MRI: Acquisition of a High-Throughput Small Angle X-ray Scattering Instrument for Data-Driven Materials Design

Nontechnical summary

This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award is to acquire a high-throughput small angle x-ray scattering (HT-SAXS) instrument to accelerate the discovery of a wide range of nanostructured materials. Nanostructured materials are essential elements for the development of new technologies in healthcare, clean energy, and environmental sustainability among many others.

The HT-SAXS instrument is especially configured to use x-rays to non-destructively analyze material structures over a broad range of size scales. This precise measurement of structure is critical to the design of materials that have specific properties (e.g. mechanical, electronic, optical) to meet the needs of their target end-use applications. The instrument is also uniquely configured to analyze a broad range of materials (e.g. polymers, gels, proteins, particles and composites) very quickly and automatically, through the use of robotic sample handling features, so that it can operate efficiently and autonomously to enable the execution of high-throughput experiments.

In addition, acquisition of this instrument will see implementation of advanced data science and artificial intelligence algorithms for accelerated materials design. This HT-SAXS instrument enables a large and diverse group of researchers and students, distributed across several pacific northwest research institutions, to openly access state of the art x-ray instrumentation to meet critical needs for research, education and workforce development.

Technical summary

The HT-SAXS instrument seamlessly integrates Bonse-Hart optics for Ultra-SAXS (USAXS), pinhole SAXS and wide-angle x-ray scattering (WAXS) to analyze nanomaterials with structural features ranging from 0.1 nm to 5,000 nm. It uses motorized collimation optics, detector motion and autonomous sample-changing capabilities to enable its use in data-driven materials design problems where statistical design of experiments, advanced data visualization and knowledge extraction via machine learning is facilitated. the instrument's grazing incidence small angle scattering cell is used for the analysis of conjugated polymers, molecules and blends with commodity polymers to produce materials with optimized optoelectronic properties.

The HT-SAXS instrument enables and accelerates numerous data-driven materials research projects including colloidal systems such as emulsions and nanocrystals as well as for block-copolymers, polymer blends and cyclic bottle-brush polymers, de-novo designer proteins, organic frameworks, bio-composite plastics, as well as educational activities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.