembly line-they create active sites that give zeolites their catalytic properties.

Industry uses about a dozen synthetic zeolites as catalysts to process petroleum and chemicals. One major conversion process, called fluid catalytic cracking, depends on zeolites to produce the majority of the world’s gasoline. [emphasis mine]

To awaken active sites within zeolites, industry pretreats the material with heat and water, a process called steaming. But too much steaming somehow switches the sites off. Changing the conditions of steaming could extend the catalyst’s life, thus producing fuel more efficiently.

Scientists have long suspected that steaming causes aluminum to move around within the material, thus changing its properties. But until now aluminum has evaded detailed analysis.

Strip away the atoms

Most studies of zeolite structure rely on electron microscopy, which can’t easily distinguish aluminum from silicon because of their similar masses. Worse, the instrument’s intense electron beam tends to damage the material, changing its inherent structure before it’s seen.

Instead, the team of scientists turned to a characterization technique that had never before been successfully applied to zeolites. Called atom probe tomography, it works by zapping a sample with a pulsing laser, providing just enough energy to knock off one atom at a time. Time-of-flight mass spectrometers analyze each atom-at a rate of about 1,000 atoms per second. Unlike an electron microscope, this technique can distinguish aluminum from silicon.

Though atom probe tomography has been around for 50 years, it was originally designed to look at conductive materials, such as metals. Less conductive zeolites presented a problem.

PNNL materials scientist Danny Perea and his colleagues overcame this hurdle by adapting a Local Electrode Atom Probe at EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science User Facility accessible to scientists around the world. Most attempts to image the material ended prematurely, when electromagnetic forces within the instrument vaporized the entire sample. The key to success was to find the right conditions to prepare a sample and then to coat it with a layer of metal to help provide conductivity and strength to withstand analysis.

After hours of blasting tens-of-millions of atoms, the scientists could reconstruct an atomic map of a sample about a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. These maps hold clues as to why the catalyst fails.

The news release reveals what the scientists were able to see for the first time,

The images confirmed what scientists have long suspected: Steaming causes aluminum atoms to cluster. Like workers crowded around one spot on the assembly line, this clustering effectively shuts down the catalytic factory.

The scientists even pinpointed the place where aluminum likes to cluster. Zeolite crystals often grow in overlapping sub-units, forming something like a 3-D Venn diagram. Scientists call the edge between two sub-units a grain boundary, and that’s where the aluminum clustered. The scientists suspect that open space along grain boundaries attracted the aluminum.

With the guidance of these atomic maps, industry could one day modify how it steams zeolites to produce a more efficient, longer lasting catalyst. The research team will next examine other industrially important zeolites at different stages of steaming to provide a more detailed map of this transformation.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Determining the location and nearest neighbours of aluminium in zeolites with atom probe tomography by Daniel E. Perea, Ilke Arslan, Jia Liu, Zoran Ristanović, Libor Kovarik, Bruce W. Arey, Johannes A. Lercher, Simon R. Bare, & Bert M. Weckhuysen.  Nature Communications 6, Article number: 7589 doi:10.1038/ncomms8589 Published 02 July 2015

This is an open access paper.

Platinum catalysts and their shortcomings

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The problem boils down to the fact that platinum isn’t cheap and so US Dept. of Energy research laboratories are looking for alternatives to or ways of making more efficient use of platinum according to a June 16, 2015 news item on Nanowerk,

Visions of dazzling engagement rings may pop to mind when platinum is mentioned, but a significant share of the nearly half a million pounds of the rare metalExternal link [sic] mined each year ends up in vehicle emission systems and chemical manufacturing plants. The silvery white metal speeds up or enhances reactions, a role scientists call serving as a catalyst, and platinum is fast and efficient performing this function.

Because of its outstanding performance as a catalyst, platinum plays a major role in fuel cells. Inside a fuel cell, tiny platinum particles break apart hydrogen fuel to create electricity. Leftover protons are combined with oxygen ions to create pure water.

Fuel cells could let scientists turn wind into fuel. Right now, electricity generated by wind turbines is not stored. If that energy could be converted into hydrogen to power fuel cells, it would turn a sporadic source into a continuous one.

The problem is the platinum – a scarce and costly metal. Scientists funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science are seeing if something more readily available, such as iron or nickel, could catalyze the reaction.

