This morning our cohort toured the science teacher playground known as the Analytical Instrumentation Facility (AIF) within the same building as our Assist internship at NC State University. Although as a business educator I was a fish out of water, I know enough to be thoroughly impressed with the technology at use within AIF. I sincerely believe that I have never experienced in person the magnitude of such scientific research and discoveries that we were introduced to us today.
AIF’s mission is to offer a state of the art facility for both students and external parties to explore materials characterization utilizing analytical instruments – including the “Titan” which happens to be the largest microscope I have ever seen. In addition to the Titan which is an Aberration Corrected S/TEM, AIF offers multiple X-Ray Diffractometers, X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (TOF SIMS), and Focused Ion Beam (FIB) instruments among others as well. We experienced the FIB burning a microscopic hole into a penny that allowed us to look into and measure various characteristics of the internal material of the penny. We could see where the penny changed from copper to zinc almost like a fault line of a cliff or a crack in concrete. Very cool!
Our team spent the afternoon working together to help one another troubleshoot problems each of us had uploading Arduino coding onto our LilyPads that we began to experiment with earlier in the week. Most of our problems appeared to be with the various drivers needed to run the programs which was compiled by the fact that each of us has different types of laptops and operating systems. Although, feeling our way through the troubleshooting phase of the LilyPad over the past 48 hours was frustrating at times, it felt good to overcome the obstacles that were before us and to see everyone on the team come together to help one another. Now we are ready to dive in and have some coding fun!
Pictures from our AIF tour:
The Titan Microscope
Focused Ion Beam (FIB)
X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS)
Time-of-Flight Secondary Mass Spectometry (TOF SIMS)
PANalytical Empyrean X-Ray Diffractometer
Bruker X-Ray Diffractometer