This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Microfocus x-ray computed tomography is a versatile and multidisciplinary tool for studying the internal structure of opaque materials. It will be used by the faculty to investigate heterogeneous materials including packing of spherical and non-spherical particles, geophysical flows, elasticity and crumpling, biological materials, locomotion, and organic superconductors. The instrument is capable of resolving features to less than 10 microns in 3-D and samples up to 150 mm in size, to allow unprecedented measurements to calculate strength, electric and heat conduction, fluid permeability, and electromagnetic scattering properties of heterogeneous materials from first principles. The x-ray instrument will have a significant impact on undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral student training, besides being available as a research and diagnostic tool for the scientific and engineering community in Worcester and neighboring areas. The instrument will be operated out of Clark which is a liberal arts university with approximately 2200 undergraduates and 800 graduate students, with a strong tradition of involving undergraduate students in active learning experiences. This proposed instrument will also complement a recent education grant by the Sherman-Fairchild foundation to bring major scientific equipment on imaging across spatial scales including an AFM and a radio telescope into an inquiry-based science curriculum at Clark University. The x-ray system will complement this equipment allowing researchers and students unprecedented access to the internal structure of materials.
Layman Summary: This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
A microfocus x-ray computed tomography system is a versatile industrial instrument that can be used to investigate a range of scientific problems at the confluence of physics, materials sciences, and biological physics. It will enable a new series of transformative research both as a measurement and diagnostic tool at Clark University to calculate properties of opaque inhomogeneous materials from first principles. The x-ray instrument will have a significant impact on undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral student training, besides being available as a research and diagnostic tool for the scientific and engineering community in Worcester and neighboring areas. The instrument will be operated out of Clark which is a liberal arts university with approximately 2200 undergraduates and 800 graduate students, with a strong tradition of involving undergraduate students in active learning experiences. This proposed instrument will also complement a recent education grant by the Sherman-Fairchild foundation to bring major scientific equipment on imaging across spatial scales including an AFM and a radio telescope into an inquiry-based science curriculum at Clark University. The x-ray system will complement this equipment allowing researchers and students unprecedented access to the internal structure of materials.
The NSF grant has enabled the purchase of a micro-focus three dimensional x-ray tomography instrument manufactured by Varian Medical Systems towards research and diagonistic tool in materials science at Clark University. The X-ray technique allows internal imaging of a wide range of materials such as polyethylene, teflon, glass, and aluminum to vary particle symmetry, friction and elasticity, which is difficult to do with optical index matching techniques. This combination of techniques enables one to investigate the nature of the local and global order and disorder using statistical measures that are important in the development of a theory from fundamental principles. The x-ray instrument has been used in the measurement of the internal structure of tower structures obtained by depositing a grain-liquid suspension on an imbibing substrate. Various symmetric, assymetric and chrial structures were shown to self-assemble. Internal imaging revealed that the structure were fully saturated with a liquid, and that the structure was held together by capillary forces at the surface of the structure. The instrument has enabled a study of packing of structure of granular particles with focus on the shape of the particle on the overall structure. Significant differences were found by going to non-spherical shapes in contrast with spherical shapes. In particular, the method of deposition, and the excitation present doing the deposition was found to have significant impact on the over all internal structure observed. Because the structure is important in determining the strength, heat conductivity, and electrical properties of a material, these studies have far reaching implications in making materials lighter, stronger and cheaper. After installation of the machine in November 2010, it has been used in the traning of graduate students and postdoctoral researcher in the use of the instrument towards doing projects in condensed matter physics on the structural properties of granular materials and extreme mechanics.
