An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories Fiscal Year 2002 (2002) / Chapter Skim
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6 Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory
6 Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory
Pages 179-214
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6 Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory 179
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From page 180... ...
Department of Commerce, Technology Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Materials Reliability Division: FY2001 Programs and Accomplishments, NISTIR 6795, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md., September 2001. Department of Commerce, Technology Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Polymers Division: FY2001 Programs and Accomplishments, NISTIR 6796, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md., September 2001.
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' 1 Ceramics Division · Ceramic Manufacturing · Phase Equilibria · Film Characterization and Properties · Materials Microstructural Characterization · Surface Properties · Data Technologies Materials Reliability Division (Boulder) · Microscale Measurements · Microstructure Sensing · Process Sensing and Modeling Polymers Division · Characterization and Measurement · Electronics Materials · Biomaterials · Multivariant Measurement Methods · Multiphase Materials · Processing Characterization Metallurgy Division · Electrochemical Processing · Magnetic Materials · Materials Performance · Materials Structure and Characterization · Metallurgical Processing NIST Center for Neutron Research · Neutron Condensed Matter Science · Research Facilities Operations Reactor Operations and .
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From page 182... ...
The booklets are a means of disseminating the experience of NIST scientists, who practice measurement science every day, to researchers throughout the country, who may have recourse to these measurement methods only infrequently. MSEL has been a leader within NIST in publishing these Recommended Practice Guides.
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From page 183... ...
bNCNR personnel are excluded from these totals. Information about the center's personnel is available in the section of this chapter titled "Review of the NIST Center for Neutron Research." CThe number of full-time permanent staff is as of January of that fiscal year.
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MSEL has some very good examples of leveraging its human resources through collaborations. Its program in tissue engineering is a particularly good example.
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From page 185... ...
It successfully completed the realignment of the ceramics machining and ceramics manufacturing activities and the coatings activities into the Powder Measurements Program and the Advanced Engine Materials Program. This change entailed directing resources to select, narrow problems such as specific nanoparticle characterization and reliability of thermal barrier coatings.
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The Advanced Manufacturing Methods Program consists almost entirely of a process modeling effort for the manufacture of low-temperature co-fired ceramics. LTCC products are primarily used in hybrid packages for electronics.
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"Advanced engine materials" is a very broad area, encompassing monolithic and composite materials and coatings for diesel and gas turbine engines. The program is focusing on two areas: rolling contact fatigue of silicon nitride and thermal and mechanical properties of thermal barrier coatings.
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As of January 2002, staffing for the division included 52 full-time permanent positions, of which 44 were for technical professionals. There were also 4 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.
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Materials Reliability Division Technical Merit The mission of the Materials Reliability Division is to develop and disseminate measurement methods and standards enhancing the quality and reliability of materials and to provide technical leadership in their introduction to the appropriate industries. The division is organized in three groups: Microscale Measurements, Microstructure Sensing, and Process Sensing and Modeling.
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The Materials Reliability Division also continues as the main source for materials information on issues integral to the nation's infrastructure support. Several examples include work on Charpy impact verification, welding, forensic analysis, and the lead-free solder database.
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In other cases, information is disseminated to customers primarily through participation in consortia, technical publications, and conference presentations, so direct use is harder to gauge. Division Resources Funding sources for the Materials Reliability Division, shown in Table 6.3, remained flat for FY 2001 and FY 2002.
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The Materials Reliability Division is continuing this positive trend by starting collaborations with the Polymers Division in the new health care thrust. In addition, there has been an increase in travel from Boulder to Gaithersburg for training and other presentations.
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The division has six groups: Characterization and Measurement, Electronics Materials, Biomaterials, Multiphase Materials, Processing Characterization, and Multivariant Measurement Methods. The Polymers Division has been instrumental in establishing a project-planning protocol to ensure the coupling of new programs and initiatives to the MSEL mission.
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The focus is principally on dental materials, tissue engineering scaffolds, and metrology for tissue engineering. The dental materials effort is conducted in collaboration with the American Dental Association Health Foundation researchers.
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The optical coherence tomography capability developed over the past several years is being effectively applied in both the biomaterials and composite fields. The Polymers Division has led in the development of multivariant measurements methods by initiating a Gordon Conference on the topic and forming the NIST Combinatorial Methods Center.
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The panel discussed possible areas in which the Polymers Division could use its unique skills to contribute to this national interest. The Multivariant Measurement Methods Program has the goal of developing rapid testing and screening technology for microscale quantities of materials.
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As of January 2002, staffing for the division included 37 full-time permanent positions, of which 32 were for technical professionals. There were also 18 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.
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The Metallurgy Division has provided leadership in the area of phase-diagram calculation and data integrity for many years. This phase-diagram expertise, combinatorial methods for sample preparation, and thermodynamic calculations of diffusion are now being applied to GaN low-resistance contacts of importance to the display and optoelectronics industry, and to superalloy processing.
