Toys and Presentations

Hello,

Well, after the business of last week, things were much calmer this week, not least because we kicked it all off with a bank holiday. And rain.

Betsy now has spare wagons.

So by Tuesday, I was ready to go. I began by chasing up some more trains, ready as spares in case any of the trains get damaged along the way. Being dunked in liquid nitrogen isn't a usual environment after all. I also went about procuring some grass mats from a Modelling shop and deciding on other characters and decorations.

Aside from this, I began work on an instruction manual. The aim is that anyone (with common sense) can get out and use the train on Open Days (which Diamond host fairly often). Thus, it is handy to have a quick start guide.

During the afternoon, I began to use the software Origin to sort out the graphs I want to use. And during this, I found some interesting properties in some of the data I collected.

To do work, I had to tidy my desk. I had too many toys lying around.
And with the arrival of more, it got worse.

I continued this task over to Wednesday. However, it was broken up by attending some presentations by some of the other placement students. The variety of the placement projects make this a very worth while and interesting session and I come away knowing a lot more about SAX (small angle X-ray imaging) and the magnetic modelling and experiments occurring elsewhere around the beamline. I thank all three students for this.


Thursday I went about preparing my own presentation, showing a rough draft to my supervisor. If you are preparing a presentation, I recommend getting someone else to check it over with you, as things may not be as clear as you would like them to be. I went away with several suggestions. I'm doing this alongside a report and a poster so all these documents are keeping me busy as I wait for parts to start appearing.

Type soon!

Culham, Trains and Nightime Beamtime.

Hello,

I do not apologise for the length of this post as it matches this weekend. Working at Diamond is never monotonous.

A model of the inside of JET, the torus tokamak. The plasma is held within the kidney
shaped areas by magnets... and superconductors play their role!

On Thursday morning, I came back to stuffing quartz wool and YBCO salts into open capillaries. By the end, I had manged to fill and mount one, which I felt was quite an achievement. The afternoon, however, I was off to Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. There, they have the world's largest tokamak. With it, they are able to create a plasma out of heavier isotopes of hydrogen (a hydrogen atom with extra neutrons). With it, they are hoping to help find a clean and abundant power source for the future, along with the developing remote handling systems like MASCOT (who looks so like Wall-e). If you want to know more, visit http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/

Friday, however, was back to the trains. Some more empty engine shells had arrived, so I spent my morning patching up wholes and trying them with the superconductors. No joy... yet... The afternoon, I finished creating a spare gas cell capillary because...

Saturday was BEAMTIME! That morning, we attached and aligned the gas cell and hooked it up to the oxygen flow for the gas to flow through. The experiment involved heating the capillary up using a hot air blower and watching for changes.

Leaving it there for several hours, however, didn't actually seem to do much, so we began loading normal capillary (hard as my salts had clumped a little) and set up a low pressure gas experiment, pumping in oxygen. We watched it heat and began writing scripts for overnight dwelling... until the capillary disappeared. As it was getting late at this point, we left it to get some sleep so we were prepared for...

The beamroom at night... not actually that different from day, except
for the peacefulness.

More beamtime Sunday. This turned into a long day. Since the YBCO had to be loaded into really thin capillaries (it absorbs the radiation well), we put this on the back burner so to speak and moved onto another compound. This one, we were able fill into larger capillaries and pump He through in the hope that it could capture some of it. Slowly increasing the pressure, we hoped to see a change in the diffraction pattern.

My little engine, awaiting the judgement by nitrogen.

Whilst analysing these results, we repeated the experiment, but using Oxygen, to try to show whether the He had changed the crystal more than the beam did. To further our evidence, we followed this up with a different compound which shouldn't react with the He at all. With so many experiments and so much capillary heating, we eventually left the beamline at 1.30AM! Diamond at night is so quiet!

Monday morning, (and I do mean 9am-no liein) we came down to our results... only to find the computer script had failed to take the scans! Sad times, but I was able to manually perform the experiment and follow it up with a repetition of the He experiments in the hope of clearer results. I'm now able to mount the samples, lockup the beam room and set scans going.

The afternoon, though, was back to the train and my conclusion was superglue can't cope with liquid nitrogen... oh well. Needless to say, there were many leaks. And 3 broken magnets. Oops.

So to Tuesday, the order of the day was glues. I created samplers of glues and left them to dry over lunch so later in the afternoon I could try them in the liquid nitrogen. They seemed to work so tomorrow, my train is about to get coated!

Type soon!

  PS. It wasn't all work. I've learnt 2 new board games and eaten many biscuits 
whilst waiting for things to heat and pattern emerge.

Into the Beam Room

Hello,

 
Starting again on Monday and getting into the week with Beamtime. After gaining a diffraction pattern of the last YBCO I made, the morning was spent attaching the capillary furnace, known as the STOIE, in the beamline; you can see pictures of it to the left. This allows the capillary to be heated more accurately and uniformly than the alternative, the hot air blower, meaning we can get nice diffraction patterns of the YBCO salts heating up.

