CTSR has established liaisons among US and foreign universities, national laboratories and industry, allowing fresh research thrusts and enhanced graduate and undergraduate training. Now in its second round of five year funding from the NSF, and working with a wide range of manufacturing companies, the CTSR continues to engage in fundamental research through our integrated partnerships that has resulted in the development of highly relevant new insights into thermal spray process and characterization of coatings. At present CTSR comprises of 10 faculty level investigators, several national laboratory affiliated participants, 3 post-doctoral fellows and about a dozen graduate students and several part-time undergraduate students. In addition to Materials Science and Engineering, the senior participants represent diverse fields including mechanical engineering (thermal and fluid sciences, solid mechanics), Geo-chemistry, Chemistry and computer science. The research is broken into a main interdisciplinary research group and a seed topic. The research group titled: Integration of Design, Materials and Processes, systematically addresses the characteristics of thermal spray deposited materials with respect to their unique microstructure and processing attributes. A means to achieving this linkage is through the concept of intelligent process maps. These maps can be generated from modeling or experimental data and are based on understanding of basic mechanisms. The ultimate goal is to provide fundamental knowledge to materials designers to integrate these complex layered systems.

Early on the original goal of the CTSR was: "To gain a fuller understanding of the processing, microstructures and properties, and thus, to contribute to materials science research, to the thermal spray industry and the industrial community in general". We are proud to say that this initial goal was achieved through our interdisciplinary, collaborative research efforts. Today's mission of the CTSR builds upon this scientific foundation to focus on achieving the goal of "prime-reliant thermal spray coatings and functional surfaces".

The key goals of the CTSR today are:

• Integrated approach to process-materials-properties through modeling/experiments
• Mechanics-based design of TS-processed layered and graded structures
• Advanced process maps (models/experiments)
• In-situ and ex-situ sensing for property evaluations and microstructural control
• Advanced neutron and synchrotron based characterization methodologies
• Non-equilibrium and chemical precursor based synthesis of functional materials.