Addressing today's grand challenges in energy, environment, health, and security relies on the development of novel materials with extraordinary properties and the understanding of natural materials tasked with unprecedented performance. The properties and performance of a material depend on its structure across different size scales and although much information can be gained by looking at the surface, to truly understand the design and use of materials it is necessary to characterize their internal three dimensional structure without destroying the systems or devices in which they are used. This project seeks to achieve this goal by acquiring an X-Ray tomographic microscope (XRM) capable of visualizing the three dimensional structure of materials with submicron spatial resolution while controlling such environmental variables as tension-compression, temperature and fluid flow and without destroying the sample in the process. In doing so, Princeton will be able to complement its existing expertise in two dimensional characterization and create a user facility that will open the door to new kinds of characterization aimed at developing a deeper understanding of materials ranging across areas such as biological materials for tissue engineering, geological materials for carbon sequestration, or electrochemical materials for energy storage. These and numerous other frontier research efforts will enable Princeton and neighboring researchers to meaningfully and substantially contribute to the solution of pressing problems confronting the nation and the world. The XRM's ability to visualize the internal structures of materials will be incorporated to education and outreach programs that seek to inspire and excite young people about science and engineering and to instill confidence and motivation for academic achievement.
The goal of this project is to create a user facility that enables non-destructive, time resolved, 3-D structural and chemical characterization of materials to probe aspects of structure-property-processing-performance relations, formation and evolution of defects, compositional heterogeneity, and the spatial organization of phases for broad classes of materials. Through this funding we will acquire an X-Ray tomographic microscope (XRM) capable of visualizing the 3D structure of materials with submicron spatial resolution and the added ability to control such environmental variables as tension-compression, temperature and fluid flow. The x-ray microscope has a unique source-sample-detector design that provides unprecedented sensitivity to contrast imaging along with multiple length scale imaging of the same sample, spanning the nanometer scale (100 nm voxel dimension) up to the device-scale (25 micron voxel). Users will come from across the sciences and engineering, and specimens of immediate interest will include batteries, fuel cells, electronic devices, polymers, composites, biofilms, living tissues, cements, rock cores, sediments, vegetation and soil cores. This XRM's large working distances provide space for in situ cells that will be developed to enable time-dependent, in situ, nondestructive studies of materials under their real-world operating conditions.
