High Temperature Heating Stage for Bruker D8 X-Ray Diffractometer

The Office of Acquisition and Agreements Management (OAAM), Acquisition Management Division (AMD) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), on behalf of the Material Measurement Laboratory (MML), Materials Science and Engineering Division (MSED), intends to negotiate on a sole source basis with Bruker AXS, for the purchase of a high-temperature heating stage for a NIST-owned Bruker D8 X-ray diffractometer instrument, to support the NIST Additive Manufacturing (AM) Project.While demonstrating enormous potential, Additive Manufactured (AM) alloys often require post-build heat treatment to ensure a reproducible, predictable, and certifiable microstructure. A high-temperature stage will enable in-situ monitoring of the structure transformation of AM alloys, which currently can only be done at a synchrotron facility. It further allows in-situ monitoring of structure evolution of AM alloys during a prolonged heat treatment that cannot be done in synchrotron, due to

limitations imposed by beamtime availability.The Contractor shall provide a high temperature heating stage, including installation, training, and warranty, that will integrate with and operate seamlessly with NIST's existing Bruker D8 X-ray diffractometer. For the purpose of this procurement, "integrate with and operate seamlessly with" means that the integration between the Bruker Diffrac software and the high-temperature heating stage shall: (1) Link the simultaneously collected X-ray diffraction data and temperature profile into a single metadata file; (2) Allow real-time analysis while the data is being collected; and (3) Prevent hardware collisions.SOLE SOURCE DETERMINATION IS BASED UPON THE FOLLOWING:Bruker AXS designed, engineered, and manufactured NIST's existing D8 X-Ray Diffractometer and the required high temperature heating stage. Bruker AXS owns all rights to all equipment, hardware and software, and is the sole manufacturer of all required equipment and software. Bruker-AXS has no distributors.The current value of the NIST-owned diffractometer is $375,000.00. It is not NIST's intent to, nor is it within budgetary constraints to replace this equipment. Therefore, is necessary to purchase a high temperature heating stage that will integrate and operate seamlessly.If the high temperature heating stage is not integrated to the Bruker Diffrac software, the simultaneously collected temperature and X-ray diffraction data would have to be overlaid manually in a separate software program. Since NIST is investigating the precise temperature of the phase transformations, such an action would add steps to the analysis process and introduce uncertainty to NIST's measurements and data.This notice of intent is not a request for competitive quotations; however, responses received by September 13, 2019, will be considered by the Government. Any party responding to this notice must provide clear and specific product documentation that they can provide equipment that can integrate with and operate seamlessly with the NIST-owned Bruker D8 X-ray diffractometer.A determination by the Government to compete this requirement based upon responses to this notice, is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information received will normally be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to compete this requirement.