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Material Measurement Laboratory / Materials Science and Engineering Division

Polymers and Complex Fluids Group

Projects/Programs

Displaying 1 - 20 of 20

Advanced Composites Pilot for the Materials Genome Initiative

Completed
Many computational programs exist that are being used by industry for predicting properties of polymer composites but their general predictive power is limited by how faithfully the microstructure is represented and how realistically the interfaces are handled. The computations are limited by the
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Carbon Nanotube Reference Materials

Completed
Carbon nanomaterials are expected to play an important role in future technological developments of transistors, photovoltaics, transparent thin film conductors, sensors, and fuel cell electrodes among many potential applications. However, the potential of these materials has been hindered by a lack

Combinatorial Approaches to Thin Film Nanomaterials

Completed
The behavior and performance of nanostructured materials and devices are governed by the chemistry and structure of their surfaces and interfaces. However, chemistry-structure-performance relationships in these systems are complex, so hundreds of experiments can be necessary to determine optimal

Fluid Suspensions and Emulsions

Ongoing
We aim to: Develop measurement capabilities to relate solution structure and viscosity through novel combinations of unique small volume, high shear rate rheometers with scattering and particle-imaging techniques. A major application of these capabilities is understanding self-association in fluids

Macromolecular Architectures

Ongoing
This project’s purpose is to synthesize and characterize model thermoplastics, thermoplastic elastomers (TPE), and mixed resins with systematic variation of polymer sequence, chemistry, and architectures to generate libraries of quantitative structure-property relationships validated by multiple

Macromolecule and Nanoparticle Composition and Architecture

Completed
Bringing new products to market requires measurements for rapid, quantitative assessment of composition and structure. To this end, NIST has developed a series of mass spectrometry-based tools that decrease the time necessary to achieve measurement success while producing more accurate results. The

Micro-rheometry

Completed
One way to develop small-volume rheology methods that we have used successfully is to start with existing concepts and geometries of rheometry and to then "think small." This approach ensures that we are measuring fundamental materials properties rather than quantities that are experiment and
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Modeling Dispersion Rheology for Non-Spherical Particles

Completed
The goal of this MGI project is to establish an interactive database, generated by sophisticated modeling, such as dissipative particle dynamics and smooth particle hydrodynamics, to compute the rheological properties of polymer composites, where interaction among inclusions, inclusion particle

Nanoparticle Assembly in Complex Fluids

Completed
Engineered nanomaterials are promising for technological and medical purposes. However, molecular mechanisms of toxicology are less known. This presents a problem and barrier for future innovation and applications as new nanomaterials are developed for healthcare where particles are intentionally

Nanoscale Thermal Properties

Completed
It is known that at the nanoscale, composition and interface structure play important roles in determining the mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties of multiphase nanomaterials and nanocomposites. To probe the thermal properties of these heterogeneous nanomaterials, local thermal analysis

Nanotube Metrology

Completed
Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are a tubular form of carbon consisting of a single shell of sp2 bonded carbon with a nanometer scale diameter that have many predicted properties superior to other available materials. However, every production technique for SWCNTs produces many different

NIST Combinatorial Methods Center (NCMC)

Completed
Established in 2002, the NCMC combines pioneering research and customer engagement to foster wide-spread adaptation of combinatorial and high-throughput methodologies. NCMC research addresses key challenges faced by polymer researchers who want to employ combi. In particular, the NCMC creates new

Particles, Tubes, and Colloids

Ongoing
Description A highlight of the PTC project is our success in purification of well-defined SWCNT populations using liquid phase separation methods. Although we use multiple techniques and methods, ion exchange chromatography, rate-zonal and isopycnic ultracentrifugation, size exclusion chromatography

Polymer Analytics

Ongoing
This project focuses on a variety of activities to achieve the aforementioned goal of accelerating the discovery of new polymer physics. Polymer databases In collaboration with partners, we build FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reproducible) data resources that enable machine learning

Polymer Formulations

Completed
Bringing new and optimized formulated products to market requires measurements that will allow rapid assessment of the structure and properties of multicomponent mixtures over large parameter spaces. To this end, we are developing microfluidic "lab on a chip" technologies that enable researchers to

Polymer Property Predictor and Database

Ongoing
We aim to generate the data necessary for polymer informatics by developing information extraction pipelines to automatically extract polymer properties from the literature. We use natural language processing software (ChemDataExtractor) to extract both names of chemical entities and properties

Protein rheology measurements

Ongoing
Intended Impact Why does the health-care industry care about rheology and scattering of protein solutions? Operations. Viscosity is a critical and fundamental constitutive input for drug delivery, device design and manufacturing. For example, high viscosity leads to poor syringeability due to

Renewable Polymers

Completed
In this project, use innovative measurements to optimize existing materials synthesis and discover new routes to polymers from renewable feedstocks by providing characterization methods that can describe the mechanisms and of enzymatic catalysis of polymers from renewable feedstocks and synthetic