As a materials science student, your first lab experience is in the foundry making greensand casts. You go through the entire process of wetting and sifting the sand, compacting the molds, and removing the hot parts. The pattern used to make the vintage stadium memorabilia was created over 100 years ago by a local craftsmen. The MSE department isn’t allowed to sell any of the casts, so they allow students to make them and keep them (for free) every year. One of the coolest things you will see in the foundry are the large induction furnaces that melt the metal. Induction furnaces use electromagnetism to heat up the metal, and it creates a pool of liquid metal that appears to be levitating, a pretty cool thing when seen in person.

As a materials science student you will also get to spend time at the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis (CEMAS). It’s a relatively new facility with millions of dollars of equipment including diffractometers for XRD analysis, scanning electron microscopes (SEM), and transmission electron microscopes (TEM). The construction of the facility itself was carefully thought out so as to limit any interference with the microscopes, ultimately resulting in a center that houses some the highest resolution microscopes in the world.

Microscopy really brings out the beauty of materials science. The bottom image depicts an electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) pattern, an EBSD crystallographic orientation map, a TEM image of a grain boundary, and an SEM secondary electron image.