Since 1997, she has built a unique high temperature calorimetry facility. She has also designed and enhanced the instrumentation.  Navrotsky introduced and applied the method for measuring the energetics of crystalline oxides of glasses, amorphous, nanophase material, porous materials of hydrous phases and carbonates also more recently nitrides and oxynitrides. Obtaining the thermo chemical data is used to understand the compatibility and reactivity of materials in technological and geological application. The energetics provides insight into chemical bonding, order-disorder reactions, and phase transitions.
Navrotsky's calorimetry has also been used in providing thermo chemical data for a variety of perovskite-related phases which has major consequences for convection and evolution on a planetary scale.
One of Navrotsky's works has shown that many zeolitic and mesoporous phases have energies only slightly higher than those of their stable dense polymorphs. The energy is associated with the presence or absence of strained bond angles not with the density.