CAES Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory - Additive Manufacturing Partnership Opportunity

CAES Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory & Microscopy and Characterization Suite

Opportunity: Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES) are seeking industry partners to leverage our Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory and Microscopy and Characterization Suite. These laboratories provide cutting-edge equipment such as super inkjet printers and Atomic Force Microscopes for precise and high-resolution detail in material research, fabrication, and characterization.

Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory: The Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory features an array of equipment to support materials development, printed sensors and structural additive manufacturing. This equipment helps meet CAES and industry needs such as sensor development for extreme environments, micro-electronics development and fabrication, investigation on unique geometrics to device designs, and materials development for additive manufacturing technologies. Equipment available at the Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory includes:

• Electrohydrodynamic super inkjet printer, an aerosol jet printer and a suite of instruments to synthesis power feedstocks for ink development and characterization and/or 3D metal printing
• A dynamic mechanical analyzer, creep tester, dilatometer and materials microscope can also support analysis of mechanical properties and microstructure in printed materials

Microscopy and Characterization Suite (MaCS): The MaCS is a state-of-the-art materials characterization laboratory that provides cross-cutting capabilities that help characterize a wide range of materials, including metals, semiconductors, ceramics, coal and minerals in bulk or powder forms, as well as some organic cellular materials. MaCS contains several high-end pieces of equipment including:

• Two Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopes – Images materials structurally and chemically down to sub-Angstrom scale. Equipped with HAADF, EDS, EELS, EFTEM, Electron Tomography, ASTAR/TopSpin, PicoIndenter, Heating Stage, etc.
• Local Electrode Atom Probe (LEAP) – Creates atom-by-atom maps and images 3-D construction of up to hundreds of millions of atoms.
• Dual Focused Ion Beam – High-resolution, high-vacuum dual-beam SEM/FIB for 2-D and 3-D material characterization and analysis. Equipped with EDS, EBSD and STEM detector.
• Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) – Images material surfaces ranging from micrometer to nanometer scale under high-vacuum and low-vacuum environment. Equipped with EDS, EBSD and CL.
• NanoIndenter/Atomic Force Microscope (NIAFM) – Nanomechanical test instrument for measuring the hardness and elastic modulus of materials, and imaging surface morphology down to atomic scale.
• X-Ray Diffractometer – Includes standard and parallel beam for use with thin films, powders, nanomaterials.
• NanoMill  – Low-energy, low-angle argon ion milling instrument used for preparing ultra-thin, high-quality transmission electron microscopy (TEM) specimens.
• Microhardness Tester –Measures and evaluates microhardness of materials.

For more information on the additive manufacturing capabilities of CAES or INL, please reach out to Javier Martinez (email: javier.martinez@inl.gov).