Past The Halfway Point

Pretty mixed week here for us at strathSEEA. For the upcoming micro-hardness and optical microscope work we needed our samples to be mounted as a cross section and then nickel coated. As this is really only a one man job, Camy took charge of that practical task whereas I (Kenny) got stuck in to writing up the interim report due next week.

We then found out that our advisor Emmy had booked us some time on the XPS machine, as this requires supervision and it was the only time she had available. Due to limited machine availability we could only run XPS on a select few samples, so we chose an iron based sample and a K33 treated nickel based sample. It transpired that the XPS involves a lot of waiting about.

But with that completed in a few days, we were also able to make good progress on the surface hardness testing. This involves taking a lot of small measurements, approximately 500 for now we think. We persevered and managed to complete the majority of them in a few days and we will be looking to have them all completed by the start of next week.

Hopefully we will also receive some confirmation of our XRD analysis so that we can commence the write-up of that section next week also. All in all a productive week here at Chlamers!