NIST Grants Support Eight Materials Theory And Modeling Workshops

A new materials theory center at the National Institute of Standards and Technology is awarding eight grants to support theory and modeling workshops for academic, industry and government researchers.

The NIST Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science is funding workshops to form alliances between industrial researchers and theoreticians in academia and government. The electronically accessible center brings together researchers in government, academia and industry to attack key materials problems and materials processing obstacles. The center is part of the NIST Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory.

"We have a strong industrial focus," Dale Hall, center director, says. "We emphasize the formation of research teams to continue after the workshops are over." The center's mission is to develop and apply state-of-the-art theoretical and computational materials science techniques, and then help industry integrate them into technology development.

The first set of grants from the NIST Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science has been awarded to:

• Case Western Reserve University and the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials to co-sponsor a Workshop on Structure Formation in Liquid Crystals, Polymers and their Mixtures;
• Hughes Research for a Workshop on Theory and Modeling of Molecular Beam Epitaxial Growth;
• National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, for a co-sponsored Workshop on the Development of Residual Stresses During Curing of Thermoset Composites;
• University of Chicago and NIST's Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory, Ceramics Division, for a Workshop on Large-Scale Computation of Realistic Microstructure;
• The University of Utah for a Workshop on Optimal Design for Materials and Structures;
• NIST's Building and Fire Research Laboratory for a Tutorial Workshop on Lattice Boltzmann Methods;
• NIST's Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory for a Workshop on Collective Dislocation Theory and Modeling;
• NIST's Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory, Polymers Division, for a Workshop on Hygrothermal Effects on Polymer and Composite Performance. Workshops will be held during the spring and summer of 1995. The workshop grants are the first in what will be a continuing series of awards to support alliances among researchers in theoretical and computational materials science. The center is aiming to assist industry by solving problems and transferring information in materials design, processing and application. It also strives to increase understanding of materials properties and processing through theory, modeling, simulation, visualization and computation.

For workshop dates and information, contact James Warren, CTCMS Workshop Coordinator, A153 Materials Building, Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-0001, (301) 975-5708, email: jwarren [at] enh.nist.gov (jwarren[at]enh[dot]nist[dot]gov) (via Internet).

Information on the NIST Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science is also available on the Internet's World Wide Web at URL http://www.ctcms.nist.gov.

As a non-regulatory agency of the Commerce Department's Technology Administration, NIST promotes U.S. economic growth by working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements and standards.