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

Nanotube Metrology

Nanotube metrology improvement is a significant effort in the Particles, Tubes and Colloids project dedicated to improving the measurement methods for, and

zCOMPLETED: Macromolecule and Nanoparticle Composition and Architecture

We develop quantitative methods for the analysis of macromolecules having complex architectures and nanoparticles having organic functionalities. Our approaches

Hierarchical Materials

Nature utilizes a hierarchy of length scales and tiered structure to build lightweight, strong, and tough materials. Engineers look to exploit the advantage of

Nanometrology: Composition and Structure of Nanomaterials

Advances in methods, instrumentation and analysis protocols are developed to enhance measurement science capabilities in nanomaterial elemental and

Publications

Fabrication of 3D Printed Hydroxyapatite Composite Scaffolds for Bone Regeneration

May 19, 2021

Author(s)

Yoontae Kim, Eun-Jin Lee, Albert Davydov, Stanislav Frakhtbeyen, Jonathan Seppala, Laurence Chow, Tagaki Shozo, Stella Alimperti

Additive biomanufacturing has been adapted in a wide variety of biomedical and tissue engineering applications, including orthopedics. The ability to print

Comparative study of multiwall carbon nanotube nanocomposites by Raman, SEM, and XPS measurement techniques

March 3, 2021

Author(s)

Yanmei Piao, Vipin Tondare, Chelsea S. Davis, Justin Gorham, Elijah Petersen, Jeffrey W. Gilman, Keana Scott, Andras Vladar, Angela R. 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 Combining Asymmetric Pore Structures with Well-Defined Mesoporosity for Energy Storage and Conversion

November 25, 2020

Author(s)

Sarah Hesse, Kevin Fritz, Peter A. Beaucage, R. Paxton Thedford, Fei Yu, Francis Disalvo, Jin Suntivich, Ulrich Wiesner

Porous materials design often faces a trade-off between the requirements of high internal surface area and high reagent flux. Inorganic materials with

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

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

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

Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy

Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy is a spectroscopic technique in which the vibrational modes of the molecules comprising a material of interest

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