MIAMI launched at professorial lecture
Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:13:00 GMT
Professor Donnelly and his team now have UK-leading facilities for their materials analysis research
The University's Professor Stephen Donnelly (centre) is pictured at the opening of MIAMI with former Astronomer Royal Professor Sir Arnold Wolfendale (left), a former colleague of Stephen, and Professor Sir Peter Knight (right), who chairs the University's EPSRC Centre Steering Committee.
A RESEARCH scientist and his team at the University of Huddersfield now have the full use of technology that is unique in the UK and matched by just one other facility in the whole of Europe.
The team, headed by Professor Stephen Donnelly, is the Electron Microscopy and Materials Analysis Research Group – or EMMA. And they are celebrating the fact that the highly advanced, custom-designed facility known as MIAMI is now fully installed and up and running at the University of Huddersfield.
MIAMI stands for Microscope and Ion Accelerators for Materials Investigation and it consists of an electron microscope coupled to an ion accelerator. It was constructed to the design and specification of Professor Donnelly and his colleagues and it enables vital research in a number of areas, such as optimising the performance of materials to be used in the construction of new generations of nuclear reactors.
The EMMA researchers, equipped with MIAMI, can carry out their work without using any potentially hazardous radioactive materials. Instead, they use ion beams in order to simulate the effects that neutron bombardment has on materials. And their powerful electron microscope enables them to carry out analysis at the nanoscale.
MIAMI has now been fully installed at the University of Huddersfield, having been relocated from Professor Donnelly’s previous research establishment. To celebrate the official opening of MIAMI, he delivered his inaugural professorial lecture entitled ‘A matter of atoms’, which explained the full background to his area of research.
Professor Donnelly came to the University of Huddersfield at the start of 2011 in order to become Head of Engineering and Technology and to devote more time to his research. He has since become Acting Dean of the School of Computing and Engineering.
It was after he had carried out research using facilities overseas that Professor Donnelly decided that the UK needed its own electron microscope linked to an ion accelerator. He secured funding of £650,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, leading to the design and construction of MIAMI.
It is the only facility of its type in the UK and one of only two in Europe – the other being the JANNuS facility at Orsay, near Paris. But MIAMI (pictured below) has several innovative features, in particular an in-microscope electrostatic deflector system, and it will continue to be upgraded during its likely ten-year lifespan.
