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Materials Science and Engineering Division
The Materials Science and Engineering Division is dedicated to the research and development of materials measurement science, standards, technology, and data. It supports the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Material Measurement Laboratory’s (MML’s) mission in advanced manufacturing, including the Materials Genome Initiative 2.0, additive manufacturing, and biomanufacturing. The division also has programs in advanced electronics, the circular economy, climate, and the environment. Many of the topics are cross-cutting programs, and some programs are shared with other laboratories of NIST.
The division is made up of six groups. During this assessment, each group presented an overview of selected programs to the panelists. The six groups are the Polymers and Complex Fluids Group, Functional Polymers Group, Polymer Processing Group, Functional Nanostructured Materials Group, Mechanical Performance Group, and Thermodynamics and Kinetics Group.
The division also hosted two laboratory tours and a forum with postdoctoral fellows and early career researchers.
The division leads or collaborates with internal and external stakeholders on diverse programs important to the innovation and competitiveness of the nation’s manufacturing. A few notable programs include the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design, Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science, NIST Center for Automotive Lightweighting, and Additive Manufacturing Benchmarks.
The division has 161 staff members at the time of this assessment; these include 60 permanent staff, 21 term employees, 20 postdoctoral fellows, and 60 associates. In 2020, there were 151 staff, indicating the total staff count has increased by 10 over the past 3 years. The division’s staff represents about 19 percent of the total MML staff. The division’s budget for 2023 was about $30 million, which is flat compared to 2020 when MML was last assessed. The average annual funding per full-time employee was about $186,000 in 2023.
The division’s impact is closely connected to its collaboration with industry, government agencies, academic partners, standard organizations, and the dissemination of its research. The division holds an outstanding publication record, which includes 375 archival journals, 34 database publications, 16 NIST reports, 14 conference papers, and 6 book chapters since the past assessment. The division also has strong engagement with customers. It had 16 cooperative research and development agreements, hosted 2 consortia, and led or participated in 24 workshops in the past 3 years. The division’s dissemination includes data, open-source software, and active participation in 96 standard committees with more than 21 leadership positions.
The scientific accomplishments and services of the division’s researchers have been recognized by NIST and the Department of Commerce as well as by peers in professional societies. These awards include the Arthur S. Flemming Award, the NIST William P. Slichter Award, National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow, Microscopy Today Innovation Award, and fellowship of the American Physical Society, ASM International, and the Society of Rheology.
ASSESSMENT OF TECHNICAL PROGRAMS
The division determines the scope and the priorities of its research programs annually, with guidance from the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology. One overarching division theme is leveraging its strength and core competences to advance science and technology in materials science, measurement technology, standards, and data to enhance U.S. manufacturing competitiveness in industries such as automobile, aviation, chemical, biotechnology, defense, pharmaceutical, and semiconductor. The division recruits and retains top-notch researchers and the quality of research is outstanding.
The Materials Science and Engineering Division supports the nation’s need to design, develop, manufacture, and use materials. As such, the division interacts extensively with some of the leading players (with an aggregate 2022 annual revenue of more than $2 trillion) in industry. The division has had outstanding engagements with stakeholders in the semiconductor, and additive and automotive manufacturing industries, as well as the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. However, stakeholder engagement was not as clear in some other areas. The long-term impact of the division’s programs on the nation’s economy and innovations was not adequately documented and reported.
Researchers in the division developed unique multimodal capabilities to probe material composition, structures, and properties or functionalities simultaneously with wide ranges of spatial and temporal scales, coupled with modeling and simulation, to gain knowledge and provide insights for industrial applications. Some of the examples are highlighted below. The programs discussed below cut across the divisions research groups and involve collaboration with other parts of NIST and stakeholders outside of NIST.
Accomplishments and Challenges in Selected Programs
Advanced Manufacturing
The Materials Science and Engineering Division has a strong advanced manufacturing program, aimed at revitalizing the nation’s manufacturing capabilities and the associated infrastructure. Advanced manufacturing is a cross-cutting theme within the division. It includes additive manufacturing with metals and polymers, advanced composites, the NIST Center for Automotive Lightweighting, biomanufacturing, and the nSoft consortium. The division leads a NIST-wide effort on additive manufacturing benchmarking to create a comprehensive benchmark database to validate numerical models over the full range of additive manufacturing processes.
