Fatigue and Fracture Group

The Fatigue and Fracture Group is part of the Applied Chemicals and Materials Division (ACMD) on the NIST Boulder campus. The Group develops new methods for evaluating mechanical performance and is especially focused on linking relatively small-scale laboratory tests with real world failure conditions. They provide SRMs, measurement services, critical property data, predictive models and science to ensure materials reliability against fatigue and fracture especially for structural applications (e.g., buildings, bridges, pipelines, and some medical devices). They assist government agencies, industry, and universities in assessing material durability under extreme operational and environmental conditions and by conducting failure analysis post-mortem. The group performs mechanical testing over a wide range of temperatures, pressures, chemical conditions and size scales ranging from micrometers to meters.