Materials Synthesis
• Vertigo – A vertical tube furnace for melting and long-duration heat treatments at temperatures up to 1100 °C.
• Combo – A multipurpose box furnace operating up to 1100°C with protective atmosphere.
• ThermoCeram – A Nabertherm high-temperature air furnace for sintering up to 1600 °C with an option for protective atmosphere.
• Samson – A tube furnace combined with hydraulic press for hot-pressing of powders up to 700 ° C under protective atmosphere.
• A two-stage EDWARDS-make vacuum system for evacuating and sealing of quartz ampoules at pressure <10-5 Torr.
• A hydraulic press for cold uniaxial powder compaction up to 5,000 kgf.
• A constant-force Buehler precision saw.
Thermal Analysis
A Netzsch LFA-457 apparatus for thermal conductivity measurements
The LFA-457 instrument is based on the “half-time” method, where a thermal pulse is generated on the sample’s surface on one side, and the thermal response is detected and temporally-resolved on the opposite side, thus yielding the temperature- dependent thermal diffusivity. The temperature- dependent heat capacity is also measured using standards. The product of these two magnitudes with the material’s density yields the temperature- dependent thermal conductivity.
Technical Details
- Furnaces: -125°C to 500°C , RT to 1100°C
- Measurement Atmosphere:He/Ar/Vacuum (<10-2 mbar)
- Laser:Nd-YAG, up to 18 J, Minimum pulse duration 0.5 ms
- Infra-Red Detectors:Mercury-Cadmium-Telluride/Indium-Antimonide
- Data Acquisition:Control unit, Dedicated software
- Thermal Conductivity Range:0.1 to 2000 Wm-1K-1, Accuracy ±3%
- Thermal Diffusivity Range:0.01 to 1000 mm2/s, Accuracy ±2%=
Electrical Analysis
A Netzsch SBA-458 Nemesis TM system for simultaneous determination of Seebeck Coefficient (10 through 500 µV/K) and electrical conductivity (5 through 150,000 S/cm) at the range of room temperature through 1100 °C under protective atmosphere.
Computational
High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster
WildCat is a ProLiant Hewlett-Packard HPC cluster comprising 14 compute nodes interconnected by a Mellanox high-speed infiniband switch (40 Gb/s) to speed-up parallel computing. Each node contains double six-core Intel Xeon 5650 processors (2.66 GHz) and 48 GB shared memory. OS: Linux.
MedeA software package
MedeA software package
We utilize the MedeA 2.19 software package (Materials Design, Inc. 2015; Angel Fire, NM, USA) for ab-initio calculations. This package includes several components:
- VASP 4.6 and 5.4 codes for plane-wave density functional theory (DFT) calculations;
- MedeA graphical user interface;
- InformaticA crystallographic database;
- Phonon package for calculations of temperature-dependent thermodynamic properties;
- Interface Builder for building simulation cells comprising interphase boundaries;
- Electronics for calculation of electronic transport properties.
- Medea LAMMPS for performing molecular dynamic calculations;