As with other NIST programs, the division has engaged key external and internal stakeholders in advanced manufacturing to maximize its impact. External industrial partners are major players in manufacturing sectors such as automobile, aviation, biotechnology, chemical, defense, and pharmaceutical. Examples of these companies include 3M, Amgen, Boeing, Dow, Ford, General Motors, PPG, and Raytheon.
The division capitalizes on its strength in developing multimodal measurement techniques—many proprietary—to elucidate relationships between material composition, processing, structure, and properties or performance. These unique capabilities allow simultaneous spatial and temporal measurements of structure and performance over large swaths of time and space.
When division researchers encountered unavoidable challenges over the past 3 years, they rose to the occasion. For example, when some NIST facilities were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers in the division developed a mobile multimodal measurement module and shipped it around the world to maintain research momentum.
Advanced Electronic Materials
NIST has a long history of research on semiconductor technology and electronic materials. It is a recognized national center of excellence and is entrusted to administer the $50 billion CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. The Materials Science and Engineering Division will be a key part of this NIST effort. The division has a track record of fruitful collaborations with major players and key consortia in the semiconductor industry to develop technology roadmaps, spur innovations, and advance semiconductor measurements and manufacturing technologies. The external stakeholders include companies such as IBM, Intel, Honeywell, KLA, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company; and consortia like the Semiconductor Research Corporation.
The division has a strong program in semiconductor lithography in X-ray-based dimensional metrology and photoresist materials. The metrology technology, called CDSAXS, employs X-rays to nondestructively measure high aspect-ratio, nano-scale critical features on 300-mm wafers, a feat that had been elusive to traditional semiconductor metrology methods. This exemplary technology has been adopted for manufacturing leading-edge three-dimensional memory products worldwide. The current focus is on providing the industry with standard reference materials for this measurement technology. This program’s collaborators encompass semiconductor industry giants, including those who produce electronics products and those who create materials, equipment, process lines, and characterization tools for manufacturing electronics products.
Another focus area in semiconductor lithography is materials measurements technology for advanced photoresist materials. This work dates to foundational work at NIST in the early 2000s and has become increasingly important as the industry moves to extreme ultraviolet lithography for manufacturing the 5 nm node of electronic products and beyond. The division has been working on chemically specific direct measurements of nanoscale lateral interfaces that have greater relevance for new photoresist materials in extreme ultraviolet lithography.
Additionally, the division has an active program in electrochemical deposition of electrical conductors for the semiconductor industry. Researchers in the division demonstrated copper conformation super filling, which is important for wafer fabrications and advanced packaging.
Finally, the division pioneered research on biological ways to sort and place semiconducting carbon nanotubes as a potential future transistor technology to extend Moore’s Law. Recent work on DNA templated dense carbon nanotube arrays is an important step toward future high-density, high-performance, and energy-efficient electronics.
The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 investment is expected to significantly boost the division’s advanced electronic materials research in the coming years.
Sustainability
The division’s sustainability work is focused on three areas: (1) the circular economy of plastics, (2) polymer membranes for clean water, and (3) carbon dioxide (CO2) capture.
The division partnered with major polyolefins manufacturers to advance measurement science through the synthesis of plastics with systematic variations of polymer sequence, chemistry, and chain architectures. This work led to a curated data and analysis framework of correlated measurements for post-consumer plastic identification and sorting facilities.
In a project focused on clean water, the division partnered with industry stakeholders to develop and advance integrated measurement platforms to characterize the key structural, thermodynamic, and kinetic properties of polymer membranes and sorbents that govern water and small molecule transport. This work led to design cues for water membranes with controlled chemistry, structure, and thickness; and standard testing protocols for the industry.
In the CO2 capture project, the division endeavors to achieve CO2 capture and the energy efficient, selective, and high-throughput conversion of CO2 into chemical feedstocks and other specialty products.
While the plastics and CO2 research quality is outstanding, the programs’ long-term impacts are not adequately documented and reported.
Recommendation 8-1: The Materials Science and Engineering Division should develop more coordinated technical and stakeholder engagement plans for its effort in carbon dioxide capture and the circular economy of plastics and track the long-term impacts of the division’s programs on the nation’s economy and related innovations.
Data Science and Data Infrastructure
The Materials Science and Engineering Division collects, stores, analyzes, and transmits data in the course of all of its research, measurement, standards-making, and dissemination activities. Data science is an integral and increasingly important part of the division’s work to meet its mission. Within MML, the Office of Data and Informatics is a dedicated, service-oriented data resource for physical sciences with domain expertise in biological, chemical, and materials sciences, specializing in large and information-rich data sets.
