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Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council produced this video about creating high-quality jobs and high-quality life in Tennessee. View it and contact us to begin your journey.

U-Haul International, Inc released its annual list of the states most Americans moved to during the year, and for the first time, Tennessee ranked No. 1.

See the full list on Forbes.

Which US state produces the most carbon-free power?

Tennessee was named one of the top 10 states in the US that produces carbon-free power.

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When your history on rooted on resilience and determination, on grit and hard work, you’ll have no problem being the first to get up, to volunteer, to go forward. In Tennessee, we put that pioneering spirit into everything we do.

Tennesseans pay second-lowest share of income in state and local taxes of any state according to a new study by HireHelper that compared taxes in all 50 states.

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The amount paid by the typical Tennessean in state and local taxes totaled $2,694 in 2018, which was was 44.4% lower than the national average and the lowest of any state.

The typical Tennessean paid 5.7% of income in property, sales and other state and local taxes, compared with a national average of 8.9% of personal income going for such taxes.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said he is proud of the recognition as a low-tax state and insisted taxes can be kept low “while maintaining a high level of service” to Tennessee taxpayers.

The conservative Nashville think tank the Beacon Group credits Tennessee’s low tax burden for its above-average economic growth rate in recent years.

“There is a reason Tennessee is one of the fastest-growing states in the country and people from Illinois, New York, California, and others are fleeing here,” said Ron Shulis, Beacon’s policy director. “Tennessee’s commitment to low taxes and reasonable regulations has created an economic environment that is attractive to both businesses and workers.”

In the quest for advanced vehicles with higher energy efficiency and ultra-low emissions, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are accelerating a research engine that gives scientists and engineers an unprecedented view inside the atomic-level workings of combustion engines in real time.

The new capability is an engine built specifically to run inside a neutron beam line. This neutronic engine provides a unique sample environment that allows investigation of structural changes in new alloys designed for the environment of a high-temperature, advanced combustion engine operating in realistic conditions.

ORNL first unveiled the capability in 2017, when researchers successfully evaluated a small, prototype engine with a cylinder head cast from a new high-temperature aluminum-cerium alloy created at the lab. The experiment was the world’s first in which a running engine was analyzed by neutron diffraction, using the VULCAN neutron diffractometer at the Department of Energy’s Spallation Neutron Source, or SNS, at ORNL.

The results of the research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, not only proved the hardiness of the unique alloy, but also demonstrated the value of using non-destructive methods such as neutrons to analyze new materials.

Neutrons are deeply penetrating even through dense metals. When neutrons scatter off atoms in a material, they provide researchers with a wealth of structural information down to the atomic scale. In this case, scientists determined how the alloys perform in operating conditions such as high heat and extreme stress or tension to identify even the smallest defects.

The experiment’s success has prompted ORNL to design a purpose-built research engine at industry-relevant scale for use in VULCAN. The capability is based on a two-liter, four-cylinder automotive engine, modified to operate on one cylinder to conserve sample space on the beamline. The engine platform can be rotated around the cylinder axis to give maximum measurement flexibility. The engine is custom designed for neutron research, including the use of fluorocarbon-based coolant and oil, which improves visibility into the combustion chamber.

The capability will provide researchers with the experimental results they need to quickly and accurately vet new materials and improve high-fidelity computational models of engine designs.

“Around the world, industry, national labs and academia are looking at the interface between turbulent combustion that happens in the engine, and the heat transfer process that happens through the solid components,” said Martin Wissink, lead of the project at ORNL. “Understanding and optimizing that process is really key to improving the thermal efficiency of engines.”

“But currently, most of these models have almost no in situ validation data,” he added. “The objective is to fully resolve stress, strain, and temperature in the entire domain over all the metal parts in the combustion chamber.”

The engine has been designed to ORNL specs and is currently undergoing final development with the Southwest Research Institute, and will be commissioned at DOE’s National Transportation Research Center, or NTRC, at ORNL before its first use at SNS, which is expected by late 2021. Both the NTRC and SNS are DOE scientific user facilities, providing access to the most advanced tools of modern science to researchers around the world.

