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Physical Sciences and Engineering

Collaborative Research

Argonne’s collaborations with other labs, companies, and academic institutions are vital to ensuring the success of our research efforts. The laboratory is home to a number of world-class user facilities that host hundreds of scientists annually.

ACCESS

Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science

Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) is a powerful collaborative of scientists and engineers from across Argonne that solves energy storage problems through multidisciplinary research. ACCESS is the key that unlocks the potential of energy storage, helping public and private-sector customers turn science into solutions.

EFRC

Energy Frontier Research Centers

Argonne plays a key role in several U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) programs. These integrated, multi-investigator centers involve partnerships among universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit firms that conduct fundamental research focusing on one or more ​“grand challenges.”

Center for Molecular Imaging

Center for Molecular Engineering

The Center for Molecular Engineering (CME), housed at Argonne in the Materials Science Division, is addressing a set of key research areas that seek to produce key advances in a number different areas. Each one aims at a major societal problem of global significance: Arts, Sciences, and Technology; Energy Storage and Harvesting; Immuno-Engineering and Cancer; Molecular Engineering of Water Resources; Quantum Information and Technology; and Nano-Patterning and Nanolithography.

MICCoM

MICCoM

Headquartered at Argonne National Laboratory, the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials (MICCoM) develops and disseminates interoperable open source software, data and validation procedures, enabling the community to simulate and predict properties of functional materials for energy conversion processes. Emphasis is on interfaces, the transport across them, and the manipulation of matter under conditions far from equilibrium.

CPSFM

Center for Predictive Simulation of Functional Materials

The Center for Predictive Simulation of Functional Materials develops, applies, validates, and disseminates parameter-free methods, open source codes, and scientific data to predict and explain the properties of functional materials for energy applications. The Center aims to quantitatively predict, analyze, and eventually design functional materials with tailored properties that will accelerate new materials development and bring enabling and essential clarity to our modeling and understanding of functional materials.

Advanced Materials for Energy-Water Systems

Advanced Materials for Energy-Water Systems

A huge number of the challenges we face surrounding water center on the interface between water and the materials that make up the systems that handle, process and treat water. Gaining a deeper understanding of what takes place when water — and matter dissolved or suspended in water — comes into contact with those solids is the focus of the Argonne-led Advanced Materials for Energy-Water Systems (AMEWS) effort. For example, in many water systems, a phenomenon known as fouling — the accumulation of unwanted material on solid surfaces to the detriment of function — occurs at interfaces. Another area AMEWS is exploring is reactivity, or chemical reactions, at interfaces. Argonne is partnering with the University of Chicago and Northwestern University on the four-year effort.