But, earth-abundant metals cannot simply be used in place of platinum and other rare metals. Each metal works differently at the atomic level. It takes basic research to understand the interactions and use that knowledge to create the right catalysts.

A June 15, 2015 US Department of Energy Office of Science news release, which originated the news item, describes various efforts,

At the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis, an Energy Frontier Research Center, scientists are gaining new understanding of catalysts based on common metals and how they move protons, the positively charged, oft-ignored counterpart to the electron.

Center Director Morris Bullock and his colleagues showed that protons’ ability to move through the catalyst greatly influences the catalyst’s speed and efficiency. Protons move via relays — clusters of atoms that convey protons to or from the active site of catalysts, where the reaction of interest occurs. The constitution, placement, and number of relays can let a reaction zip along or grind to a halt. Bullock and his colleagues are creating “design guidelines” for building relays.

Further, the team is expanding the guidelines to examine proton movement related to the solutions and surfaces where the catalyst resides. For example, matching the proton-donating abilityExternal link [sic] of a nickel-based catalyst to that of the surrounding liquid, much like matching your clothing choice with the event you’re attending, eases protons’ travels. The benefit? Speed. A coordinated catalyst pumped out 96,000 hydrogen molecules a second — compared to just 27,000 molecules a second without the adjustment.

This and other research at the Energy Frontier Research Center is funded by the DOE Office of Science’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences. The Center is led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

At two other labs, research shows how changing the catalyst’s superstructure, which contains the proton relays and wraps around the active site, can also increase the speed of the reaction. Led by Argonne National Lab’s Vojislav Stamenkovic and Berkeley Lab’s Peidong Yang, researchers created hollow platinum and nickel nanoparticles, a thousand times smaller in diameter than a human hair. The 12-sided particles split oxygen molecules into charged oxygen ions, a reaction that’s needed in fuel cells. The new catalyst is far more active and uses far less platinum than conventional platinum-carbon catalysts.

Building the catalysts begins with tiny structures made of platinum and nickel held in solution. Oxygen from the air dissolves into the liquid and selectively etches away some of the nickel atoms. The result is a hollow framework with a highly active platinum skin over the surface. The open design of the catalyst allows the oxygen to easily access the platinum. The new catalyst has a 36-fold increase in activity compared to traditional platinum–carbon catalysts. Further, the new hollow structure continues to work far longer in operating fuel cells than traditional catalysts.

I think we’re entering the ‘slow’ season newswise so there are likely to be more of these ’roundup’ pieces being circulated in the online nanosciencesphere and, consequently, here. too.

Trapping gases left from nuclear fuels

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A July 20, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily provides some insight into recycling nuclear fuel,

When nuclear fuel gets recycled, the process releases radioactive krypton and xenon gases. Naturally occurring uranium in rock contaminates basements with the related gas radon. A new porous material called CC3 effectively traps these gases, and research appearing July 20 in Nature Materials shows how: by breathing enough to let the gases in but not out.

The CC3 material could be helpful in removing unwanted or hazardous radioactive elements from nuclear fuel or air in buildings and also in recycling useful elements from the nuclear fuel cycle. CC3 is much more selective in trapping these gases compared to other experimental materials. Also, CC3 will likely use less energy to recover elements than conventional treatments, according to the authors.

A July 21, 2014 US Department of Energy (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item despite the difference in dates, provides more details (Note: A link has been removed),

The team made up of scientists at the University of Liverpool in the U.K., the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Newcastle University in the U.K., and Aix-Marseille Universite in France performed simulations and laboratory experiments to determine how — and how well — CC3 might separate these gases from exhaust or waste.

“Xenon, krypton and radon are noble gases, which are chemically inert. That makes it difficult to find materials that can trap them,” said coauthor Praveen Thallapally of PNNL. “So we were happily surprised at how easily CC3 removed them from the gas stream.”

Noble gases are rare in the atmosphere but some such as radon come in radioactive forms and can contribute to cancer. Others such as xenon are useful industrial gases in commercial lighting, medical imaging and anesthesia.

