Composites

News and Updates

A man in a hard hard is holding a clipboard and looking towards a large wind turbine.

An Early Warning System for Damage in Composite Materials

February 18, 2020

A team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a tool to monitor changes in widely used composite materials known as fiber

Multiscale Polymer Dynamics in Hierarchical Carbon Nanotube Grafted Glass Fiber Reinforced Composites

August 27, 2019

NIST researchers utilized a suite of techniques typically reserved to investigate polymer dynamics and structure in nanocomposites with dispersed fillers to

Assessing the Next-Generation Backing Materials for Body Armor Testing

March 28, 2019

A framework of rheological techniques was developed to evaluate a candidate ballistic witness material developed by the U.S. Army.

Projects and Programs

zCompleted - Personal Body Armor

Our goal is to prevent the catastrophic failure of ballistic body armor by developing measurements and predictive models to test and determine the long-term

Polymer Composites

The objective of this project is the develop of tools to measure the fundamental structure-processing and structure -property relations associated with

zCOMPLETED - Combinatorial Approaches to Thin Film Nanomaterials

Our goal is to develop combinatorial library approaches for measuring and optimizing the effect of substrate chemical functionalization on the structure and

Measurements of Point-Defect Chemistry in Complex Oxides

All inorganic materials contain point defects in the form of impurities, interstitials, or vacancies. Common imaging techniques fail to capture these defects

Publications

Comparative Study of Nanocomposites with 0.01% to 1.0% Mass Loading of Multiwall Carbon Nanotube-Polymer Nanocomposites by Raman, SEM and XPS Measurement Techniques

April 1, 2021

Author(s)

Yanmei Piao, Vipin Tondare, Chelsea S. Davis, Justin Gorham, Jeffrey W. Gilman, Keana Scott, Andras Vladar, Angela Hight Walker

Substantial ongoing research efforts are investigating the production of novel composite material enhanced by the incorporation of nanomaterial fillers such as

Optimizing Flame Retardancy and Durability of Melamine-Formaldehyde/Solid-Urban-Waste Composite Panels

February 26, 2021

Author(s)

Mauro Zammarano, Carola Esposito Corcione, Francesca Ferrari, Raffaella Striani, Laura J. Dubrulle, Paolo Visconti, Antonio Greco

In our previous study, an innovative method for sterilization, inertization, and valorization of organic fraction of the municipal solid waste (OFMSW), to be

Materials Research & Measurement Needs for Ceramics Additive Manufacturing

November 1, 2020

Author(s)

Andrew J. Allen, Igor Levin, Suzanne E. Witt

We report on a recent workshop dedicated to additive manufacturing (AM) of ceramics that was held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Particle Size Distributions for Cellulose Nanocrystals Measured by Transmission Electron Microscopy: An Interlaboratory Comparison

October 6, 2020

Author(s)

John E. Bonevich, Juris Meija, Bushell Michael, Martin Couillard, Kai Cui, Johan Foster, Douglas M. Fox, Markus Heidelmann, Byong Chon Park, Lingling Ren, Aleksandr B. Stefaniak, Ralf Theissmann, Natalia de Val Alda, Linda Johnston

Particle size is one of the key parameters that must be measured to ensure reproducible production of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) from various types of

Software

Custom Lifetime Imaging Platform (CLIP)

CLIP is an analysis program for fluorescence lifetime images. It provides the user with the ability to fit or calculate the phasor plots for lifetime decays

Tools and Instruments

Differential Scanning Calorimeter

Differential Scanning Calorimetry, or DSC, is a classic thermoanalytical measurement performed on many different types of materials. In our laboratory, it is

Picture of the sample area of the NIST X-ray Adsorbtion Fine Structure instrument, with NIST scientist Bruce Ravel, located at the National Synchrotron Light Source.

X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (XAFS)

The XAFS station uses a tunable, monochromatic, and moderately high energy X-ray beam (4.5 keV to 23.5 keV) for X-ray absorption spectroscopy measurements. The

High Throughput (Combinatorial) Screening Tool for Characterization of Thin Film Thermoelectrics as a Function Temperature

High-throughput (combinatorial) metrologies have evolved as a useful approach to rapidly determine the composition-structure-property relationships for novel

Positron Annihilation Lifetime Spectrometer

Positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy uses positrons to probe material defects/voids/free volume at the sub-nm scale. The general working principle is

Awards

2017 American Physical Society Fellow

Congratulations to Chris Stafford (Functional Polymers Group) for being selected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society for 2017. He

image of a 3D volume reconstruction of a forest of carbon nanotubes (CNT) embedded in epoxy

Natarajan Wins FEI Image Award

One of the November winners of the 2016 FEI Image Contest