Metallurgy & Materials Research Fellow Committee


The School of Metallurgy & Materials' Research Fellow Committee aims to help RFs within the School; i) by enabling them to build links between one another to support collaborative research, ii) informing who they need to speak with for advice on specialised scientific research kit, and iii) introduce them to the supporting staff and technicians who make up the School.

The Committee currently consists of; Dr Richard Turner & Dr Mary Taylor.  The RF committee also sit as the School representatives on the joint college of EPS and college of LES Post-doctoral Early Career Development Network  (ECDN) committee. More information on ECDN can be found on the ECDN pages.

The Met & Mat RF committee are keen to recruit new researchers to join the committee, any enquiries are most welcome,  Mary and Richard can be contacted for this.  For any general queries regarding information on this page, Richard Turner and Mary Taylor can be contacted.

Facilities

Electron Microscopy

The Centre for Electron Microscopy is a departmental facility within Metallurgy & Materials. The academics responsible for the Centre are Professor Yu-Lung Chiu and Professor Ian Jones. 

Use of the facilities requires training. This is provided by the technical support for the Centre, via Ludwig Schneider and Teresa Morris. Booking of microscopes amd training is done via the ppms booking pages.  More information can be found on the Centre for Electron Microscopy pages

X Ray Diffraction

The academic responsible for the X-Ray Diffraction facilities is Dr Daniel Reed.

Metallographic Sample Preparation

The metallographic and sample preparation facilities within the School of Metallurgy & Materials include a number of mounting presses, manual and automatic polishing wheels, etchants and fume cupboards. The equipment all requires training before use.  The sample preparation lab facility is managed by Amy Newell (a.j.newell@bham.ac.uk), who can be contacted to arrange training via ppms. 

The metallographic preparation lab is a shared facility with undergraduate and post-graduate students, so the  lab and equipment may be closed to staff access for certain times during the week for student teaching activity.  

Supplementary equipment, such as bakelite granules, polishing and grinding papers, must be provided by the individual researcher themselves. These can be purchased from the Metallurgy & Materials Stores. 

Optical Microscopy

The academic responsible for the optical microscope facilities within the School is Dr Dan Reed.  All appropriate training on these optical microscopes can be requested for researchers. 

PRISM Computational Modelling

The PRISM research group holds academic licences for a number of different finite element, computational fluid dynamics and materials thermodynamics software packages.  Some of these software packages can be made available to Metallurgy & Materials researchers, and all enquiries should be directed to Dr Richard Turner.

  • Finite element software packages held by the PRISM group include: ABAQUS, ANSYS, Forge and Deform.
  • CFD packages held by the PRISM group include: OpenFOAM
  • Thermodynamics and Materials properties software held by the PRISM group include: JMatPro, ThermoCalc (licenced jointly by PRISM and academics within the School of Met & Mat).

Netshape Manufacture

The Advanced Materials and Processing Laboratory (AMPLAB), led by Professor Moataz Attallah, studies manufacturing methods including Direct laser deposition (DLD), Selective laser melting (SLM) and Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIPping). As such, the group has a number of HIP vessels, DLD machines and SLM machines.

In addition, the AMPLAB group also have an EDM / spark erosion machine, available to researchers within the School.  for further information on the AMPLAB research group, facilities, ongoing work and staff members, please see their group pages .

Magnetic Materials Research 

The Magnetic Materials group (MMG) is led by Professor Allan Walton, and supported by academic staff Dr Richard Sheridan

The Magnetic Materials Group (MMG) at the University of Birmingham is the only UK research group focussed on processing and recycling of permanent rare earth magnetic materials. The MMG is internationally-recognised for its work on hydrogen processing of rare earth alloys and magnets which are used worldwide in the production and recycling of Neodymium-Iron-Boron (Nd-Fe-B) magnets. 

For further details, please see the MMG research group pages

Heat Treatment and Furnaces

The school have a variety of box and tube furnaces, with differing heating capabilities and configurations. The school technician, Simon Cannon (s.cannon@bham.ac.uk) can be contacted for futher information, and furances can be booked via the ppms booking system. 

Diamond Light Source Facility (Didcot)

The School of Metallurgy & Materials has a program of assigned beam time on a number of the beam-lines at the Diamond Light Source, which is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. For further details of the equipment and the site, please see the external Diamond pages

Dr Biao Cai co-ordinates the University’s activities with Diamond Light Source (UK’s synchrotron X-ray) to facilitate the Diamond - Birmingham Collaboration. 

Technical Support & Workshop

The technicians within the School of Metallurgy & Materials offer support for a range of equipment available to researchers. The acting Technical Manager for the School is Tom Hutchinson (T.Hutchinson@bham.ac.uk), and the Buildings manager is Bernard Smithson (B.J.Smthson@bham.ac.uk) and they can be contacted to offer further advice on technicians able to support particular requests from researchers. A list of the technical staff at the school can be found on the School's Professional Services pages

The workshop based within Metallurgy & Materials is a part of the general EPS / Physics workshop facilities. For enquiries to do with the workshop, Jag Sangha can be contacted.

IT Support

The School of Metallurgy & Materials does have dedicated IT support technicians based within the School. All requests for IT support should be raised through the formal IT services support pages, on the intranet.  This can be found  on the IT services Gateway pages

Other Information

Wellbeing

The Westmere PGR Hub (building G15 on campus maps) hosts the Westmere Scholars organisation, who organise academic, social and wellbeing activities to support the University's postgraduate researchers. This space can be used from 6am to Midnight, 7 days a week. 

BEAR Training courses

The BEAR team offers a range of training courses for researchers, including;

  • How to use Linux / PuTTy to access BlueBEAR
  • NVIDIA Deep learning
  • R-coding carpentry workshop
  • Python coding carpentry workshop

All training courses can be booked on the BEAR Intranet pages

 Contensis training for Web-page management

Anyone interested in getting trained to manage the web content for their research group can request training via: eps-web@contacts.bham.ac.uk