Johney Green, director of Savannah River National Laboratory and president and CEO of Battelle Savannah River Alliance, LLC, congratulated a Savannah River National Laboratory’s team on winning the lab's second consecutive R&D 100 Award.
Green said the accomplishment was achieved through collaboration across seven research institutions.
In a similar social media post, a national laboratory executive and member of the National Academy of Engineering shared that America's national labs led more than 50% of the 2026 top 100 award-winning technologies.
Also noteworthy was how the results underscore the role of the national labs in translating scientific breakthroughs into innovations, with real world impact during the 60-year span that R&D World has annually recognized the world’s 100 most significant new technologies.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that it won 22 R&D 100 Awards in 2026, making this the third year in a row its total has grown.
The press release highlights that these technologies help advance fields like energy, manufacturing, computing, and biotechnology.
The R&D 100 Awards honor 100 of the year’s most important new products and innovations. This year, winners were chosen from 149 finalists, including 28 projects involving Oak Ridge, with entries from universities, companies, and government labs around the world.
Among Oak Ridge’s winners is a Multi-Event Grid Intelligence Platform for Wildfire Prevention and Resilience.
R&D World magazine also named ORNL’s Parans Paranthaman the 2026 Researcher of the Year for his work in materials science, energy technology, and advanced manufacturing.
ORNL’s 2026 R&D 100 Award winners include an affordable Efficient Thermoelectric Dishwasher with Enhanced Drying.
Developed with Samsung Electronics America, this dishwasher uses a solid-state heat pump and wastewater heat recovery to cut energy use and improve drying.
The Multi-Event Grid Intelligence Platform for Wildfire Prevention and Resilience, created with Southern California Edison, uses artificial intelligence to spot and classify power grid conditions that could lead to wildfires, equipment damage, or blackouts.
Another winner, the Geothermal Heat Pump Web-Based Integrated Simulation and Economic Analysis Tool, developed with Oklahoma State University, is a web platform that quickly checks if geothermal energy is a good fit for buildings, campuses, and communities by automating energy modeling and infrastructure sizing.
The Distributed Controller for Networked Microgrids, made with New Sun Road and Casa Pueblo, helps coordinate electricity transfers between connected microgrids to boost reliability and resilience while lowering costs.
The Multiplexing Extrusion System, developed with the University of Maine, is a 3D printing system that can deposit several materials at once in a single printed bead, doubling output and allowing new combinations of materials.
A polyphase Wireless Power Transfer System with Rotating Magnetic Fields, developed with BMW Group, is a compact wireless vehicle charger that delivers twice the power of current systems, takes up 61 percent less space, and keeps charging efficiency above 95 percent.
Pastree, developed with the Florida Industrial and Phosphate Research Institute, makes it easier and cheaper to recover rare earth elements and other valuable materials from phosphate industry by-products.
Materials science, energy technology, and advanced manufacturing
A new residential oven, developed with Whirlpool Corporation, uses fiberglass composites and thermoset polymers instead of steel to lower energy use while still cooking well.
Another technology, developed with Captis Aire, turns waste terpenes from the wood industry into hydrocarbons that can be used in sustainable aviation fuel.
One innovation controls how fuel particle is placed, rather than relying on random packing, which increases fuel density and could extend fuel cycles.
Another process converts carbon dioxide directly into high-purity graphitic carbon at 550 degrees Celsius, much lower than the temperatures needed for traditional graphite production, making it less energy-intensive to produce battery-grade graphite.
ORNL researchers also created a molten-salt system that turns waste polyethylene and other plastics into gasoline- and diesel-range hydrocarbons under mild conditions.
This technology uses cheap, recyclable salts as both solvent and catalyst, so there’s no need for expensive metal catalysts, organic solvents, or extra hydrogen.
The Neutral Extractant Advanced Rare Earth Separation Technology uses a new two-ligand method to separate rare earth elements while using fewer chemicals, creating less waste, and lowering costs compared to standard methods.
A low-cost composite, developed with the California Institute of Technology, uses wastewater algae and farm leftovers to make materials for things like lightweight panels, packaging, and insulation.
Another process, developed with the National Laboratory of the Rockies, uses a specially engineered heat-loving microbe to turn plastic waste into a more valuable industrial chemical in one step.
A prototype biotechnology platform cuts the time needed to add new DNA to heat-loving industrial microbes from about four weeks to just three days, speeding up the development of new biotechnologies for high-temperature manufacturing.
An artificial intellignce technology developed by ORNL and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences predicts gene activity in tissues that are hard to sample by using data from tissues that are easier to access.
ORNL also developed LuGo, a software framework that makes quantum computing faster and more efficient. LuGo improves a key quantum algorithm by generating circuits over 50 times faster and reducing quantum gates and circuit depth by more than 30 times, all without losing accuracy.