Edwin R. Fuller, Jr., Andrew R. Roosen, and Stephen A. Langer, have received the 2000 Jacob Rabinow Applied Research Award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the Commerce Department's Technology Administration. The award is named after the late Jacob Rabinow, a former NIST researcher and inventor of numerous devices, including the first automatic mail sorter.
Fuller, a physicist, and Roosen, a mathematician, work in the NIST Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory. Langer is a physicist with NIST's Information Technology Laboratory.
They are being honored for developing a computer software program-Object-Oriented Finite element, or OOF-that enables scientists to improve the testing of materials while saving considerable amounts of time. This computational tool analyzes and predicts the behavior of solid materials, such as metals, ceramics and polymers, under various conditions of stress and strain. This information can be critical if the material, for example, constitutes a critical component in a jet turbine blade.
