Lab Tour One

Welcome to our lab tour. In this, you will basically take a short walk through portions of our lab. At the end of each page you will find a link to the next portion of the tour. I suggest going through all three pages as there are multiple instruments on each page, arranged by lab location.

	This is a glovebox. Often times starting materials that we use, or compounds that we make, are sensitive to moisture or air. The atmosphere inside is argon gas and allows us to work with these compounds. This is especially useful for those working in nitrides.
	This is a general shot of our "main lab." That being said, it will not look like this for too much longer as total renovation is due to begin fall/winter 2007.
	A picture of a typical hood assembly used in the fuel cell project. As part of our upcoming lab renovations we will be replacing all of the hoods in the lab.
	This is another one of our dry boxes. Except this one isn't really dry. This is our solvent box, and it allows us to work with various solvents in the absence of air. Also, this solvent box is specially equipped with a refrigerator so that if something needs to be kept cold out of air, it can be.
	This is what is known as our "tool room." Which pretty much describes it! In this group you typically do a fair amount of building and working with your hands, so this little space (along with the machine shops in neighboring Clark Hall) is invaluable.
	This is a Scintag XDS 2000 powder diffractometer. This allows us to identify what materials are in a powder, and whether or not a new phase is present. An incoming beam of X-rays strikes the powder sample. The arms of the machine move, and at characteristic angles, compounds will diffract. The detector is cooled with liquid nitrogen.
	This is our torch hood, used for sealing reactions into evacuated silica ampoules. Many of the reactions we do have to be heated to high temperatures in the absence of air. If the materials don't react with the silica, then we generally evacuate the tube and then seal them with this torch. Silica can be used up to about 1150 °C, after which it starts to soften.
	This is our new Solvent System, primarily used by the Fuel Cell project. This takes care of the drying and dispensing of the four most commonly used solvents, which has been said to shave off hours (and increase safety!) of a typical reaction.

Go ahead...click it, you know you want to!

Last updated July 2007