The conventional way to remove xenon from the air or recover it from nuclear fuel involves cooling the air far below where water freezes. Such cryogenic separations are energy intensive and expensive. Researchers have been exploring materials called metal-organic frameworks, also known as MOFs, that could potentially trap xenon and krypton without having to use cryogenics. Although a leading MOF could remove xenon at very low concentrations and at ambient temperatures admirably, researchers wanted to find a material that performed better.

Thallapally’s collaborator Andrew Cooper at the University of Liverpool and others had been researching materials called porous organic cages, whose molecular structures are made up of repeating units that form 3-D cages. Cages built from a molecule called CC3 are the right size to hold about three atoms of xenon, krypton or radon.

To test whether CC3 might be useful here, the team simulated on a computer CC3 interacting with atoms of xenon and other noble gases. The molecular structure of CC3 naturally expands and contracts. The researchers found this breathing created a hole in the cage that grew to 4.5 angstroms wide and shrunk to 3.6 angstroms. One atom of xenon is 4.1 angstroms wide, suggesting it could fit within the window if the cage opens long enough. (Krypton and radon are 3.69 angstroms and 4.17 angstroms wide, respectively, and it takes 10 million angstroms to span a millimeter.)

The computer simulations revealed that CC3 opens its windows big enough for xenon about 7 percent of the time, but that is enough for xenon to hop in. In addition, xenon has a higher likelihood of hopping in than hopping out, essentially trapping the noble gas inside.

The team then tested how well CC3 could pull low concentrations of xenon and krypton out of air, a mix of gases that included oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. With xenon at 400 parts per million and krypton at 40 parts per million, the researchers sent the mix through a sample of CC3 and measured how long it took for the gases to come out the other side.

Oxygen, nitrogen, argon and carbon dioxide — abundant components of air — traveled through the CC3 and continued to be measured for the experiment’s full 45 minute span. Xenon however stayed within the CC3 for 15 minutes, showing that CC3 could separate xenon from air.

In addition, CC3 trapped twice as much xenon as the leading MOF material. It also caught xenon 20 times more often than it caught krypton, a characteristic known as selectivity. The leading MOF only preferred xenon 7 times as much. These experiments indicated improved performance in two important characteristics of such a material, capacity and selectivity.

“We know that CC3 does this but we’re not sure why. Once we understand why CC3 traps the noble gases so easily, we can improve on it,” said Thallapally.

To explore whether MOFs and porous organic cages offer economic advantages, the researchers estimated the cost compared to cryogenic separations and determined they would likely be less expensive.

“Because these materials function well at ambient or close to ambient temperatures, the processes based on them are less energy intensive to use,” said PNNL’s Denis Strachan.

The material might also find use in pharmaceuticals. Most molecules come in right- and left-handed forms and often only one form works in people. In additional experiments, Cooper and colleagues in the U.K. tested CC3’s ability to distinguish and separate left- and right-handed versions of an alcohol. After separating left- and right-handed forms of CC3, the team showed in biochemical experiments that each form selectively trapped only one form of the alcohol.

The researchers have provided an image illustrating a CC3 cage,

Breathing room: In this computer simulation, light and dark purple highlight the cavities within the 3D pore structure of CC3. Courtesy: PNNL

Breathing room: In this computer simulation, light and dark purple highlight the cavities within the 3D pore structure of CC3. Courtesy: PNNL

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Separation of rare gases and chiral molecules by selective binding in porous organic cages by Linjiang Chen, Paul S. Reiss, Samantha Y. Chong, Daniel Holden, Kim E. Jelfs, Tom Hasell, Marc A. Little, Adam Kewley, Michael E. Briggs, Andrew Stephenson, K. Mark Thomas, Jayne A. Armstrong, Jon Bell, Jose Busto, Raymond Noel, Jian Liu, Denis M. Strachan, Praveen K. Thallapally, & Andrew I. Cooper. Nature Material (2014) doi:10.1038/nmat4035 Published online 20 July 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.

Injectable and more powerful* batteries for live salmon

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Today’s live salmon may sport a battery for monitoring purposes and now scientists have developed one that is significantly more powerful according to a Feb. 17, 2014 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) news release (dated Feb. 18, 2014 on EurekAlert),

Scientists have created a microbattery that packs twice the energy compared to current microbatteries used to monitor the movements of salmon through rivers in the Pacific Northwest and around the world.

