Composites

News and Updates

With Fuzzy Nanoparticles, Researchers Reveal a Way to Design Tougher Ballistic Materials

December 13, 2021

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Columbia Engineering have discovered a new method to improve the toughness of

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

Projects and Programs

Metrologies for Non-linear Materials in Impact Mitigation

Ongoing

First responders, athletes, consumers, and the military rely on protective equipment to prevent blunt trauma from an impact. Understanding of the relationship

The SPMforAMP project develops novel SPM methods

Scanning Probe Microscopy for Advanced Materials and Processes

Ongoing

Local material-property information is essential to evaluate emerging micro- and nanoscale materials, which many manufacturers would like to leverage for their

Nanoscale Thermal Properties

Completed

Our goal is to develop measurement techniques to characterize the changes in thermal transport and thermal transition temperatures in polymeric and hybrid

NIST Combinatorial Methods Center (NCMC)

Completed

Our goal is to enable industrial acquisition of combinatorial and high-throughput measurement approaches for polymeric materials research and development

Publications

Fire Performance of Upholstery Materials: Correlation between Cube Test and Full-Scale Chair Mock-Ups

November 17, 2021

Author(s)

Mauro Zammarano

In our previous work, the fire performance of seven upholstery materials combinations - including six barrier fabrics, one cover fabric and one flexible

Activation of Mechanophores in a Thermoset Matrix by Instrumented Scratch

November 17, 2021

Author(s)

Chelsea S. Davis, Jeremiah Woodcock, Ryan Beams, Mitchell Rencheck, Muzhou Wang, Stephan J. Stranick, Aaron M. Forster, Jeffrey Gilman

Scratches in polymer coatings and barrier layers negatively impact optical properties (haze, light transmission, etc.), initiate routes of degradation or

SHARING STANDARDIZED COMPOSITE MATERIAL DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING INFORMATION

September 1, 2021

Author(s)

Allison Barnard Feeney, Keith A. Hunten

Composite structures have been developed for use in aerospace, automotive, sports and marine industries since the early 1940s. Compared to conventional metallic

Temperature-insensitive silicone composites as ballistic witness materials: the impact of water content on the thermophysical properties

July 28, 2021

Author(s)

Ran Tao, Fan Zhang, Huong Giang Nguyen, Philip Bernstein, Amanda L. Forster, Randy Mrozek, Aaron M. Forster

In this work, different formulations of a room-temperature silicone composite backing material (SCBM) composed of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), fumed silica and

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