WPL 1.09 & 1.10 Characterisation & Microscopy Suite

Overview

The Characterisation and Microscopy Suite is one the smaller laboratories in STEMLab, with a capacity of 24 students, and is usually booked in conjunction with other laboratories.

For example, the Materials Testing Laboratory and the Microscopy Suite would be used together. The laboratory contains primarily optical microscopes together with x-ray and scanning electron microscopy capability.

These labs are primarily used for the teaching of courses in Physics, Materials, and Natural Sciences.

We teach microscopy and the analytical techniques used to characterise materials.

Accurately characterising materials can be essential to understanding how their structure and makeup correlate to their properties.

In this lab, students can learn how to:

• Determine the crystal structure of a material.
• Find characteristic polymer properties such as melt temperature, glass transition temperature, types of organic bonds, and functional groups.
• Image the microstructure of a metal, its general elemental composition, the size of its grains and the presence of flaws and secondary phases.

A common final year project for our undergraduate students might involve characterising polymers to measure their recyclability or bio-degradability.

Equipment in these laboratories includes:

  • Desktop SEM (TM303Plus Hitachi) x1
  • FTIR (Cary 630 Agilent) x1
  • DSC (Q200 TA Instruments) x1
  • Optical Microscopes (Zeiss Primotech) x8
  • XRD (D2 Bruker) x1