Skip to main content

Projects

As a scientific user facility, EMSL provides expertise, instrumentation, and resources to 250 projects each year. Projects displayed below reflect information and abstracts that were published before April 30, 2024. To review current user projects, visit EMSL's Science Central.

  • Projects beginning at or after given date.
    Projects ending at or before given date.

Characterization of Synthetic Mixed Valence U Compounds

Lead Institution
The George Washington University
Principal Investigator
Christopher Cahill
Project type
Exploratory Research
The efforts proposed herein will explore the synthetic reaction conditions necessary to produce and stabilize pentavalent uranium oxide species under hydrothermal conditions. U(V) is a fleeting…

Evaporative Co-deposition of Fluoride Materials

Lead Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Principal Investigator
Dean Matson
Project type
Exploratory Research
Electron-beam evaporation will be used to co-deposit calcium fluoride and europium fluoride in varying proportions for application in the formation of scintillator films. The project will involve…

Tapping mode AFM for real-time analysis of DNA hybridization on microarrays

Lead Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Principal Investigator
Eileen Jutras
Project type
Exploratory Research
Recent advances in AFM make visualization of surface/DNA and DNA/protein interactions possible. Presently, we are designing nucleic acid based microarrays for the detection of bacterial pathogens…

Mapping of the contaminants in soil thin sections

Lead Institution
Oregon State University
Principal Investigator
Oleg Povetko
Project type
Exploratory Research
Dynamic models of the transport and fate of radionuclides in ecosystems include many parameters that can not be easily estimated and often their estimates vary by many orders of magnitude. This…

Plasma Coating for Surface Passivation of Silica-coated Wafers

Lead Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Principal Investigator
Suresh Baskaran
Project type
Exploratory Research
he surface of silica coating prepared by Sol-gel process contains large amount of adsorbed water molecules. The presence of these polar molecules adversely affect the properties of the Silica…

Roughness Measurements of Microchannel Surfaces

Lead Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Principal Investigator
David Pfund
Project type
Exploratory Research
Surface roughness may influence the heat transfer coefficients in microchannel heat exchangers, particularly in cases of boiling. Roughness may also influence flow regimes in two-phase flow. We…

Microscopic analysis of carbon-based nanomaterials

Lead Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Principal Investigator
Yongsoon Shin
Project type
Exploratory Research
We are synthesizing nanostructured carbon-based materials from different carbohydrate precursors, such as glucose, fructose, and their derivatives. Functional carbon spheres with core-shell…

High Resolution Infrared Spectroscopy of the 360 cm-1 Band of Acetonitrile

Lead Institution
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Principal Investigator
Linda Brown
Project type
Exploratory Research
We will record and analyze the high resolution infrared spectrum of the 360 cm-1 band of acetonitrile. The purpose of this work is to determine the line shapes and positions of the rovibrational…

Computational Study of Oxygen Reduction on SOFC Cathode Surfaces

Lead Institution
Georgia Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator
Meilin Liu
Project type
Exploratory Research
This project is to examine the detailed reaction mechanisms of oxygen reduction process in the cathode of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) employed with first-principle calculations of gas-surface…

Hydrophobic coatings development for contactor membranes

Lead Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Principal Investigator
Dean Matson
Project type
Exploratory Research
Porous contactor membranes are being developed for mass transfer of species into and out of aqueous solutions in high temperature corrosive environments encountered in heatpump and other applications…

Surface Structure Analysis of Hematite Thin Films Grown by MBE Technique

Lead Institution
Northwestern University
Principal Investigator
Laurence Marks
Project type
Exploratory Research
This proposed activity will focus on the the preparation of hematite thin films using the MBE system in EMSL and the characterization of surface structures of the as-deposited thin films utilizing…

ESEM Characterization of Aerosol Materials

Lead Institution
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Principal Investigator
Stephen Joyce
Project type
Exploratory Research
The unique capability of the ESEM will be used to study the morphological change of materials such as simple inorganic salts as a function of humidity and temperature over atmospherical relevant…

Sputtered Au for Alkane Thiol Self-Assembly

Lead Institution
University of Washington
Principal Investigator
Kip Hauch
Project type
Exploratory Research
The scope of this project will be to provide smooth sputtered Cr/Au layers on glass substrata for use in the self-assembly of novel poly(ethylene glycol) terminated alkane thiols.

Morphology and composition of encoded segmented metal oxide nanowires

Lead Institution
Southern Illinois University
Principal Investigator
Andrei Kolmakov
Project type
Exploratory Research
The recent interest in one-dimensional semiconducting nanostructures is based on their possible operation as ultrasmall active elements in applications such as nanoelectronics, optoelectronics,…

Zero Emission Research & Technology (ZERT) CO2 Sequestration Leakage Evaluation Task: Parameterization of Leakage from Geologically Sequestered CO2 (PNNL Scope # 46379).

Lead Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Principal Investigator
Christopher Thompson
Project type
Exploratory Research
Understanding, characterizing, and ultimately quantifying leakage rates of geologically sequestered CO2 through the confining layers (caprock) is critical to site monitoring and verification (SMV),…