Metallurgy & Materials Research Fellow Committee

The Centre for Electron Microscopy is a departmental facility within Metallurgy & Materials. The academics responsible for the Centre are Professor Yu-Lung Chiu and Professor Ian Jones. 

Use of the facilities requires training. This is provided by the technical support for the Centre, via Ludwig Schneider and Teresa Morris. Booking of microscopes amd training is done via the ppms booking pages.  More information can be found on the Centre for Electron Microscopy pages. 

The academic responsible for the X-Ray Diffraction facilities is Dr Daniel Reed.

The metallographic and sample preparation facilities within the School of Metallurgy & Materials include a number of mounting presses, manual and automatic polishing wheels, etchants and fume cupboards. The equipment all requires training before use.  The sample preparation lab facility is managed by Amy Newell (a.j.newell@bham.ac.uk), who can be contacted to arrange training via ppms. 

The metallographic preparation lab is a shared facility with undergraduate and post-graduate students, so the  lab and equipment may be closed to staff access for certain times during the week for student teaching activity.  

Supplementary equipment, such as bakelite granules, polishing and grinding papers, must be provided by the individual researcher themselves. These can be purchased from the Metallurgy & Materials Stores. 

The academic responsible for the optical microscope facilities within the School is Dr Dan Reed.  All appropriate training on these optical microscopes can be requested for researchers. 

The PRISM research group holds academic licences for a number of different finite element, computational fluid dynamics and materials thermodynamics software packages.  Some of these software packages can be made available to Metallurgy & Materials researchers, and all enquiries should be directed to Dr Richard Turner.

• Finite element software packages held by the PRISM group include: ABAQUS, ANSYS, Forge and Deform.
• CFD packages held by the PRISM group include: OpenFOAM
• Thermodynamics and Materials properties software held by the PRISM group include: JMatPro, ThermoCalc (licenced jointly by PRISM and academics within the School of Met & Mat).

The Advanced Materials and Processing Laboratory (AMPLAB), led by Professor Moataz Attallah, studies manufacturing methods including Direct laser deposition (DLD), Selective laser melting (SLM) and Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIPping). As such, the group has a number of HIP vessels, DLD machines and SLM machines.

In addition, the AMPLAB group also have an EDM / spark erosion machine, available to researchers within the School.  for further information on the AMPLAB research group, facilities, ongoing work and staff members, please see their group pages .

The Magnetic Materials group (MMG) is led by Professor Allan Walton, and supported by academic staff Dr Richard Sheridan. 

The Magnetic Materials Group (MMG) at the University of Birmingham is the only UK research group focussed on processing and recycling of permanent rare earth magnetic materials. The MMG is internationally-recognised for its work on hydrogen processing of rare earth alloys and magnets which are used worldwide in the production and recycling of Neodymium-Iron-Boron (Nd-Fe-B) magnets. 

For further details, please see the MMG research group pages. 

The school have a variety of box and tube furnaces, with differing heating capabilities and configurations. The school technician, Simon Cannon (s.cannon@bham.ac.uk) can be contacted for futher information, and furances can be booked via the ppms booking system. 

The School of Metallurgy & Materials has a program of assigned beam time on a number of the beam-lines at the Diamond Light Source, which is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. For further details of the equipment and the site, please see the external Diamond pages. 

Dr Biao Cai co-ordinates the University’s activities with Diamond Light Source (UK’s synchrotron X-ray) to facilitate the Diamond - Birmingham Collaboration.