Basic and applied materials research at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) is conducted by the Materials Science Division (MSD) and the Materials and Components Technology Division (MCT). Of the $30 million annual budget, $23 million comes from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that funds Basic Energy Sciences (BES)-Materials Sciences, Reactor Development, Fusion Energy, Fossil Energy, and Conservation Technology. Another $5 million of the $30 million budget comes from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the remaining $2 million is from the Department of Defense.

Representative projects in fission energy include fuel element behavior in the Advanced Breeder Reactor, fuel development for the Integral Fast Reactor, and supporting research in aqueous corrosion and in phase stability.

Materials research for fusion environments includes containment materials, liquid metal compatibility, vanadium alloy development, defect production processes, radiation-induced segregation, sputtering of self-replenishing low atomic number coatings, and ultrahigh field superconductors.

Helium is formed in metals as a secondary product of fission/fusion energy technology. Even though helium is chemically inert and essentially insoluble in metals, under specific exposure conditions it is known to cause them to lose their ductility. At high temperatures, helium atoms produced from the transmutation of 10B or from a two-step process with 58Ni in amounts as low as a few parts per million migrate to grain boundaries to cause inter-granular failure. Ion implantation of helium may cause a similar effect. More recently it has been found that helium produced from tritium decay at or slightly above room temperature also markedly degrades the mechanical properties of metals. In order to design alloys of the future it is necessary to understand the mechanisms responsible for this helium embrittlement.

Early experiments found that helium is strongly trapped at radiation-produced defects in metals. Atomistic calculations using pair potential interactions verified these findings. It was initially thought that the helium embrittlement in metals was due to the trapping and subsequent bubble formation at radiation-induced defects. It has been shown, however, that helium may be trapped in metals even in the absence of radiation damage. Thomas et al. found that 3He generated at low temperatures from tritium decay remained trapped in nickel upon heating to 500°C. In both this experimentand a subsequentone in gold the helium was introduced without the production of radiation damage. In this second experiment Thomas used transmission electron microscopy to see in the gold small (10Å) bubbles that had been implanted with low-energy (sub-damage threshold) helium.

The Materials Research Center at Northwestern University is an interdisciplinary center that supports theoretical and applied research on experimental advanced materials. Conceived during the post-Sputnik era, it is now in its 26th year.

The Center, housed in the university's Technological Institute, was one of the first three centers funded at selected universities by the federal government in 1960. The federal government, through the National Science Foundation, now supplies $2.4 million annually toward the Center's budget, and Northwestern University supplements this amount. Approximately one third of the money is used for a central pool of essential equipment, and the other two thirds is granted to professors for direct support of their research. Large amounts of time on supercomputers are also awarded to the Materials Research Center from the National Science Foundation and other sources.

The Center's role enables it to provide partial support for Northwestern University faculty working at the frontiers of materials research and to purchase expensive, sophisticated equipment. All members of the Center are Northwestern University investigators in the departments of materials science and engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, or physics. The Materials Research Center is a major agent in fostering cross-departmental research efforts, thereby assuring that materials research at Northwestern University includes carefully chosen groups of faculty in physics, chemistry, and various engineering departments.

Victorian men placed fig leaves over those parts of classical statues they didn't want their wives and children to see. Yet it's easy for someone looking at those statues today to assume that the leaves play some part in the Roman and Greek concepts of physical beauty.

A fig leaf may be the most blatant breach of an artist's original inspiration you'll encounter in a museum, but it's not likely to be the only one. Other more subtle transgressions are displayed in nearly every gallery and museum in the country—but unmasking them takes more than just a discerning eye. For instance, did the 17th-century painter see the world as quiet and subdued, or have his bright colors been muted by a 19th-century varnish? Did the classical sculptor intend his work to have an even, green patina, or has the Renaissance infatuation with antiquity allowed this corrosion to hide his varying shades of burnished bronze? Did Leonardo conceive the face of the Christ of “The Last Supper” as speaking, or silent, as his overpainters would have it?

“Modern conservators really make us think about objects, says Carol Faill, administrator of college collections at Franklin & Marshall College. “There's been a consciousness raising about objects' own integrity.” Art and science are being used together as never before to gain an understanding of the physical and chemical properties of materials and their role in the fine arts.

The aluminum-air power cell is being developed as a power supply for general purpose electric vehicles because it can provide them with the range, acceleration performance, and rapid refueling capability of current internal combustion engine vehicles. This paper describes the general characteristics of the systems and the materials research effort sponsored by DOE to improve the characteristics of the air and aluminum electrodes.