Industrial Impact at CHESS. Q&A with Justin Mach, an Engineer at Caterpillar Inc.

Nearly four years ago, Justin Mach, an engineering specialist at Caterpillar, was invited by Armand Beaudoin, associate director of Insitμ, to work with CHESS on materials research that could be of benefit to the company. Mach conducted Caterpillar’s first experiment with CHESS in December 2014 to help validate a model of how residual stress occurs during welding. Caterpillar has continued this collaboration with both CHESS and the Advanced Photon Source (APS) to aid in further research and development in welding and in other processing stages of materials.

A naturally occurring antibiotic active against drug-resistant tuberculosis

The compound, kanglemycin A, is related to the antibiotic rifampicin, according to Katsuhiko Murakami, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State and one of leaders of the project. “Rifampicin is already part of the cocktail of antibiotics used to treat tuberculosis, but many strains of the tuberculosis-causing bacteria have developed resistance to it,” Murakami said.

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How Synthetic Diamonds Reflect X-rays

It is a well known fact that crystals reflect X-rays when the incident X-ray beam makes a certain angle to a given set of atomic planes. In other words, this happens when the Bragg diffraction condition, which relates the incident angle, radiation wavelength and the interatomic spacing of the planes is satisfied. A not so trivial question to answer is what fraction of incident radiation is reflected for any given Bragg reflection and why. 

Striking the right balance of intermolecular coupling for high-efficiency singlet fission

What did the Scientists Discover?

Although singlet fission promises to boost device efficiencies, it is a complex process involving multiple steps. A loss incurred during any step would be detrimental to promised efficiency gains. Currently, few highly efficient singlet fission materials exist—a grand challenge is to develop structural rules that help guide the design and synthesis of new materials.

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