MRI: Track 2 Acquisition of a TriBeam Microscope for a 3D Materials Education and Science Hub (3DMESH)

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This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award supports the acquisition of a new type of microscope, the TriBeam, that generates high resolution 3D information on a broad range of materials. This includes polymers, composites, ceramics, metals, semiconductors, electrochemical and biomaterials. Such 3D data underpins the ability to design and predict the behavior of a broad array of engineering and biological systems, but often requires many months to years to acquire. This instrument dramatically speeds up the process, generating critical information in days to weeks. The TriBeam data will be deployed to design new materials for battery electrodes, additive manufacturing, wear-resistant coatings, and high power semiconductor devices. Additionally, it will enable new insights on structure and function of heart tissue and advanced materials in extreme space and nuclear environments. The instrument will also provide critical 3D data for training of machine learning algorithms and open new frontiers for the quantification of material structure and properties. To broaden the instrument’s impact, a Hub, 3DMESH, will be formed to provide TriBeam training and increase community access to 3D datasets and analysis protocols. This will benefit the broader engineering community as these new instruments become more widely available. The instrument is designated as TriBeam because it hosts electron, focused ion and femtosecond laser beams in one chamber. The femtosecond laser allows for extremely rapid (of the order of seconds) in-situ serial sectioning of millimeter squared-scale surfaces with sub-micron slice thickness, with further cleanup of the surface by the ion beam for some materials. The electron beam and other in-situ detectors enable acquisition of chemical, structural and crystallographic information from each slice. This information is subsequently processed to create 3D multimodal datasets, with all of the materials information merged. These rich modalities result in many gigabytes of data per slice, and many terabytes of data per dataset - requiring simultaneous development of methods for data management, analysis, and sharing. Large volumes at sub-micron resolution are critical for understanding the mechanisms that govern mechanical, electronic, and magnetic properties in a wide range of materials, since they are often governed by the presence of microstructural features or layered structures at the 1-100 micrometer scale. Examples include additively manufactured metallic structures with 100 micrometer-scale melt pools; melt tracks, transistors and diodes in electronic and light emitting device structures and soft; and biological materials that possess complex structure at the microscale, cellular and tissue levels.This project is jointly funded by the Major Instrumentation Research Program (MRI) and the division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI).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.