• Shared Facilities
• MCL
• Nanofab
• NNIN@Penn State
• MSC

Materials Research Facilities

Shared User Facilities

MRI coordinates, administers, and supports several state-of-the-art research, fabrication, and characterization facilities at Penn State that are available to the academic and non-academic research communities. These shared facilities are staffed with full-time technical personnel who train researchers to use the instrumentation and tools themselves or assist researchers with their charcterization and fabrication needs.

• Materials Characterization Laboratory (MCL) - a fully staffed analytical laboratory offering a range of state-of-the-art characterization techniques and tools including microscopy, surface and thin film analysis, optical spectroscopy, structural analysis, chemical analysis, physical property determination, and materials processing.
  
  

• Nanofabrication Laboratory - Working in conjunction with NNIN@Penn State to provide world-class facilities and expertise to nano-researchers.
  
  

• National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) at Penn State - facilities that enable fabrication of a wide range of electrical, optical, and micromechanical devices; focus is on materials and chemical technologies at the molecular scale with unique strengths that include surface chemistry, self-assembly, and the fabrication and processing of complex oxide materials.
  
  

• W. M. Keck Smart Materials Integration Laboratory (Keck SMIL) - a facility that allows scientists to create a new generation of smart integrated components; this lab enables the integration of devices with electrical, mechanical, and optical functions and is able to characterize the resulting materials and devices.
  
  

• Materials Simulation Center (MSC) - a group of faculty and professional staff develop state-of-the-art atomic-scale materials modeling for design of high-performance alloys, evaluation of precursors for epitaxial growth, calculation of electronic and structural properties of nanoscale materials, and simulations for materials processing.

Other Research Facilities

• Advanced Coatings Lab - EB-PVD is a materials coating technology whereby a coating (metal, alloy, or ceramic) is melted, vaporized in a vacuum, and then deposited on a component or part requiring the surface properties inherent in the coating.
  
  
• Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) - The NMR facility's primary mission is to make NMR spectroscopy available to students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty of the University for the purpose of answering scientific questions that arise in their research.
  
  
• Mechanical Testing Laboratory (MTL) - MTL provides a well maintained, user testing facility which allows mechanical evaluation of materials on length scales from nanometers to meters.