The battery, a cylinder just slightly larger than a long grain of rice, is certainly not the world’s smallest battery, as engineers have created batteries far tinier than the width of a human hair. But those smaller batteries don’t hold enough energy to power acoustic fish tags. The new battery is small enough to be injected into an organism and holds much more energy than similar-sized batteries.

Here’s a photo of the battery as it rests amongst grains of rice,

The microbattery created by Jie Xiao and Daniel Deng and colleagues, amid grains of rice. Courtesy PNNL

The microbattery created by Jie Xiao and Daniel Deng and colleagues, amid grains of rice. Courtesy PNNL

The news release goes on to explain why scientists are developing a lighter battery for salmon and how they achieved their goal,

For scientists tracking the movements of salmon, the lighter battery translates to a smaller transmitter which can be inserted into younger, smaller fish. That would allow scientists to track their welfare earlier in the life cycle, oftentimes in the small streams that are crucial to their beginnings. The new battery also can power signals over longer distances, allowing researchers to track fish further from shore or from dams, or deeper in the water.

“The invention of this battery essentially revolutionizes the biotelemetry world and opens up the study of earlier life stages of salmon in ways that have not been possible before,” said M. Brad Eppard, a fisheries biologist with the Portland District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“For years the chief limiting factor to creating a smaller transmitter has been the battery size. That hurdle has now been overcome,” added Eppard, who manages the Portland District’s fisheries research program.

The Corps and other agencies use the information from tags to chart the welfare of endangered fish and to help determine the optimal manner to operate dams. Three years ago the Corps turned to Z. Daniel Deng, a PNNL engineer, to create a smaller transmitter, one small enough to be injected, instead of surgically implanted, into fish. Injection is much less invasive and stressful for the fish, and it’s a faster and less costly process.

“This was a major challenge which really consumed us these last three years,” said Deng. “There’s nothing like this available commercially, that can be injected. Either the batteries are too big, or they don’t last long enough to be useful. That’s why we had to design our own.”

Deng turned to materials science expert Jie Xiao to create the new battery design.

To pack more energy into a small area, Xiao’s team improved upon the “jellyroll” technique commonly used to make larger household cylindrical batteries. Xiao’s team laid down layers of the battery materials one on top of the other in a process known as lamination, then rolled them up together, similar to how a jellyroll is created. The layers include a separating material sandwiched by a cathode made of carbon fluoride and an anode made of lithium.

The technique allowed her team to increase the area of the electrodes without increasing their thickness or the overall size of the battery. The increased area addresses one of the chief problems when making such a small battery — keeping the impedance, which is a lot like resistance, from getting too high. High impedance occurs when so many electrons are packed into a small place that they don’t flow easily or quickly along the routes required in a battery, instead getting in each other’s way. The smaller the battery, the bigger the problem.

Using the jellyroll technique allowed Xiao’s team to create a larger area for the electrons to interact, reducing impedance so much that the capacity of the material is about double that of traditional microbatteries used in acoustic fish tags.

“It’s a bit like flattening wads of Play-Doh, one layer at a time, and then rolling them up together, like a jelly roll,” says Xiao. “This allows you to pack more of your active materials into a small space without increasing the resistance.”

The new battery is a little more than half the weight of batteries currently used in acoustic fish tags — just 70 milligrams, compared to about 135 milligrams — and measures six millimeters long by three millimeters wide. The battery has an energy density of about 240 watt hours per kilogram, compared to around 100 for commercially available silver oxide button microbatteries.

The battery holds enough energy to send out an acoustic signal strong enough to be useful for fish-tracking studies even in noisy environments such as near large dams. The battery can power a 744-microsecond signal sent every three seconds for about three weeks, or about every five seconds for a month. It’s the smallest battery the researchers know of with enough energy capacity to maintain that level of signaling.

The batteries also work better in cold water where salmon often live, sending clearer signals at low temperatures compared to current batteries. That’s because their active ingredients are lithium and carbon fluoride, a chemistry that is promising for other applications but has not been common for microbatteries.

Last summer in Xiao’s laboratory, scientists Samuel Cartmell and Terence Lozano made by hand more than 1,000 of the rice-sized batteries. It’s a painstaking process, cutting and forming tiny snippets of sophisticated materials, putting them through a flattening device that resembles a pasta maker, binding them together, and rolling them by hand into tiny capsules. Their skilled hands rival those of surgeons, working not with tissue but with sensitive electronic materials.

