This is a sample preparation laboratory with facilities for cutting, polishing and ultrasonic drilling of many materials from electronic ceramics to geological specimens. Machines include Buehler and Struers diamond saws and Buehler polishing equipment. Also available are a full range of silicon carbide, alumina oxide, and diamond grinding and polishing powders. A Hitachi 3500N scanning electron microscope is equipped with a Robinson backscatter detector and light element EDS system. The MRL operates a computer-controlled sintering furnace system consisting of 14 box furnaces.
Computer control allows the operator to program any temperature profile desired.
One furnace allows sintering in various atmospheres and all of them are both hardware and software over-temp protected. Spectroscopic Laboratory Four instruments are available at Materials Research Laboratory for spectroscopic analysis. The Thermal Analysis Laboratory contains several instruments designed to characterize materials based on their behavior under various heat conditions. The choice of instrument is primarily a function of which thermodynamic properties that need to be determined. Typically, samples are subjected to a programmed thermal profile as the instrument produces a plot of its intrinsic property as a function of temperature.