Lab Facilities & Equipment
- Sample preparation lab: 157 Kemper
- High temperature synthesis and rheometry lab: 157 Kemper
- Vibrational Spectroscopy lab: 156 Kemper
- NMR Spectroscopy lab: 051 Kemper
Our glass synthesis and physical characterization laboratories are equipped with:
- Several atmosphere controlled glass melting (up to 1700 °C) and annealing furnaces (up to 1200 °C) including a rocking furnace
- Varian UV-Vis spectrometer
- Bruker FT- micro-Raman and FT-IR spectrometers.
- Micromeritics He gas pycnometer
- Mettler-Toledo differential scanning calorimeter
- Malvern capillary rheometer
- Anton Paar oscillatory parallel plate rheometer MCR92 and MCR 302
- Glove box and two fume hoods
Our Solid-state NMR facility is equipped with a wide-bore superconducting magnet operating at 11.7 T, a Bruker Avance 500 solid-state spectrometer and complete solids equipment. The available NMR probes include high spinning speed (up to 35 kHz) and regular CP-MAS probes, triple-resonance probe, low-gamma probe and a wideline probe as well as a unique high-temperature MAS NMR probe (Doty Scientific Inc.) optimized for high-resolution work on a wide range of quadrupolar and spin-1/2 nuclides in situ. This probe is capable of operating at temperatures of up to 700 °C with sample spinning speeds of up to 6 kHz.
Computational resources in our group include a workstation with 16 parallel fast 64-bit Opteron processors to carry out Reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) and molecular dynamics simulations of glass structure. Moreover, we also have perpetual site license to use the classical and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations packages and the plane wave code CASTEP-NMR (for ab initio calculation of NMR parameters) as part of the Materials Studio simulation package from Biovia Inc.
Other analytical equipment in the department’s Advanced Materials Characterization (AMCAT) facility include scanning and transmission electron microscopes and powder x-ray diffractometer and a host of sample prep equipment. We carry out x-ray absorption spectroscopy at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, x-ray and neutron scattering studies at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Lab and at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Lab and high-pressure – high-temperature x-ray scattering in diamond anvil cells at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.