Thermal expansion, the way materials change shape when you heat or cool them, is an advantageous property to understand and control. Many objects that people rely on every day (e.g. building materials, energy transportation and storage materials, aerospace parts, etc.) can wear out or fail more easily if their thermal expansion is not matched well, thus less robust materials create more waste and compromise safety. While many materials exhibit positive thermal expansion and expand as they are heated some exhibit negative thermal expansion and shrink with increasing temperature. These two opposing types of expansion can be coupled in materials such that there is control over the thermal expansion of the final material. This project will study how to control these thermal expansion properties so that new types of materials can be engineered.

This project is a collaborative effort which will be conducted at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI) which is also a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). Undergraduate and Master’s students will be involved to attempt to understand how to tune the thermal expansion of certain combinations of earth-abundant elements that shrink instead of expanding upon heating. Part of this effort will involve development temperature-dependent diffraction measurement capabilities at a DOE National Laboratory to the benefit of not only this project, but also the broader user community. Students recruited to work on this effort will conduct experiments in-house at the university and at national laboratories, and disseminate findings to the public through local, national, and international conference presentations. Furthermore, local outreach will allow students to work to increase the amount of citizen science, public scientific literacy, and overall public interest in materials chemistry.