The VULCAN instrument at the SNS is ideal for the research, as it accommodates larger structures, said Ke An, lead scientist for the instrument. VULCAN is designed for deformation, phase transformation, residual stress, texture and microstructure studies. According to An, they are preparing the platform for the neutronic engine with a new exhaust system and other retrofits, including a new control interface for the engine.

“This is what will get people excited, producing results on a larger, state-of-the-art engine,” An said. The neutronic engine “will provide even more options to users seeking to validate their models to resolve issues like stress, strain and temperature. It shows the direct value of neutrons to an important manufacturing sector.”

Measurements from the neutronic engine will be fed into high-performance computing, or HPC, models being developed by scientists to speed breakthroughs for advanced combustion engines.

Researchers are interested in creating accurate predictions of phenomena such as heat losses, flame quenching and evaporation of fuel injected into the cylinder, especially during cold-start engine operations when emissions are often highest. The data from the neutronic engine are expected to provide new understanding of how the temperature of metal engine components changes throughout the engine over the course of the engine cycle.

The resulting high-fidelity models can be quickly run on supercomputers such as Summit, the nation’s fastest and most AI-capable computer. Summit is housed at ORNL as part of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, also a DOE scientific user facility.

“We’re bridging these fundamental science capabilities to applications and making measurements in real engineering devices and systems,” Wissink said. “The full measurement of strains and temperatures in engine components is something that has not been possible before. It’s crucial to have these data as either a validation or as a boundary condition for the HPC models that can be shared with researchers in the automotive industry.”

The neutronic engine augments existing capabilities at ORNL and other national labs in the work to create more energy-efficient and ultra-clean engines, said Robert Wagner, director of ORNL’s Buildings and Transportation Science Division.

“The ability to operate an engine in the neutron beamlines enables us to make unprecedented measurements under realistic engine conditions,” Wagner said. This capability adds to the one-of-a-kind resources that the national laboratories bring to advance the efficiency and emissions of combustion engines, such as the optical engine research at Sandia National Laboratories and with the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.

The power of these unique resources is currently being aligned to solve the most challenging problems through a six-laboratory consortium called Partnership to Advance Combustion Engines, led out of the DOE Vehicle Technologies Office.

“What sets us apart here at ORNL is the portfolio of science available,” Wagner said. “We are making use of the world’s most powerful neutron source, the nation’s fastest supercomputer, and world-class materials science in coordination with our expertise in transportation to take on the grand challenges of a more sustainable energy future.”

The neutronic engine research is primarily supported by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Vehicle Technologies Office. Access to the SNS is supported by DOE’s Office of Science. The research on the aluminum-cerium alloy was sponsored by DOE’s Critical Materials Institute, which is supported by DOE EERE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, along with Eck Industries, which helped develop and test the alloy and has licensed the material.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

The Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research in the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee released its 2021 Economic Report to Governor Lee. Learn more: tiny.utk.edu/ERG2021

The report highlights projected state and national economic growth, unemployment, employment growth by industry, consumer spending and taxable sales.

This year’s report provides a retrospective on the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the Tennessee economy, with a central focus on the labor market and state tax revenue collections.

Here’s some more good news for doing business in Tennessee.

The fiscal stability of a state’s government is vital to ensuring the success of government-sponsored programs and projects and the quality of life of the state’s residents.

Tennessee is the top state for fiscal stability.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/e5dj_M7

This week Rep. Clark Boyd released an op-ed that notes that Tennessee’s business-friendly environment is crucial to ensuring economic recovery. The op-ed titled: Conservative Tennessee Policies Saved Economy from Pandemic and highlights a number of initiatives that Tennessee has focused on over the years that have produced significant economic growth. The publication also highlights where businesses have moved out of other states that have placed substantial operational, regulatory and tax burdens on employers. Rep. Boyd (R-Lebanon) has been chair of the Employee and Consumer Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over a substantial number of crucial business legislative proposals.

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