Welcome

For nearly 50 years, our Division has helped ensure the reliability of the Nation’s civil infrastructure, including its extensive (and rapidly aging) network of buildings, bridges, highways, railways, etc. Most recently, in partnership with the Department of Transportation, we have applied our expertise to the safety of the nearly 2.4 million miles of oil & gas pipelines in the U.S. By introducing new test methods, we hope to broaden the choices of materials available for repair and replacement ultimately extending their lifetime.

More than a decade ago, we began transitioning our expertise in large-scale mechanical testing to the increasingly smaller scale materials used in the microelectronics industry. This was critical as material behavior undergoes fundamental changes in mechanical response as dimensions shrink. We helped pioneer microtensile testing, including its use inside a scanning electron microscope (SEM), so that this industry could better understand differences between bulk and thin film materials. Currently, we are developing and exploiting completely new approaches for in situ characterization of ultrathin films and patterned structures, buried interfaces, and isolated nanostructures.

Finally, we are adapting our microscale measurement methods to test live cells and tissues, as well as synthetic materials intentionally used inside the body (e.g., in implantable cardiac devices). Cells and tissues are highly adaptive, making them one of the most complex types of materials to characterize. At the same time, the body represents an extremely harsh environment due to its continually evolving chemistry. We are developing a range of test platforms for cell and tissue mechanics and integrating unique ways to test the reliability of biomaterials as a function of their local environment.