A PNNL team led by Deng surgically implanted 700 of the tags into salmon in a field trial in the Snake River last summer. Preliminary results show that the tags performed extremely well. The results of that study and more details about the smaller, enhanced fish tags equipped with the new microbattery will come out in a forthcoming publication. Battelle, which operates PNNL, has applied for a patent on the technology.

I notice that while the second paragraph of the news release (in the first excerpt) says the battery is injectable, the final paragraph (in the second excerpt) says the team “surgically implanted” the tags with their new batteries into the salmon.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the newly published article in Scientific Reports,

Micro-battery Development for Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System Applications by Honghao Chen, Samuel Cartmell, Qiang Wang, Terence Lozano, Z. Daniel Deng, Huidong Li, Xilin Chen, Yong Yuan, Mark E. Gross, Thomas J. Carlson, & Jie Xiao. Scientific Reports 4, Article number: 3790 doi:10.1038/srep03790 Published 21 January 2014

This paper is open access.

* I changed the headline from ‘Injectable batteries for live salmon made more powerful’ to ‘Injectable and more powerful batteries for live salmon’  to better reflect the information in the news release. Feb. 19, 2014 at 11:43 am PST.

ETA Feb. 20, 2014: Dexter Johnson has weighed in on this very engaging and practical piece of research in a Feb. 19, 2014 posting on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers]) website (Note: Links have been removed),

There’s no denying that building the world’s smallest battery is a notable achievement. But while they may lay the groundwork for future battery technologies, today such microbatteries are mostly laboratory curiosities.

Developing a battery that’s no bigger than a grain of rice—and that’s actually useful in the real world—is quite another kind of achievement. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have done just that, creating a battery based on graphene that has successfully been used in monitoring the movements of salmon through rivers.

The microbattery is being heralded as a breakthrough in biotelemetry and should give researchers never before insights into the movements and the early stages of life of the fish.

The battery is partly made from a fluorinated graphene that was described last year …

Sifting through Twitter with your computer cluster of more than 600 nodes named Olympus—one of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.

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Here are two (seemingly) contradictory pieces of information (1) the US Library of Congress takes over 24 hours to complete a single search of tweets archived from 2006 – 2010, according to my Jan. 16, 2013 posting, and (2) Court (Courtney) Corley, a data scientist at the US Dept. of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), has a system (SALSA; SociAL Sensor Analytics) that analyzes billions of tweets in seconds. It’s a little hard to make sense out of these two very different perspectives on accessing data from tweets.

The news from Corley and the PNNL is more recent and, before I speculate further, here’s a bit more about Corley’s work, from the June 6, 2013 PNNL news release (also on EurekAlert)

If you think keeping up with what’s happening via Twitter, Facebook and other social media is like drinking from a fire hose, multiply that by 7 billion – and you’ll have a sense of what Court Corley wakes up to every morning.

Corley, a data scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has created a powerful digital system capable of analyzing billions of tweets and other social media messages in just seconds, in an effort to discover patterns and make sense of all the information. His social media analysis tool, dubbed “SALSA” (SociAL Sensor Analytics), combined with extensive know-how – and a fair degree of chutzpah – allows someone like Corley to try to grasp it all.

“The world is equipped with human sensors – more than 7 billion and counting. It’s by far the most extensive sensor network on the planet. What can we learn by paying attention?” Corley said.

Among the payoffs Corley envisions are emergency responders who receive crucial early information about natural disasters such as tornadoes; a tool that public health advocates can use to better protect people’s health; and information about social unrest that could help nations protect their citizens. But finding those jewels amidst the effluent of digital minutia is a challenge.

“The task we all face is separating out the trivia, the useless information we all are blasted with every day, from the really good stuff that helps us live better lives. There’s a lot of noise, but there’s some very valuable information too.”

I was getting a little worried when I saw the bit about separating useless information from the good stuff since that can be a very personal choice. Thankfully, this followed,

One person’s digital trash is another’s digital treasure. For example, people known in social media circles as “Beliebers,” named after entertainer Justin Bieber, covet inconsequential tidbits about Justin Bieber, while “non-Beliebers” send that data straight to the recycle bin.

