Chemical movement through soil is an important process in agriculture and ecology. Observing the spatial and temporal dynamics of these processes using conventional chemical ecology methods requires techniques that are destructive and/or lack resolution. Neutron radiography has the capability to allow chemical motion through sand/soil to be tracked with high spatial and te…
Neutrons have historically been used for a broad range of biological applications employing techniques such as small-angle neutron scattering, neutron spin echo, diffraction, and inelastic scattering. Unlike neutron scattering techniques that obtain information in reciprocal space, attenuation-based neutron imaging measures a signal in real space that is resolved on the or…
To promote industrial uptake of clean hydrogen production technologies such as polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) water electrolyzers, advancements in catalyst layer (CL) morphology are required. We demonstrate how improved electrochemical performance can be achieved when using an ionomer free porous transport electrode (PTE) coupled with a traditional catalyst coated memb…
Neutron imaging is a non-destructive probe that can spatially resolve bulk materials’ internal features/structures. Neutron imaging spatial resolution is driven by detector technology, i.e., pixel size, and is currently on the order of 10–20 µm. This limitation can be alleviated by the use of neutron grating interferometry – an advanced neutron imaging technique – that ena…
Salt hydrates are a promising thermochemical energy storage medium that stores heat through the reversible uptake (hydration) and release (dehydration) of water vapor. Our study deploys operando neutron imaging to investigate salt hydrate performance with high spatial resolution (42 μm pixels). For flow over a packed bed with diffusion-driven transport, measurements reveal…
Focus herein is on hydrogenous gases interacting with porous-carbon materials on activated biochar at pressures ranging from 0 to 100 bar and temperatures from room (ambient) to cryogenic. Neutron radiography was conducted using a custom-made cell system to simultaneously image pure gas and gas interacting with the porous carbon. From neutron attenuation, the cross section…
Neutron imaging is a powerful tool used for inspecting internal structures and studying macroscale particle dynamics. This work is performed at the Multimodal Advanced Radiography Station (MARS), which is the cold-neutron imaging beamline at the High-Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Herein is a summary of recent upgrades to instrumentation, software,…
Neutron scattering studies of kinetic processes are often flux limited. For processes which can be repeated many times, this can be mitigated by stroboscopic reintegration. The recorded scattering events are assigned to different time slices of the process and corresponding slices from all repetitions are summed up. The normalization of such data with respect to the incide…
Neutron imaging is a non-destructive technique used to study the internal structure and composition of a wide range of materials. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), there are two neutron imaging beamlines that provide complementary capabilities that serve a diverse community, from materials science and engineering to biomedical and plant sciences. This report provide…
Advanced battery characterization using in situ/operando neutron imaging is critical for uncovering degradation modes such as lithium (Li) plating in Li-ion batteries (LIBs). However, conventional LIBs hinder operando neutron radiography (NR) and in situ neutron micro-computed tomography (N-μCT) for visualizing Li plating near the graphite-separator interface due to strong…