• Question: What is the collest piece of equipment in your lab and can you explain it?

    Asked by to Hannah, James, Meggi, Olivia, Oli, Paul, Saiful on 3 Jan 2017. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Oli Weber

      Oli Weber answered on 3 Jan 2017:

      The coolest piece of equipment in my lab is a single crystal X-ray diffractometer. You take a tiny piece of a crystal, just like a grain of salt or sugar, and line it up so the X-rays will hit it. Usually we also cool the crystal down to about -120 degrees celsius, which is also very cool. When the X-rays hit the crystal, they scatter off the atoms and we detect where they go. We then use this data to find out where all the atoms are in the crystal structure.

    • Photo: Meggi

      Meggi answered on 3 Jan 2017:

      Yes, the XRD machine is really cool as it gives you the identity (one could say DNA) of your material.

      I like a lot our transmission electron microscope. We can make with this photos of the single super tiny particle.

      To get an idea how tiny nanoparticles are: 1 meter and 1 nanometer are comparable with the earth and a table tennis ball.

    • Photo: Paul Shearing

      Paul Shearing answered on 4 Jan 2017:

      We also use X-rays in our lab – but mostly to conduct imaging work using a 3D X-ray microscope.

      It works in a very similar way to hospital X-ray machines, which are sometimes called CAT Scanners (although not ’cause they scan cats! it stands for ‘computed axial tomography’) – but the main difference is that our machines can look at tiny things, with super high resolution (not quite as high as Meggi’s transmission electron microscope, but pretty close!)

      We look at battery materials at the nano-meter length scale to see who the size and shape of particles affect how the battery performs and degrades

    • Photo: Hannah Moir

      Hannah Moir answered on 4 Jan 2017:

      My choice would have to be our large treadmill. Its the centrepoint of our lab and it is impressive to look at, it certinaly gets the attention when people come visit our labs. It was also the device we used for the 12hr female treadmill dsitance guinness world record and its been one of our most reliable bits of kit to date. Without the ‘simplistic’ pieces of equipment we would struggle to conduct our studies.

    • Photo: James Betts

      James Betts answered on 31 Jan 2017:

      In metabolic studies we are now able to monitor aspects of people’s metabolism even when they are not in the laboratory. One of the coolest recent developments is that we can attach a small monitor to their tummy (just biside the tummy button) and it measures their glucose levels every 5 minutes 24 hours a day. This has really helped understand the overall effect of different diets or exercise plans on how well we can control blood sugars.

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