National Transportation Research Center
Welcome to a User Facility dedicated to Transportation R&D;
Located a few miles down the road from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Transportation Research Center houses several highly-sophisticated, experimental ORNL research laboratories that constitute the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Transportation Research Center User Facility (NTRC).
As a User Facility, NTRC offers industry, academia, and other agencies the opportunity to access state-of-the-art technologies, equipment and instrumentation, and computational resources to advance transportation technologies. These resources are critical to their efforts in the areas of improving fuel economy, reducing emissions and addressing transportation systems issues, such as traffic congestion, evacuation planning and highway safety.
- More than 55,000 square feet of research laboratory space
- High bay space
- 80,000-pound pit reference scale
- Engine and chassis dynamometers
- Analytical chemistry laboratory
- Catalysis function laboratory
- Fuel cell laboratory with evaluation capabilities for cells up to 3 kW
- Unique diagnostic tools for in situ chemical speciation and catalysis surface analysis
- Wide bandgap device evaluation facility
- DOE’s largest open access Battery Manufacturing Facility
- Fuels, Engines, and Emissions Research Center
- Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Laboratory
- Vehicle Integration Laboratory
- Transportation Analysis and Visualization Laboratory
- Access to ORNL world-class supercomputing, visualization, and materials science capabilities
- Uninterrupted power backup for entire laboratory
- Co-located with ORNL’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility
- Center for Transportation Analysis
In addition to serving users, ORNL conducts approximately one-half of all its transportation research at NTRC. The nearly 200 ORNL employees based at NTRC work closely with government agencies, industry and universities through non-user facility partnerships including public-domain work for federal agencies, DOE-funded partnerships with industry, and proprietary contracts conducted on behalf of automotive companies and suppliers, large and small. Approximately 50 employees from The University of Tennessee Center for Transportation Research work at NTRC where they operate several transportation laboratories and occasionally collaborate with ORNL.
Facility Resources
ORNL staff based at NTRC offer an unusually broad set of technical expertise to bear on the research problems users address. Included on the facility’s roster are staff members from a range of engineering and physical science disciplines, urban planners, statisticians, mathematicians, geographers, and specialists from a dozen other fields of endeavor. They represent several principal ORNL research centers and groups for advancing transportation systems.
The Center for Transportation Analysis researchers are focused on improving the safety, efficiency, and security of the nation's transportation systems. Their areas of study include not only passenger and freight transportation systems, but also aviation safety and air traffic management, and a range of issues related to planning, simulation, and intelligent transportation systems. Research at the facility centers around four transportation-related areas: congestion and delay, energy and environment, asset management and logistics, and safety and security.
The Fuels, Engines, and Emissions Research Center researchers help identify ways to increase automotive efficiency and reduce emissions by performing research on engines and other automotive components, basic chemistry, materials, lubricants, and fuels. The relationships between fuel properties, engine performance, and emissions are studied with fuels from conventional and unconventional fossil-based sources and nonpetroleum fuels from synthetic and renewable sources such as ethanol and biodiesel.
In the Packaging Research Laboratory researchers are engaged in the development of advanced power electronics modules for electric vehicles. Research and development is targeted to achieve comprehensive improvements in efficiency, functionality, reliability and cost effectiveness of power electronics modules.
The Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Research Laboratory researchers develop and prototype the next generation of power electronics and electric machines that will increase hybrid vehicle efficiency, reliability and durability while reducing component cost, weight and volume. Major areas of research include development of advanced power electronics packaging and topologies, high-performance motor technology that does not use permanent magnets, wireless charging, component benchmarking, and ongoing evaluations of hybrid drivetrains.
The Vehicle Systems Integration (VSI) Laboratory offers unique capabilities to evaluate and simulate engines, electric motors, and transmissions in conventional and hybrid powertrain configurations for vehicles ranging from light-duty cars to Class 8 trucks. The VSI Lab is changing the pace of powertrain development by performing prototype research and characterization of advanced systems and components. Housed at NTRC, the VSI Lab comprises a powertrain test cell with twin AVL 500 kW AC transient dynamometers and a component test cell – both share energy storage system emulation and dSPACE hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) real-time platform capabilities. The VSI Lab also features “X”-in-the-loop hardware evaluation of powertrain components and/or subsystems in virtual vehicle environments, where “X” represents any experimental component or subsystem.
The Battery Manufacturing Facility with a dual dry room operation complements ORNL's existing energy storage concentration on materials testing and characterization. Housing equipment for nondestructive evaluations and inline quality control, the lab's focus includes developing and refining new technologies for materials processing and battery assembly to innovate manufacturing procedures. This is the largest open research dry room-cell assembly lab in the DOE system.
The Transportation Analysis and Visualization Laboratory (TRAVL) is a state-of-the-art, 32-seat facility designed to showcase ORNL-developed transportation modeling and simulation tools. With enough processing power for 15 high-definition 3-D graphics panels, the TRAVL lab facilitates researchers' requirements for the most advanced real-time simulation modeling collaborations and visual sharing of findings and results. The TRAVL Lab is maintained by the Center for Transportation Analysis.
ORNL’s Sustainable Transportation Program is also based at NTRC. Program staff members work closely with scientists and engineers across research disciplines to integrate transportation research taking place at NTRC and at the main ORNL campus. These research efforts include studies of vehicles and fuel, the mobility of passengers and freight, the nation’s transportation infrastructure, and energy distribution systems that support transportation. The program supports a number of federal and private research organizations that fund research at the laboratory, including DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies, Biomass, and Fuel Cell Technologies programs; the Department of Transportation; the Environmental Protection Agency; various industries; and other partners.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy
