Capabilities

The Materials Characterization Core is a catalog of advanced ORNL instrumentation available to laboratory staff for self-use or collaboration, providing coordination, awareness and scheduling for staff.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a broad suite of quantum optical, tunneling, and spin-based quantum sensing platforms.

The Creep Laboratory offers an unparalleled testing of materials by exerting a dynamic range of stress on them, whether that be in terms of temperature, force, strain rate, pressure, length scale, or time.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s mechanical properties researchers study how materials respond to diverse modes of stress – tension, compression, shear, bending, biaxial, triaxial, and hydrostatic – across a broad range of length scales and environments. 

The Irradiated Material Examination and Testing (IMET) Facility offers a comprehensive suite of post-irradiation examination (PIE) capabilities, including specialized physical and mechanical testing.

ORNL researchers are exploring material compatibilities in a wide range of pressure and temperature environments that are relevant for the public and private power generation, transportation and chemical processing sectors.

ORNL’s materials joining research connects science and technology to provide solutions and innovations in materials joining, such as welding and additive manufacturing, to a wide range of industry sectors. 

ORNL researchers are performing cutting-edge research to understand wear in a variety of systems using multiple classes of materials. This process includes comprehensive tribosystem analysis for understanding failure modes and wear mechanisms based on contact interface mechanical, thermal, and lubrication modeling and worn surface examination.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are using the lab’s unmatched computing power to integrate multi-scale modeling, AI/ML, and exascale computing for predicting and validating materials behavior across vast swaths of time and size scales. 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory possesses a full suite of thermophysical properties and electrical properties testing systems for materials characterization.