Beacon Equipment

Find out what new equipment has been acquired by the Propulsion Futures Beacon of Excellence.

New cryo-free HighTMag Facility installed July 2021

A new cryo-free HighTMag facility will greatly enhance the suite of experimental equipment currently available in Nottingham for characterisation of novel electronic and optoelectronic materials and devices in a wide range of temperatures (2K<T<400K) and magnetic fields (B<16T).

High T Mag_410x273

This new equipment will significantly expand the current Beacon’s nanomaterial/thin film characterisation facilities by providing capability to measure microscopic devices and devices in commercial packages required to progress to high Tier level applications within current Beacon’s activities relevant to novel materials, sustainability and energy harvesting. It will also significantly enhance our ability to discover new phenomena and exploit them in thermopower generation. The new capability will be strongly demanded for other research activities relevant to the development of above-room-temperature functional devices required for the propulsion systems. The new HighTMag equipment will be custom built, so nothing equivalent is currently operational in the UK.

View the Beacon equipment list

University staff wishing to book equipment should use the Workspace booking pages.

External organisations wishing to access any equipment should contact the listed academic lead or contact us at PF-Beacon@nottingham.ac.uk.

Some of our current equipment

Beacon Advance Materials Laboratory

This lab will support projects such as the Liquid Plasma Processing Platform, which will deliver the first suspension plasma spray facility of its kind in the UK and the Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) project (pictured), which offers many advantages over conventional sintering systems, including greatly reduced sintering temperature, and a much shorter sintering period. SPS offers entirely new possibilities to manufacture a wide range of materials with extraordinary characteristics, ideal for fuel cells and functional electrodes.

NAP-XPS

Our NAP-XPS system is UK-leading. It comprises of an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) analysis chamber equipped with a differentially pumped high-pressure hemispherical electron analyzer, a 4-axis sample manipulator and sources for monochromatic micro-focused x-rays, sputtering and charge neutralization. The chamber is also equipped with sources for evaporation and electrospray deposition of molecules. Samples can be introduced into the UHV manipulator and prepared at pressures down into the 10-10 mbar range. Samples can then be transferred into the in-situ near-ambient pressure (NAP) cell to perform XPS measurements at pressures up to 20 mbar in a range of gases. For access please contact Dr James O'Shea.

Slot Die Coater

Slot-Die Coater can be used to deposit a thin liquid film to the surface of a substrate and offers high levels of coating uniformity across the length/width of the coating surface with thicknesses ranging from a few nanometres to many microns. To use please contact Grace Guan.

Isostatic Press

EPSI cold isostatic press efficiently creates unsintered die-compacted metal powder parts as a preliminary densification step, before rolling, machining or sintering. To use please contact Dr Ming Li.

Thin Film Analyser

The LINSEIS Thin Film Analyzer is a chip-based platform to simultaneously measure the in-plane electrical and thermal conductivity, the Seebeck coefficient as well as the Hall constant of a thin film sample in the temperature range from -170°C up to 280°C and in a magnetic field of up to 1 T. To use please contact Prof Simon Woodward.

Accurion nanofilm ep-4 Ellipsometer

This instrument will provide new insights into optical properties at the microscale. We will work with a wide range of materials, such as polymer photovoltaics, exfoliated flakes of graphene, and much more. To use please contact Dr Christopher Mellor.

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