Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Materials Science and Engineering Division

MSED works across diverse stakeholder communities to foster innovation through the development of measurements, models, data, and standards needed to advance technology and facilitate manufacturing in industrial sectors such as electronics, transportation, civil infrastructure, biopharmaceuticals, energy and the environment.

Welcome to the Materials Science and Engineering Division

The Materials Science and Engineering Division performs leading-edge measurement science research, working closely with our stakeholders to impact a broad range of science and technology areas. Our core areas of competence are grounded in the discipline of materials science and engineering (structure-property-processing relationships) with specific focus on metallurgy, polymer science, and functional materials. This expertise has expanded in recent years to include nanoscale materials (2D materials), complex fluids (colloids, emulsions), advanced devices (electronic, magnetic, energy), and advanced manufacturing (additive, biomanufacturing).

Projects and Programs

NIST Priority Area

MSED Project or Program

ADVANCED MANUFACTURING

MSED is leading the development of the measurement and data infrastructure needed to ensure that advanced materials can be deployed in the complex, dynamic environments that exist in manufacturing. We provide stakeholders access to and knowledge about powerful, integrated capabilities (e.g., materials data and informatics, computational methods, unique measurement facilities) within a pre-competitive environment that can advance both their specific needs and new materials design and manufacturing concepts.

Additive Manufacturing of Metals

Advanced Materials Design: Structural Applications

Polymer Additive Manufacturing and Rheology

Automotive Lightweighting

Dynamic Plasticity:  Non-Equilibrium Mechanics

Hardness Standardization and Measurements 

Fundamentals of Polymer Mechanics 

ADVANCED MICROELECTRONICS AND PACKAGING

MSED is developing measurement-based solutions and capabilities to facilitate innovations in materials design, device architecture, and fabrication processes, particularly those relevant to transistor devices, memory, and interconnects.  To address relevant technological challenges, we provide measurements to enable materials and process development as well as advances in dimensional measurements, chemical composition, and the properties of materials and material interfaces associated with reduced feature sizes, increased geometric complexities, and low chemical contrast.

Low Dimensional and Magnetic Thin Film Materials

Advanced Materials Design:  Electronic Applications 

Electrochemistry 

Metrology for Nanolithography

Particles, Tubes, and Colloids

BIOMANUFACTURING

Building on our polymers expertise, MSED is developing and applying unique measurement capabilities and well-defined materials for guiding and evaluating biomanufacturing processes and product formulation.  We are pursuing advancements in lab automation and AI/ML methods in combination with our expertise in light, soft X-ray, and neutron scattering and in fluidics and flow metrology to enable innovation in bioformulations, particularly involving measurements of highly concentrated solutions and stability mapping.

Polyelectrolyte Solutions and Gels

Fluid Suspensions and Emulsions 

Resonant Soft X-ray Scattering (RSoXS)

 

CIRCULAR ECONOMY: PLASTICS RECYCLING

MSED is creating new measurement capabilities, data platforms, and well-defined materials to support mechanical and chemical reprocessing of post-consumer resin (PCR) waste streams, including molecular and polymer processes and associated measurements to identify and separate, compatibilize, and depolymerize PCR for reuse in production processes. 

Macromolecular Architectures

Polymer Additive Manufacturing and Rheology 

Polymer Analytics

CLIMATE AND ENERGY

MSED is addressing materials and measurement challenges for Direct Air Capture (DAC) technologies associated with the use of polymer membranes and solid sorbent materials and for electrocatalytic conversion of carbon dioxide into useful chemicals and specialty products.  These and other division capabilities are also being applied to underpin clean energy technologies.

Polymer Membranes

Electrochemistry 

Flexible and Printed Electronics

PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

MSED is developing a range of measurement capabilities to evaluate defects and damage progression in polymer matrix composites with an emphasis on novel optical, spectroscopic, and mechanical techniques.

Polymer Composites

INNOVATIVE MEASUREMENT SCIENCE

MSED has a strong history in the development of new measurement science capabilities.

Resonant Soft X-ray Scattering (RSoXS)

Magnetic Materials Metrology / Thermal MaGIC 

Measuring Intermolecular Interactions with Electro-Acoustic Spectroscopy 

Stroboscopic Transmission Electron Microscopy 

Software, Data and Computational Tools

NIST/MML Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science

Ongoing
The Center's mission is to support the Material Measurement Laboratory's mission in materials measurement and data delivery by: developing, solving, and quantifying materials models using state-of-the-art computational approaches; creating opportunities for collaboration where CTCMS can make a

JARVIS-ML

Ongoing
JARVIS-ML introduced Classical Force-field Inspired Descriptors (CFID) as a universal framework to represent a material’s chemistry-structure-charge related data. With the help of CFID and JARVIS-DFT data, several high-accuracy classifications and regression ML models were developed, with

JARVIS-DFT

Ongoing
JARVIS-DFT hosts materials property data for ~40000 bulk and ~1000 low-dimensional crystalline materials and the database is continuously expanding. Some of the properties in the database are: formation energies, bandgaps, elastic, piezoelectric, dielectric constants, and magnetic moments

JARVIS-FF

Ongoing
Many classical force-fields are developed for a particular set of properties (such as energies) and they may not have been tested for properties or configurations outside the training (such as elastic constants, defect formation energies or energies for metastable phases). JARVIS-FF provides an

Object Oriented Finite Elements (OOF)

Ongoing
The best and most current information about the OOF software, including current downloads, can be found at the main OOF site. The general workflow of the OOF software begins with a 2D or 3D image. OOF provides tools for maniupating the image to highlight scientifically important features, and to

Materials Data Repository

Ongoing
In support of NIST's MGI goals, the NIST materials data repository provides a concrete mechanism for the interchange and re-use of research data on materials systems. The NIST repository is principally a file repository, accepting data in any format. To mitigate the opacity of binary data, and to

Zeno

The Zeno software tool computes material, solution, and suspension properties for a specified particle shape or molecular structure using path-integral and Monte Carlo methods. The software was originally developed in Fortran77 at the Stevens Institute of Technology with support from NIST MML. ITL

STAKEHOLDER IMPACTS

nSoft

This consortium delivers technology and expertise within neutron-based measurement science to U.S. based industrial researchers. The impact of the consortium is based on close and extended collaboration, where member companies often have staff positioned on the NIST campus for extended periods of time. Members, having participated on-site at the NIST Center for Neutron Research, gain the expertise in the use of equipment and software targeted toward their sector of manufacturing. 

NCAL

The objective of this consortium is to develop the measurement methodology, standards and analysis necessary for the U.S. auto industry and base metal suppliers to transition to advanced lightweight materials for auto body components without wasteful trial-and-error development cycles, and successfully transfer this technology to our customers in industry.

AMBench

This is a continuing series of highly controlled benchmark tests for additive manufacturing, with modeling challenge problems. Results are discussed at the corresponding conference series.

News and Updates

Contacts