The amount of data is mind-bending. In social media posted just in the single year ending Aug. 31, 2012, each hour on average witnessed:

  • 30 million comments
  • 25 million search queries
  • 98,000 new tweets
  • 3.8 million blog views
  • 4.5 million event invites
  • 7.1 million photos uploaded
  • 5.5 million status updates
  • The equivalent of 453 years of video watched

Several firms routinely sift posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media, then analyze the data to see what’s trending. These efforts usually require a great deal of software and a lot of person-hours devoted specifically to using that application. It’s what Corley terms a manual approach.

Corley is out to change that, by creating a systematic, science-based, and automated approach for understanding patterns around events found in social media.

It’s not so simple as scanning tweets. Indeed, if Corley were to sit down and read each of the more than 20 billion entries in his data set from just a two-year period, it would take him more than 3,500 years if he spent just 5 seconds on each entry. If he hired 1 million helpers, it would take more than a day.

But it takes less than 10 seconds when he relies on PNNL’s Institutional Computing resource, drawing on a computer cluster with more than 600 nodes named Olympus, which is among the Top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.

“We are using the institutional computing horsepower of PNNL to analyze one of the richest data sets ever available to researchers,” Corley said.

At the same time that his team is creating the computing resources to undertake the task, Corley is constructing a theory for how to analyze the data. He and his colleagues are determining baseline activity, culling the data to find routine patterns, and looking for patterns that indicate something out of the ordinary. Data might include how often a topic is the subject of social media, who is putting out the messages, and how often.

Corley notes additional challenges posed by social media. His programs analyze data in more than 60 languages, for instance. And social media users have developed a lexicon of their own and often don’t use traditional language. A post such as “aw my avalanna wristband @Avalanna @justinbieber rip angel pic.twitter.com/yldGVV7GHk” poses a challenge to people and computers alike.

Nevertheless, Corley’s program is accurate much more often than not, catching the spirit of a social media comment accurately more than three out of every four instances, and accurately detecting patterns in social media more than 90 percent of the time.

Corley’s educational background may explain the interest in emergency responders and health crises mentioned in the early part of the news release (from Corley’s PNNL webpage),

B.S. Computer Science from University of North Texas; M.S. Computer Science from University of North Texas; Ph.D. Computer Science and Engineering from University of North Texas; M.P.H (expected 2013) Public Health from University of Washington.

The reference to public health and emergency response is further developed, from the news release,

Much of the work so far has been around public health. According to media reports in China, the current H7N9 flu situation in China was highlighted on Sina Weibo, a China-based social media platform, weeks before it was recognized by government officials. And Corley’s work with the social media working group of the International Society for Disease Surveillance focuses on the use of social media for effective public health interventions.

In collaboration with the Infectious Disease Society of America and Immunizations 4 Public Health, he has focused on the early identification of emerging immunization safety concerns.

“If you want to understand the concerns of parents about vaccines, you’re never going to have the time to go out there and read hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of tweets about those questions or concerns,” Corley said. “By creating a system that can capture trends in just a few minutes, and observe shifts in opinion minute to minute, you can stay in front of the issue, for instance, by letting physicians in certain areas know how to customize the educational materials they provide to parents of young children.”

Corley has looked closely at reaction to the vaccine that protects against HPV, which causes cervical cancer. The first vaccine was approved in 2006, when he was a graduate student, and his doctoral thesis focused on an analysis of social media messages connected to HPV. He found that creators of messages that named a specific drug company were less likely to be positive about the vaccine than others who did not mention any company by name.

Other potential applications include helping emergency responders react more efficiently to disasters like tornadoes, or identifying patterns that might indicate coming social unrest or even something as specific as a riot after a soccer game. More than a dozen college students or recent graduates are working with Corley to look at questions like these and others.

As to why the US Library of Congress requires 24 hours to search one term in their archived tweets and Corley and the PNNL require seconds to sift through two years of tweets, only two possibilities come to my mind. (1) Corley is doing a stripped down version of an archival search so his searches are not comparable to the Library of Congress searches or (2) Corley and the PNNL have far superior technology.