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As of January 2002, staffing for the division included 39 full-time permanent positions, of which 35 were for technical professionals. There were also 14 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.
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. Technical Merit According to NCNR documentation, the mission of the NCNR is to operate the NIST Research Reactor cost-effectively while assuring the safety of the staff and general public; to develop neutron measurement methods, to develop new applications of these methods, and to apply them to problems of national interest; and to operate the research facilities of the NCNR as a national facility, serving researchers from industry, university, and government.
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; the NCNR Users Group and its Program Advisory Committee; and National Research Council publications, such as this subpanel's annual assessment and the 1999 NRC report on managing the nation's multidisciplinary user facilities.4 The subpanel commends the NCNR staff's awareness of the overall context in which neutron research occurs and the constant evolution of the field. Continual improvement of the NCNR facility is critical, as a user community for SNS will exist only because of those users' experience with and access to existing neutron research centers, of which NCNR is the largest and most effective in the United States.
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A fourth highlight was the characterization of a novel, ribbonlike phase of mixed lipids which aligned in a magnetic field when doped with a rare-earth cation. The Macromolecular and Microstructure Science Team provides the staff support for NCNR's two 30-m SANS instruments; the 8-m SANS currently undergoing upgrade, reconstruction, and conversion to a 9-m SANS; and the (still relatively new)
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This technique is particularly sensitive to the presence of magnetic twists, and it is possible that better understanding of such twists will provide new routes to the development of magnetic thin-film devices. These and the other advances described above are clear evidence that the Surface and Interfacial Science Team is a well-functioning scientific team working at the forefront of its scientific field.
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The team's work includes determining strains and composition versus depth in plasma-sprayed and thermal barrier coatings, evaluating the parameters that control stress and elastic properties in sprayed coatings, determining stresses in new types of welds, relating weld stresses to crack propagation (in a collaboration with a well-known expert in plasticity modeling) , determining local effects on elastic property uncertainties from analytical work and from modeling techniques using object-oriented finite element analysis, and working with the European Committee for Standardization to develop standards for neutron diffraction-based residual stress.
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As with other teams in NCNR, the Chemical Physics Team is making instrument development plans with the goal of becoming complementary to the SNS. Condensed Matter Physics The Condensed Matter Physics Team continues to carry out its strong research program.
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Planning for new projects of biological relevance or actual biology-related research is under way in several of NCNR's scientific groups. In the Macromolecular and Microstructure Science Team, staff will focus on using SANS to study the structure of transmembrane proteins.
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The new cold neutron source is the culmination of several years of designing, machining, welding, and testing. Preliminary measurements of the cold neutron beam from this source indicate that a doubling of flux has been obtained at wavelengths from 0.02 to 1.0 nm, which means that design expectations have been met or exceeded.
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The emphasis on safety is not limited to operations personnel or to the NCNR staff but is also evident in the training and work controls set up for more than 1,500 external users each year. Several new safety enhancements were added to NCNR during the extended shutdown.
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However, the applications for this newly available beam time still exceeded the amount of time being offered; the user base and desire for access to these instruments clearly exist. NCNR staff have recently made a number of commendable efforts to improve user experiences at their facility.
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The Surface and Interfacial Science Team works with an extraordinarily active user community for the reflectivity instruments, whose beam time is always oversubscribed; here the typical mode of operation with outside users is through collaborations. In the Crystallography and Diffraction Applications Team, the availability of on-site staff for assistance with the BT-1 and BT-8 diffractometers is particularly attractive to industrial collaborators, who are often pressed for time and generally have inadequate personnel resources of their own to devote to complex instrument setup.
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Resources Funding sources for the NIST Center for Neutron Research are shown in Table 6.6. As of January 2002, staffing for NCNR included 90 full-time permanent positions, of which 83 were for technical professionals.
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It is vital for staff to have time to perform their own research and to reach out to research communities. Such outreach builds awareness of the applicability of neutron science techniques to a variety of scientific problems, keeps staff informed of new developments in their own fields, and allows NCNR to build a reputation that will assist it in recruiting postdoctoral research associates and permanent staff.
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As mentioned above, one is collaborations or interactions with theorists from other NIST units. A second possibility is a visitors program, although this approach works best when there is a theorist on the permanent staff who can help the visitor connect with the appropriate NCNR staff or if there is a preexisting collaboration between the visitor and NCNR experimentalists.
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Improvements in the data reduction and analysis software available to users, improvements in the support of ancillary instrument equipment, and improvements in the proposal process all responded to concerns expressed by the subpanel and the users and should, therefore, be commended. Major Observations The subpanel presents the following major observations: · The NIST Center for Neutron Research is an essential national user facility with high-quality science, instruments, and reactor operations.
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