Question: what do you do in the lab?

Andy Norton answered on 17 Jun 2011:

Heya yameen786,

In the labs, I do a variety of different things. One of the really nice things about my work is that there is so many different things to do – I hardly ever get bored with what I am doing! Maybe if I tell you what I’ve done this week, it’ll give you an idea of what sort of stuff I do in the lab?

On Monday, I was making some samples for my compression tests. I have to cut these into small blocks (maybe 2.5mm x 1.5mm x 1mm) using an automated saw, and then I polish the different sides to it to get rid of any damage from the saw. I also made some other samples for the microscope, which involved making some samples really thin (like a tenth of a millimetre in thickness) and grinding a little hole in it.

On Tuesday I went to the microscope (which is based in an old farmhouse in the North of Oxford!). I looked at my samples on this Transmission Electron Microscope (which elses electrons to image the sample rather than light. There is a picture of it on the profile, if you are interested!). I can look at things that are tiny – I can make things 300, 000 or 400, 000 times bigger than they are in reality. So I looked at some deformed samples to try and see what happened to them.

On Wednesday I polished some beams for a different sort of test. With these ones, we bend the beam (which is about 2mm x 1mm x 15mm) and see what the stress is to break it (and we listen in to the sound of the deformation to work out whether there are cracks growing or things).

On Thursday I used a different sort of electron microscopy – this one is called a Scanning Electron Microscopy (or SEM) and this looks at the surface of a sample. I was looking at a sample that hadn’t been deformed in order to work out what it looked like beforehand (so that I can then tell what difference the stress made). Then in the afternoon I did lots of compression tests (there is a picture of this machine on my profile too), and heard the smashing and the breaking of the sample. It makes you jump when it shatters!

And then today I have been using what is called a Focussed Ion Beam (or a FIB). This uses ions to remove material from a surface, leaving little trenches and holes. We use this to make tiny, tiny little samples to test (they are about 1 micron across, and a micron is a thousandth of a millimetre). This can tell us something about how the sample fails on a really small scale, and we can then compare that to how it breaks on the large scale so that we can see what difference it makes.

So, overall, I do a whole load of different stuff, which is all very cool and fun! It is quite varied, as you can see – it keeps me very entertained and interested!