Graphene material that improves lithium-ion battery performance wins ‘Oscar’ of innovation

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Who knew that an ‘Oscar of innovation’ existed? It does and Vorbeck Materials along with its partners,  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Princeton University have won it. From the June 22, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Vorbeck Materials, in partnership with Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL) and Princeton University, was recognized today by R&D Magazine for developing one of the 100 most significant scientific and technological products or advances of the year.

The R&D 100 Award honors Vorbeck’s breakthrough work with PNNL and Princeton to commercialize graphene technology, which will enable greater use of electric vehicles and faster charging consumer electronics.

In collaboration with Professor Ilhan Aksay at Princeton University, PNNL has demonstrated that small quantities of Vor-x™, Vorbeck’s unique graphene material, can dramatically improve the performance and power of lithium-ion batteries. The pioneering work will enable the development of batteries that last longer and recharge quickly, drastically reducing the time it takes to charge an electric vehicle to just a few hours and allowing smartphones to charge in as little as ten minutes. Lithium-ion batteries are also used to power laptops, power tools and other electronic devices.

Vorbeck is working to bring this new technology to market for use in consumer electronic devices, tools, and electric vehicles. Vorbeck is also partnering with Hardwire LLC of Maryland to integrate the new batteries into hybrid military vehicles.

You can find out more about the R&D 100 awards at the R&D (Research and Development) Magazine’s Award page,

The Awards, widely recognized as the “Oscars of Innovation”, identifies and celebrates the top high technology products of the year. Sophisticated testing equipment, innovative new materials, chemistry breakthroughs, biomedical products, consumer items, high-energy physics: the R&D 100 Awards spans industry, academia, and government-sponsored research. …

Since 1963, the R&D 100 Awards have identified revolutionary technologies newly introduced to the market. Many of these have become household names, helping shape everyday life for many Americans. These include the flashcube (1965), the automated teller machine (1973), the halogen lamp (1974), the fax machine (1975), the liquid crystal display (1980), the Kodak Photo CD (1991), the Nicoderm anti-smoking patch (1992), Taxol anticancer drug (1993), lab on a chip (1996), and HDTV (1998).

That’s a very impressive list of innovations.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory gets artistic

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There are some very pretty pictures from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) that appear in a new calendar featuring science as art. From the Nov. 1, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

A dozen stunning science images, representing cell structures, microorganisms, polymer films, degraded metals and more, have been selected by the voting public as winners in Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Science as Art contest.

The photos are representative of research projects at the Department of Energy laboratory and will appear in a 2012 “Discovery in Action” calendar (available for high- and low-resolution download). Winning images will also be used in laboratory websites, printed materials, building lobbies and conference rooms.

You can find out more about the competition in the news item and/or you can also view the images on the PNNL’s Flickr site. I downloaded a couple samples from the Flickr site,

Electro-Polymerization of Pyrrole

Electro-Polymerization of Pyrrole
Organizations like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rely on field sensors that can detect traces of anionic water-soluble pollutants, like arsenate, chromate, perchlorate and pertechnetate. At PNNL, scientists are experimenting with modified polymer films that can recognize—and therefore be used—to detect pollutants. These polymers could potentially be incorporated into devices that would make detection rapid and economic. Shown here is a microscopic image of a polymer film generated through electro-polymerization of pyrrole from a water solution. PNNL researchers Dev Chatterjee, Thao Bui and Sam Bryan are working on this project.

and here’s the second one,

Designing Nano-Potteries: CdS Hollow Spheres

Designing Nano-Potteries: CdS Hollow Spheres
Imaging bio-molecules and cells over extended periods of time is critical to understanding cellular processes and the causes of pathogenic diseases. Cadmium sulfide quantum dots are widely used for highly sensitive cellular imaging. The extraordinary photostability of these probes are highly attractive for the real-time tracking of bio-molecules and cells over time. PNNL scientists are exploring quantum dots with varying morphologies and trying to understand the variation of their spectroscopy associated with the morphological changes. The goal is to design probes that can be used to monitor cellular processes over extended periods. PNNL researcher Dev Chatterjee provided the image. Others who contribute to the project include Matthew Edwards, Paul MacFarlan, Samuel Bryan and Jason Hoki. Image colored by PNNL graphic designer Jeff London.

I quite enjoyed the images.