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Substantial capability for analysis of materials exists within the STEM College to support initiatives fo the CEMSE. In addition to extensive equipment and resources normally housed at a University, YSU has four related instrumentation centers that support the research activities of our faculty and students.
The Center for Advanced Materials Analysis at YSU includes electron microscopy laboratories and a facility for analysis of soft surfaces. Both facilities were funded largely through Ohio Third Frontier Programs. Our recently installed electron microscopy facility (Dr. Tim Wagner, Director) was funded largely through a $2.1M grant from the Wright Projects program. The new instrumentation includes a JEOL 2100 Scanning/Transmission Electron Microscope (STEM), a JIB 4500 Combined Focused Ion Beam (FIB)/ Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), and equipment for EM sample preparatrion. Both electron microscopes are equipped with EDXS detectors. Also available on-site is a Cambridge Stereoscan 200 SEM with EDAX capability. <>Equipment for the analysis of soft material surfaces, such as layered polymers used in liquid crystal applications, was funded through a $900,000 grant from the Ohio Research Scholars Program as part of the Research Cluster–Surfaces of Advanced Materials (RC-SAM) intitiative (Dr. James Andrews, YSU Director). With RC-SAM Support (Spring, 2009), YSU has acquired or is in the process of acquiring several major pieces of equipment to be housed in the Department of Physics, including an atomic force microscope (AFM) from Agilent Technologies, a Class A Solar Simulator from Newport, an optical parametric oscillator and pump laser from Opotek, a Raman Microscope from Kaiser Optical Systems, and surface prep facilities including a mask aligner for nano-patterning and advanced spin-coater for multilayer film preparation.
The YSU-Structure & Chemical Instrumentation Facility (YSU-S&CIF), directed by Dr. Allen D. Hunter, is housed on the fifth floor of the Ward Beecher science hall and specializes in the characterization of non-biological materials. Its goal is to serve the educational and research needs of the students and faculty at YSU and at collaborating regional colleges. In addition to the smaller GC-MS, chromatographic, spectroscopic, physical, and analytical instruments expected at any MS level institution, the YSU-S&CIC houses an X-ray diffraction facility consisting of three single crystal and one powder X-ray diffractometer, and an X-ray fluorimeter; and NMR Labs equipped with two Varian multinuclear NMRs operating at 300 and 400 MHz, as well as a Varian EM-360 60 MHz instrument. The research-grade major instrumentation was purchased via combination of NSF, Foundation, State, and internal funds
The Photonics and Semiconductor Laboratory in the YSU Department of Physics & Astronomy maintains a growing optical and electrical characterization laboratory headed by Dr. James Andrews and Dr. Tom Oder. This lab includes a variety of laser and photonics equipment for analysis of photoluminescence, nonlinear optics and spectral analysis (including a 55-watt, 325 nm He-Cd laser; a quadrupled Nd:YAG 10-Hz laser, and a doubled 5kHz diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser, PMTs, monochromators, Optical Power meters etc), a high power Nikon microscope (Eclipse ME- 6) with a set of objective lenses (up to 1,000x) for sample inspection and computer interfaced Keithley and Agilent meters and microprobes for I-V and CV characterization. The latter are interfaced with a dedicated Dell Pentium 4 workstation for data collection. Other equipment in this laboratory includes a student-constructed laser tweezer system, two vacuum deposition systems, one fitted with sputter guns for DC magnetron sputter deposition and the other fitted with graphite heater for vacuum annealing, and a well-equipped machine shop directly across the hall. Additionally, YSU Physics is the primary user of a parallel cluster obtained through the Cluster Ohio Program and has easy access to the Ohio Supercomputing Center. The cluster at YSU is currently being used by Andrews for modeling fields in layered polymers in coordination with Case Western Reserve University (CWRU).
The Center for Transportation and Materials Engineering (CTME), directed by Dr. Cynthia Hirtzel, is a U.S. Department of Transportation Tier II research center, funded at $2.5 M for five years. The CTME is concerned with the applications of materials in transportation, and its theme of CTME is: “Transportation: Mobility, Longevity, and Sustainability.” It has several associated labs available to the materials research community at YSU, including a Strength of Materials and Structures Laboratory for macroscopic properties testing, a Corrosion Lab, a Chemical Vapor Deposition Lab, and others. |
