Materials & Manufacturing

Materials & Coatings

Access the technical resources for a range of materials and coatings. Design engineers can browse news, technical briefs, and applications for plastics, composites, rubbers, elastomers, and metals.

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NASA Spinoff: Materials
Spinoff is NASA’s annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and services in the...
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Briefs: Materials
High-speed images of a common laser-based metal 3D printing process, coupled with newly updated computer models, have revealed the mechanisms behind material redistribution, a phenomenon that...
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Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is building a small CubeSat that uses an 85-m2 solar sail deployed from a central location to capture the push of photons from the Sun as...
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Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Green Approach for Toughening Thermosetting Reactive Resins
Thermosetting reactive resin systems such as epoxy, bismaleimide, and polyimide classes of material are brittle. The origin of brittleness is attributed to the high crosslinking density that exists in the fully cured forms of these materials. Traditionally, the toughness of these resins is...
Briefs: Medical
Metamaterials with zero, or even negative refractive index for sound offer new possibilities for acoustic imaging and for the control of sound at sub-wavelength scales. The combination...
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Articles: Materials
Learn how advanced materials are creating high-efficiency engines, better powertrains, and lighter components.
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Technology Leaders: Communications
Exciting new technological innovations are making the planet cleaner, people healthier, food more plentiful, transportation speedier, communication more accessible, and...
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Products: Sensors/Data Acquisition
Product of the Month Keysight Technologies, Santa Rosa, CA, introduced the PathWave software platform that integrates design, test, measurement, and analysis to enable product development from concept to...
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Computers use different kinds of memory technologies to store data. Long-term memory — typically a hard disk or flash drive — needs to be dense in order to store as much data as...
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Briefs: Test & Measurement
Materials scientists are looking to nature — at the discs in human spines and the skin of ocean-diving fish — for clues about how to design materials with both flexibility and stiffness. The solution...
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Briefs: Sensors/Data Acquisition
A new, flexible, silicon-on-polymer chip was developed to augment new networked realities such as the Internet of Things. Typical silicon-based integrated circuits are brittle, rigid components packaged in a...
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Shape memory alloys (SMAs) have the unique ability to recover large deformations in response to thermal, mechanical, and/or magnetic stimuli. This behavior occurs by virtue of a crystallo-graphically...
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Briefs: Medical
Currently, most 3D-printed organ models are made using hard plastics or rubbers. This limits their application for accurate prediction and replication of the organ’s physical behavior...
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Briefs: Aerospace
NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed a landing gear cavity modification that reduces noise produced during aircraft approach and landing. The modification is an innovative stretchable mesh...
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
New graphene printing technology can produce electronic circuits that are low-cost, flexible, highly conductive, and water-repellent. Low-cost, inkjet-printed graphene can...
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INSIDER: Semiconductors & ICs
By integrating storage, memory, and processing into one unit, a new semiconductor device may someday support a computing architecture that mimics the brain.
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Blog: Aerospace
To improve a flying vehicle, sometimes you have to turn to a reliable model that has been operating for hundreds of millions of years.
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Blog: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Beyond the slopes, creators of a moisture-managing, sweat-getting ski jacket envision new places for the “electrified” apparel.
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INSIDER: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
An electrically-driven demolition probe originally funded by NASA enables a more precise, quieter fracturing method that its creators hope will give construction workers on...
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Blog: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Shape-Morphing Materials Add 4th Dimension to 3D Printing
3D printing uses computer control to fuse layers of polymers or powders into a three-dimensional object. Rutgers University researchers found a way to add to a fourth dimension – time – to the manufacturing process.
Briefs: Energy
Cryo-Fluid Capacitor (CFC) for Solid-State Storage and Supply-on-Demand of Cryogenic Fluids
Storage and transfer of fluid commodities such as oxygen, hydrogen, natural gas, nitrogen, argon, etc. are absolute necessities in virtually every industry. These fluids are typically contained in one of two ways: as low-pressure cryogenic liquids, or as...
Briefs: Materials
Ultra-Strong, Lightweight, Elastic, Electrically Conductive Carbon
The configuration of carbon's electrons allows for numerous self-bonding combinations that give rise to a range of materials with varying properties. For example, transparent, super-hard diamonds and opaque graphite, which is used for both pencils and industrial lubricant, are...
Briefs: Semiconductors & ICs
Carbon aerogels (CAs) are nano-porous carbons comprising a particularly significant class of carbon nano-materials for a variety of sustainable energy applications. Carbon aerogels are...
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Briefs: Test & Measurement
Current gas mask filters counter current threats, but there are large gaps in knowledge about how they do so at the molecular level. Many of the filters were developed to handle a wide range...
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Briefs: Materials
Interlaminar Strengthening Concepts for Polymer Matrix Composites
During the last few decades, one of the most prevalent issues associated with the performance of aerospace composite materials has revolved around low interlaminar mechanical properties. The innovations described in this work outline a number of new and improved techniques for...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Method of Fabricating Ultra-Short-Gate-Length Thin-Film Transistors Using Optical Lithography
The speed of thin-film transistors (TFTs) relates directly to their gate length, which must be kept as short as possible to lower electron transport time between electrodes, and improve its high-frequency response characteristics. Since current density is...
Briefs: Materials
Corrosion of structural materials is a serious problem for industrial and civil infrastructure worldwide, costing billions of dollars, and hampering gross domestic product. Corrosion also presents a...
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Articles: Manufacturing & Prototyping
This column presents technologies that have applications in commercial areas, possibly creating the products of tomorrow. To learn more about each technology, see the contact information provided for that innovation.
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Briefs: Semiconductors & ICs
Conductive, High-Toughness Oxides Deposited by Plasma Spray-Physical Vapor Deposition (PS-PVD)
Oxide coatings deposited in Glenn Research Center's Plasma Spray-Physical Vapor Deposition (PS-PVD) facility can be processed to be mechanically tough (erosion-resistant) and electrically conductive at room temperature. The electrically conductive phase...

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