The division’s efforts in data science are highlighted in three areas: (1) the Materials Genome Initiative 2.0; (2) Additive Manufacturing Benchmarking—a NIST-wide effort to create a comprehensive benchmark database for additive manufacturing; and (3) the NIST Center for Automotive Lightweighting data management system. In addition, the Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science provides a scientist-run, flexible production environment and testing ground for the development of new scientific software tools, computational workflows, and data management. This high-performance computing center hosts computers for both a shared public cluster (comprising approximately 70 compute nodes and 100 TB of data storage) and several private high-performance computing systems and clusters.
The Materials Genome Initiative 2.0 is an evolution from the Materials Genome Initiative 1.0. It focuses on data and informatics, laboratory automation, high-throughput computing, and artificial intelligence and machine learning methods. The goal is to accelerate materials discoveries and innovations by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (ChiMad) is an extension and integral part of the Materials Genome Initiative. It developed broad research and outreach programs that involve participants from universities and NIST, and from automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, and polymer industries. It has made tremendous progress by integrating traditional computational materials tools with artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate material discovery and the technology deployment cycles. Since its inception, the center has published more than 600 papers and supported 14 dedicated NIST postdocs.
The center’s active collaboration with industry has led to tangible results. For example, its researchers designed a new printable die-cast steel to enable Tesla Gigacasting and has transferred computational tools and data management approaches to major companies such as Intel and 3M. The center’s researchers have also pioneered tools for the inverse design of sustainable plastics and nontoxic additives—tools that are highly sought after by industrial partners such as 3M, PPG, Solvay, and Apple in their efforts to transition into sustainable, fully recoverable materials cycles of use and reuse.
The Center for Hierarchical Materials Design has produced many fruitful outcomes and is coming to a natural end. The division’s programs associated with the center will be redirected to other NIST priorities.
The Additive Manufacturing Benchmarking program aims to create a comprehensive benchmark data set to validate numerical models in additive manufacturing. This NIST-wide program, running since 2015, has 51 NIST staff and associates from 10 NIST divisions. This program adopted a challenge
approach to validate additive manufacturing models for specific additive manufacturing scenarios. It collects all of the relevant measurement data and metadata for a given scenario and makes it available to challenge participants—modelers—on a predetermined schedule. The challenge participants present the modeling results to the community at regularly scheduled conferences. In 2022, 34 challenge problems were posed. The Additive Manufacturing Benchmarking program received 138 submissions from the additive manufacturing modeling community and gave out 41 awards based on a set of predetermined model quality metrics. One data-related challenge in this program is that data collection, storage, analysis, and movement are handled by multiple platforms and are fragmented.
The NIST Center for Automotive Lightweighting aims to improve fuel economy and electric vehicle range while maintaining safety in the U.S. automotive industry by incorporating advanced lightweight materials into automobile designs. It develops foundational measurements, test methods, and standards for characterizing the material properties and behavior of automotive sheet materials under complex and real-life use conditions. This center is the largest and second-longest-tenured project in the division with strong partnership in the automotive industry. External partners include Ford, General Motors, and their suppliers. The center collects data from many test platforms with operating systems spanning several decades. It also has substantial modeling efforts. The NIST Center for Automotive Lightweighting faces similar data management challenges to the Additive Manufacturing Bench program, but on a larger scale. Not all of the experimental measurement systems have a consolidated and automated data infrastructure. This fragmented data infrastructure, unfortunately, leads to discrete ineffective experimental data infrastructure throughout this program (and the division).
One encouraging effort by the NIST Center for Automotive Lightweighting was to consolidate the vastly different operating systems of all of its measurement equipment into a virtual machine. This virtual machine approach not only unified the measurement equipment operating systems but also afforded a unified infrastructure for data management infrastructure, use, and security. The virtual machine approach as a best practice would be useful throughout the Materials Science and Engineering Division.
A large number of the Materials Science and Engineering Division’s projects involve computational work and they often result in the development of many and different computational methods, varying from conventional finite element, thermodynamic methods to a density function theory-based comprehensive materials information system such as JARVIS. Although the computational works in the division are impressive, most of them are done as a part of individual projects. As a result, the computational data does not seem to be managed in a centralized platform.
