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Materials / Materials characterization

Composition & structure

Projects/Programs

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Multifunctional 3D Printable Polymer-Metal Composites

Ongoing

1. Phase-Change Polymer–Metal Composites with Tunable Thermal Conductivity Recent advances in additive manufacturing (AM) have positioned metals and polymers as two key materials. Typically, AM of these two materials involves incompatible methods and conditions. This project addresses that challenge...

Nanometrology: Composition and Structure of Nanomaterials

Ongoing

Pushing the Limits of Measurement Accuracy in Atom Probe Mass Spectrometry Nanoscale Analysis of Biological and Organic Materials Release from Nanocomposite Consumer Products

Nanoscale Spectroscopy for Advanced Electronics, Quantum Materials and Devices

Ongoing

Semiconductor technologies are critical to U.S. economic and national security as they are essential to modern life in communications, healthcare, energy, etc. and also underpin many emerging technologies like quantum, super intelligence, high power electronics and advanced wireless (6G+). The next...

Carbon Nanotubes imaged via Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscope.

Nanotube Quality Control

Completed

Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) is widely used to gather data on nanotube chemistry. By monitoring weight loss as a function of temperature, one can determine decomposition kinetics and use this data to closely approximate the distribution of impurities present in a few milligrams of material...

NCAL: Data Management

Ongoing

In the mechanical testing and materials science communities there is not a widely accepted solution for data management of test data. As part of NIST efforts on data archiving, provenance, and availability, we have worked to improve our data practices. We have extended our system beyond many out-of...

NCAL: Quantifying Crystallographic Texture and Phase Fraction

Ongoing

Predicting the deformation and force response of a polycrystalline material with the level of accuracy needed by today’s manufacturers requires knowledge of the aggregate deformation and force response of all the grains in the material. Polycrystalline materials will respond differently depending on...

Open Port Liquid Interface Mass Spectrometry

Ongoing

Rapid screening for chemical traces of explosives and narcotics is widely used to support homeland security and law enforcement. These target compounds span a range of physicochemical properties from organic to inorganic, with preferential ionization pathways in both negative and positive mode...

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...

Schematic of selective transport of water, ions, or molecules across a polymer membrane.

Polymer Membranes

Ongoing

In Situ Sorption Measurements We develop and apply coupled techniques to probe chemical interactions during membrane operation: Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) for mass uptake Polarization Modulation Infrared Reflection Absorption Spectroscopy (PM-IRRAS) for chemical speciation In-situ...

Pushing the Limits of Measurement Accuracy in Atom Probe Mass Spectrometry

Ongoing

Isotopic Analysis for Isotopic Geochemistry, Nuclear Safety, and Materials Science : Atom probe tomography has a significant advantage over other forms of mass spectrometry, which typically have a combined efficiency < 5%, in terms of ionization and detection efficiency. Commercial atom probe...

Stroboscopic TEM for Ultrafast Materials Science

Completed

Our people: June Lau co-invented the stroboscopic microscope and had been with this project since inception. She is a physicist, and the PI of this project. She received 2 non-provisional patents for the design of the microscope, and one provisional patent on a specimen holder for microwave delivery...

Structural Metrology of Advanced Manufacturing Processes

Ongoing

Understanding material structures in advanced manufacturing is crucial because it enables precise control over material properties, leading to improved performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in production processes. However, this understanding poses many challenges, such as the...

Study of Microheterogeneity in Solid Reference Materials

Ongoing

Presently there are a variety of analytical techniques that are served by few or no reference materials due to the small sample sizes they require. NIST currently certifies solid reference materials at or above the 100 mg mass level in most cases with no mention of the effect of using smaller sample...

Sub-nanoscale electron microscopy of complex nanostructures

Ongoing

The properties of advance materials are becoming ever more reliant on the ability to manipulate their chemistry and structure at very fine length scales. For example, the relevant feature sizes in state-of-the-art transistors continue to decrease, even as the complexity of the architectures employed...

Sustainable Metals Processing and Alloy Development

Ongoing

Foundational measurement science is being developed to support sustainable innovations through alloy design and optimization. The integration of experiments and computational thermodynamics and kinetics tools with mechanistic models enables the prediction of key processing-structure-property...

Synchrotron X-ray Absorbance Spectroscopy

Ongoing

The Absorbance Spectroscopy effort seeks to develop measurements that provide details of the local chemical, electronic, and physical structure in advanced materials. Spectrometer technology is developed as part of the NIST BNL partnership at the National Synchrotron Light Source II in Upton, NY...

Exploded cross section diagram representing the simplified structure layers in a MOSFET transistor.

Transport Property Measurements for Semiconductors and Energy Materials

Ongoing

The image above is an exploded cross section diagram representing the simplified structure layers in a MOSFET transistor. Thermoreflectance (TR) laser-based measurement techniques, a key focus of this project, can measure the thermal properties of substrates, thin films, multilayer structures, and...

X-ray Testbed for Breakthrough Catalyst Measurements

Ongoing

Interested in collaborating? See below What does this project do for industry? Current measurement techniques are unable to follow the reaction pathways during catalysis and are limited to observing only the end products or looking at catalysts outside of realistic reaction conditions. Our new...

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