National Physical Laboratory

In the Materials lab Advanced Materials

The Materials Division undertakes cutting-edge research for advanced processing and performance of materials, enabling improved materials selection, lifetime management and support of emerging technologies.

News & Events

News

Squashed loft insulation 50% less effective

An event report of Hybrid organic-inorganic nanomaterials for functional devices: processing and metrology held at NPL on 12 December 2012, has been published

Miniaturising piezoelectric metrology

A paper detailing the results of the 'MEMS Sensor for Metrology' project has been published in the IOP Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Big photos of little coins
A 400 megapixel image of a euro 1-cent coin produced by NPL was featured as New Scientist's image of the day

Sustainable, flexible and cost-effective organic electronics
NPL is involved in a new collaborative research project that will demonstrate the production of large area organic electronics for applications such as flexible solar cells and large area lighting. The TREASORES (Transparent Electrodes for Large Area, Large Scale Production of Organic Optoelectric Devices) project is led by EMPA, Switzerland, and features partners from across Europe.

Recyclable Electronics: Just Add Hot Water
NPL and partners have developed a printed circuit board whose components can be easily separated by immersion in hot water - this could help reduce the waste problem faced by the electronics industry, which annually discards 100 million electronic units in the UK alone.

Materials scientist wins prestigious IEC 1906 Award
Dr Michael Hall, from NPL's Functional Materials group, has received the IEC 1906 Award for his excellent work as Project Leader of IEC 60404-15. The award was created in 2004 by the IEC Executive Committee to honour IEC experts around the world whose work is fundamental to the IEC.

Award for standards work in the Materials Division
The IPC (USA Association tasked with producing ANSI standards) has presented Chris Hunt with a Distinguished Committee Service Award for his 'outstanding contributions to the development of J-Std-002D, Solderability Tests for Electronic Components'.

Materials Division win T P Hoar Award
A paper on 'X-ray tomography of the pit to crack transition' by Alan Turnbull, Shengqi Zhou and Louise Crocker, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham (CASE award), has won the T P Hoar Prize from the Institute of Corrosion for best paper published in Corrosion Science in 2011.
Novel images of the evolution of stress corrosion cracks from corrosion pits

Materials Division student wins Ernest Littauer prize
Achilleas Sesis, an EngD student in the Electrochemistry group, Materials Division, has been awarded the Ernest Littauer prize by the University of Surrey for the best oral presentation (out of 16 Research Engineers) at its annual Engineering Doctorate Micro and Nanomaterials conference. The title of the talk was 'Disentangling bubbles, carbon nanotubes and surfactants'.
The award is named after Ernest Littauer, who was the VP of Lockheed Martin and also an alumnus of the metallurgy department of Battersea College, a forerunner of the University of Surrey. He has been a very generous benefactor.

Impulse excitation paper featured in American NDT journal
A paper entitled 'Impulse Excitation Modulus Measurements of Hardmetal Rods using Custom Software on a Standard Personal Computer and Microphone', written by John Nunn (NPL) and Mike Carpenter (Sandvik), was published in the Materials Evaluation journal of the American Society for Nondestructive Testing.
The paper was highlighted on the front cover of the July 2012 issue as an 'NDT creative solution'. The computer program has been developed further and was issued to six European project partners involved in the characterisation of hardmetals through a European Powder Metallurgy Association coordinated collaborative project.

New version of Zinc released
A new version of Zinc, NPL's multiphysics finite element package has now been released. The new version includes some improvements to the graphical user interface and the Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) algorithm, for solving equations, has been updated.
There are also two new tutorials, a material diffusion problem and a plane strain elastic problem with hydrostatic pressure (both problems are compared to analytical solutions to test Zinc's accuracy).

NPL Materials win WMRIF first prize

Dynamic ferroelectric measurement system installed at ESRF beamline

New Good Practice Guide on monitoring deformation and damage in fibre-reinforced plastics

Biomimetic layer-by-layer assembly of artificial nacre

Photoactive dyes under the spotlight

Energy harvesting e-newsletter

New books published which showcase NPL research
NPL has contributed to the three chapters of two new books:

Case Studies

Materials research can have a wide-ranging impact on society, the environment and much more.

Four-point Bend Test
NPL helped develop a 4-point bend test tailored to the needs of the oil and gas industry. This will enable the reliable evaluation of materials used for extracting and transporting oil from wells.

Warmer wetsuits
NPL has performed laboratory and field-based tests for UK wetsuit manufacturer, Spartan, to help further their knowledge of how wetsuits keep people warm.

See more case studies >>

Materials technology is vital to industrial competitiveness, energy security, sustainability and innovation across all sectors, including healthcare and the environment.

Underpinning future requirements is the need to develop novel materials with tailored properties, to make radical advances in materials processing, to optimise manufacturing and engineering through knowledge-based design, and to establish innovative tools for predicting and characterising performance.

The underlying challenge is to characterise processes at an increasingly localised scale to enable prediction and manipulation of macroscopic behaviour and the production of materials and systems with managed properties.

Advanced measurement techniques are being established at NPL (including 3D-t imaging, in-situ and on-line characterisation, and novel nano-probes), coupled with modelling to support developments in:

  • Multi-functional materials, nanomaterials, fuel cells, electronic interconnects, organic electronics, organic photovoltaics and catalysis
  • Composites materials for aerospace and wind turbines
  • Coatings and surface engineered materials
  • Lifetime prediction of materials for power engineering and oil and gas extraction in increasingly harsh environments.

Recent Publications

Fabrication of Probes for in-situ mapping of electrocatalytic activity at the nanoscale. Wain, A J, Cox, D, Zhou, S, Turnbull, A (2012)

Testing the mechanical, thermal and chemical properties of adhesives for marine environments. Broughton, W R (2012)

Application of a modified slip-distance theory to the indentation of single-crystal and polycrystalline copper to model the interactions between indentation size and structure size effects. Hou, X. Jennett, N M (2012)

In situ mapping of electrode potential in a PEM fuel cell. Hinds, G, Brightman, E (2012)

Corrections for thermal expansion in thermal conductivity measurement of insulations using the high-temperature guarded hot-plate method. Wu, J, Morrell, R (2012)

Current problems and possible solutions in high-temperature lead-free soldering. Kroupa, A*, Andersson, D*, Hoo, N*, Pearce, J*, Watson, A*, Dinsdale, A T (2012)

Weighting observations from multi-sensor coordinate measuring systems. Forbes, A B (2012)

Charge redistribution in piezoelectric energy harvesters, Stewart. M, Weaver. M.P & Cain, M (2012)

Quantitative nanoscale surface voltage measurement on organic semiconductor blends, A. Cuenat, A. Muñiz-Piniella, M. Muñoz-Rojo, W. C. Tsoi, C. E. Murphy (2012)

Influence of surface defects on the biaxial strength of a silicon nitride ceramic - increase of strength by crack healing, W. Harrer, R. Danzer, R. Morrell (2012)

Good Practice Guides and Measurement Notes

Materials good practice guides aim to improve measurement understanding and technical abilities across the UK and the rest of the world. They describe good current practice and are produced with technical input from specialists in the particular subject covered.

Click here for good practice guides

Click here for measurement notes

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