HIGH TEMPERATURE MATERIALS CHEMISTRY CONFERENCE

The 13th Meeting of the IUPAC HTMC conference will take place Septemeber 15-18, 2009 at the University of California, Davis. The conference is hosted by the Peter A. Rock Thermochemistry Laboratory and the NEAT ORU. For more information see the conference web site (http://neat.ucdavis.edu/HTMC-13).

A Setaram calorimetry workshop will be held before the conference. Click on this link to view registeration information and the workshop agenda.

PROFESSOR RICARDO CASTRO JOINS THE PETER A. ROCK THERMOCHEMISTRY LABORATORY

Ricardo Hauch Ribeiro de Castro has joined the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Department and the Peter A. Rock Thermochemistry Laboratory as Assistant Professor in March 2009. Trained in materials science in Brazil, he has interests in nanoparticles, sintering of ceramics, and the application of calorimetry to study transformations involving decrease of surface area. He has acquired new calorimetric instrumentation, and has full access to the other equipment in Thermochemistry. He will be building his own independent research program (new directions, students, funding) and will also interact strongly and collaborate with people in Thermochemistry. Welcome to Davis, Ricardo.

ALEXANDRA NAVROTSKY WINS THE 2009 ROEBLING MEDAL OF THE MINERALOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

This is the highest career award of MSA and will be presented at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, OR October 19-21. Previous winners include Bragg, Pauling and many more recent eminent mineralogists, crystallographers and petrologists.

NEW EQUIPMENT

A Setaram Labsys DSC/TGA for work to 1600 C

Setaram Setsys DSC and Setsys TMA for work to 1650 C, including under hydrogen (Castro)

Setaram Wetsys humidity control system (Castro)

We are collaborating with Setaram Inc. to make a commercializable wersion of the Navrotsky oxide melt solution calorimeter. The first prototype of this instrument, dubbed the Alexsys, will go to our colleague Hans Seifert in Freiberg, Germany. Contact A. Navrotsky for details, especially if you might be interested in obtaining such an instrument in the next 2-5 years.

Sergey Ushakov, research associate, is building a multipurpose instrument (the Levaporator) for synthesis of anhydrous nanoparticles, levitation melting and quenching of samples, and, eventually, drop calorimetry of levitated samples. Contact him (svushakov@ucdavis.edu) for forther information.

DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY EFRC (ENERGY FRONTIER RESEARCH CENTER) GRANTS

NEAT and the Peter A. Rock Thermochemistry Laboratory are awarded large projects within two EFRCs - Materials Science of Actinides led by Peter Burns of Notre Dame University and Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO₂ led by Donald DePaolo of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. These are large five-year collaborative projects funded at nearly $4M per year; UCD share is over $1M per year.

OTHER GRANTS

Thermochemistry has also gotten several other grants, including:

Thermochemistry of Anion Defect and Charge Coupled Substitutions in Fluorite and Perovskite-Based Materials

Nanostructure and Thermodynamics of Polymer Derived Ceramics

A Thermodynamic Approach for the Understanding of Nanomaterials Properties: Application to two Types of Nanomaterials: Barium Titanates and Calcium Phosphate Apatites

Synthesis, Experiments & Theory of Relaxor Ferroelectrics

THERMODYNAMICS "CRASH COURSE"

Navrotsky has given an 8-hour thermodynamics "crash course", comprising solid solutions and phase transitions in Switzerland, Brazil, Korea, China, and at Davis. To obtain a copy of the lecture notes please contact her assitant at navea@ucdavis.edu.

THE INSTITUTE FOR COMPLEX ADAPTIVE MATTER JOINS NEAT ORU

Since June 2006, the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter has been part of the NEAT ORU, moving from its previous home at the University of California President’s office. ICAM (http://icam-i2cam.org) is a worldwide network focused on the science of emergent phenomena in matter linking 45 branches and 67 institutions. The co-directors are Daniel Cox and David Pines, Professors of Physics at UC Davis.

The ICAM NSF grant has just been renewed for the next five years at a budget of about $1M per year.

SPECTRAL IMAGING FACILITY

The Spectral Imaging Facility began operating in August 2005. Under an NSF MRI and University funding support existing lab space in the Chemistry building basement was renovated to accommodate the first commercially available combined Asylum Research MFP-3D Atomic Force Microscope and Olympus FluoView 1000 Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope. The high resolution Atomic Force and laser scanning confocal microscopes allow imaging soft materials with nano- and microscopic features, as well as, polymer, inorganic-organic composites, and complex biological systems such as proteins, cells, viruses, and bacteria. Certified users have the option of using the Forma 1400 Biological Safety cabinet and NAPCO 8000WJ incubator for cell preparation and normalization before imaging.

In August 2006 through a donation of equipment from Agilent Technologies the facility acquired a Hitachi S-800T Field Emission Electron Microscope and Oxford INCA Energy attachment for EDS . In January 2008 Hitachi HTA donated a later model S-4100T FE-SEM for improved nano-scale imaging. The high resolution Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope with attachment for Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometry is used for qualitative and quantitative elemental microanalysis, elemental spatial distribution, and feature detection and classification.

A Renishaw RM 1000 laser Raman Microscope was acquired in July 2007 through a co-operative funding agreement with Office of Research, Chemistry, and NEAT ORU. The laser Raman microscope is used to identify the molecular structure of organic and inorganic compounds for contamination analysis, material classification, and stress measurements. The Raman microscope was upgraded to acquire 2 dimensional Raman maps and fluorescence microscopy in January 2009.

The Spectral Imaging Facility is staffed by full-time Associate Development Engineer.

For more information, please contact the development engineer for the facility, Mr. Alan Hicklin (sif-info@ucdavis.edu or aghicklin@ucdavis.edu), for details regarding training, scheduling, and sample preparation. The Spectral Imaging Facility website may be found here.

NEAT ORU

The Organized Research Unit on Nanomaterials in the Environment, Agriculture and Technology (NEAT) is the administrative home to the Peter A. Rock Thermochemistry Laboratory, the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) and the Spectral Imaging Facility (SIF). It encourages and enables interdisciplinary research in the basic sciences of nanomaterials and energy, assists in grant preparation, manages grants, and coordinates activities. For more information, see the NEAT ORU web site at http://neat.ucdavis.edu.