Recommendation 8-2: The Materials Science and Engineering Division should launch an initiative to unify its computational systems, data formats, and data transmission protocols into a single, uniform platform for more efficient and effective data curation, storage, processing, transmission, and security management. This data science initiative could be applied to machine learning deployment and expand capabilities in laboratory automation, high-throughput computation, and artificial intelligence and machine learning methods.
ASSESSMENT OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERTISE
The Materials Science and Engineering Division’s staff members are leading technical experts in their respective fields. These experts are passionate about addressing some of the nation’s pressing challenges including manufacturing resurgence, sustainability, climate, and infrastructure. However, the skill set in machine learning or artificial intelligence is not adequate to support the division’s needs to capitalize on the growing, diverse data sets and the division’s overall goals in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and future initiatives in lab automation.
Recommendation 8-3: The Materials Science and Engineering Division should hire more scientists skilled in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science to build internal capabilities and capitalize on the growing, diverse sets of data the division has handled.
BUDGET, FACILITIES, EQUIPMENT, AND HUMAN RESOURCES
In fiscal year 2023 the budget for the Materials Science and Engineering Division was $28.410 million, comprising $27.035 million from appropriations, $1.242 million from reimbursable work for other federal agencies, and $132,000 from providing services such as standard reference materials and a working capital fund. The division has maintained a steady funding and staffing level to meet its key mission and deliverables as outlined in the Introduction, provided that the division is able to complement its current staff with scientists with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science. The division has established a few new facilities such as the state-of-the-art materials measurement laboratory where the in situ fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy equipment is housed. It also acquired new tools and capabilities such as the 300 MHz solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, the environmental transmission electron microscope, and the broad beam ion mill in recent years. It has strived to upgrade equipment or build its own tools. However, many of the buildings, facilities, and tools are several decades old. The maintenance, restoration, and modernization of facilities and capabilities have not kept up with the increasingly important role the division needs to play. Moreover, it took an unusually long time (more than 6 months) to receive approval for tools and capabilities. A more detailed assessment of NIST’s facilities can be found in the 2023 National Academies report Technical Assessment of the Capital Facility Needs of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NASEM 2023).
The division in general ascribes to proper safety procedures and practices. However, observations made during the laboratory tours and meetings suggest areas for improvement. For instance, it appeared that a researcher who typically wears prescription glasses does not universally use laboratory safety glasses that meet today’s laboratory safety standards. Generally, it did not appear to the panel for it to be customary for researchers entering into a laboratory area to immediately don safety glasses upon entering a laboratory setting. On one occasion, an organic chemical odor was detected upon entering into a laboratory setting, which suggests the need for critical facilities improvements coupled with added researcher training and awareness of laboratory and experimental standard operating procedures. In a similar vein, some exhaust systems appeared to have been installed without regard to current recommendations for materials to be used with snorkels that will be handling toxic or flammable organic solvents. Furthermore, to PhD-level researchers, the career path as a safety representative is not clear although the workload and the responsibilities of a safety representative are enormous. The reward system did not appear to align with the responsibilities of safety representatives. This misalignment does not encourage PhD scientists to serve as safety representatives in the division. Given the extensive Materials Science and Engineering Division relationships with industrial partners that were apparent during the assessment, the division would be advised to consider working with their industry partners to develop laboratory safety initiatives and programs to build a safety culture that aims for continuous improvement.
EFFECTIVENESS OF DISSEMINATION EFFORTS
The Materials Science and Engineering Division has a track record of engaging key stakeholders, including major industry players, for broad dissemination of knowledge and standards, to identify pressing national challenges, to formulate industry roadmaps, and to establish collaboration strategies.
In the past 3 years, the division has published 375 archival journals, 34 database publications, 16 NIST reports, 14 conference papers, and 6 book chapters. The division had strong engagements with key stakeholders as evidenced by 16 cooperative research and development agreements and hosting two
consortia (nSoft and Additive Manufacturing-Bench). It led or participated in 24 workshops in the past 3 years. Its researchers served on 96 standard committees and held 21 leadership positions in these organizations. Its engagements with leading players in the industry and standard organizations are broad, deep, and impactful. However, the division does not seem to track the long-term impacts of its work.
Recommendation 8-4: The Materials Science and Engineering Division should develop a plan to track the long-term, quantitative impact of its key programs and industrial engagements.
REFERENCE
NASEM (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine). 2023. Technical Assessment of the Capital Facility Needs of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/26684.