In principle. After a few coding problems, the furnace started glowing at lower temperatures than expected and the whole experiment switched off early as a safety measure. Turned out, the thermocouple inside was rather damaged, so had to be replaced. Meanwhile, I loaded a capillary of platinum (approx. £10 worth before anyone gets too excited) to use as an alignment help later.

Once working, we started aligning a new salt capillary. This one though provided us with a few difficulties and it was while swapping it for another that I accidentally broke a capillary. Whilst becoming a rarer occurrence, I'm pleased to say, this time it did get stuck in the furnace. In the end, we switch stages (the type of stand in front of the beam) and did 'Rapid Access'; these are samples sent in just for a quick scan.

The STOIE surrounded by the giant detectors.

With the upcoming beamtime over the weekend, on Tuesday I started researching a Plan B for the time then. As a scientist, you must always be prepared for not getting what you expected, because half the time, you're trying something which may not work. For this, I was researching reactions and compounds using the Oxides I'm using for the synthesis (Barium Carbonate, Yttrium Oxide and Copper (II) Oxide).

However, there was a break as I went to a skills session of presentations. It is always useful to be able to talk other people through the work you are doing to encourage interest and further research in the subject.

The gas cell capillary enables gases to flow across the sample in situ.

Wednesday got very cold first thing, as I tried to get a train to levitate with the superconductors attached. Trying several ways and butchering it with pliers, I did get slight lift off the rear of the engine briefly, but the liquid nitrogen poured off almost as fast as it was added.

In the afternoon, I practiced preparing a gas cell capillary. This involves wrapping the sample up in quartz wool and sliding it into an open-ended tube held in a stand as shown. Whilst I didn't break many blank capillaries while practicing loading them into the stand, it turns out the putting cotton-wool-like material is harder than it looks (and it looks hard). However, I didn't break anything while doing it, so tomorrow morning, I should be able to go back and try again.

Type soon.

Foiling the Attraction

Hello,

The magnet 'being put to bed' in aluminum
foil. This weakens the field, but prevents chips
of magnet being lost.

There are some days in science when you get a lot of highly scientific work done. There are others where you get on the bus at the end of the day and say to your friends:

"I spent all day searching the internet for the plastic body of a railway engine."

That was Wednesday's task. It was a little trying, if just because to be held up by such a trivial-seeming task is a little irksome, but 100% necessary - after all, what's a superconducting train track without a good train. The limitations were that the body had to be LIGHT, NON-MAGNETIC and the RIGHT SIZE. You'd be amazed how many toy shops I rang around.

By Thursday morning, though, this was sorted and I began to fill capillaries with the salts used in the synthesis, in preparation for beamtime on Monday; it's a trial time for next weekend. 

However, I was interrupted as I was given safety training for the beamline rooms. You remember the quote I gave from my supervisor at the beginning? The rooms which receive beam, known as hutches, have to be searched for people (and bodies) before the beam is switched off. Pretty serious stuff, given the consequences if anyone is missed. To avoid cutting corners, there are searching buttons which have to be pressed around the beamline rooms.

The magnets can then be positioned on a piece of track. Care has to be taken
though - they snap together with a surprising amount of force.

Friday began me watching a gas cell experiment being prepared; this is similar to what I was hoping to do next week, so the experience was a good indication of the work that goes into it. I then went back to my capillaries so there would be something to do the work on.

That all done, my afternoon was spent re-wrapping the magnets in foil; previously, they wouldn't lie flat, unbalancing the superconductors. I also checked the magnetic field around the track, since at the centre, the magnets can reach up to 160 mT (5 mT is considered strong). Luckily, the strength is very short range, so I was able to use my phone to take picture without risk of scrambling it.

Type soon!

PS. Halfway through my placement now! And things starting the pull together.

Beamtime!

Hello

I start by saying I hope to get my camera into a lab soon. But the past few days, I've been rather busy as I went...

From hot to cold these past few days. It started Friday, when I has not one but two furnaces heating away as I worked on another batch of capillaries. Having made:

The tablets go from a clay colour to black when heated

•  pelleted and pelleted-halfway-through-heating (phth as I will now call it... 'cos I'm lazy) superconductor in air
•  a unpelleted and phth superconductor with a low flow of oxygen (and the furnace did switch off and I did jump for joy)

  the final combination was pelleted in oxygen and unpelleted in air. Since the latter didn't required oxygen, I used the box furnaces instead.

This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been making more capillaries from samples of the last four pellets in the room next door. Phew! And for the mathematician who likes to have a scoreboard:

Capillary 5  Ros 10

I also made a capillary of the salts mixed but not heated because...

Monday I had beamtime!

What's more, I froze! A student on a brief bit of work experience has a small project and for it there were three of us grinding up samples to compared usin7g the beam. And my sample needed to be kept cool, so I did it in the fridge. 

I say three of us, since there was also another intern getting a taste of lab life; he's designing software to help with the data collected on our beamline and came to have a look at what we do. Goes to show, there are a lot of people working outside the beamline rooms to get it running smoothly.

The afternoon, we actually placed  14 samples (including my superconductor samples and mixed salts) into the beam in order to get results. The beam hit the sample and we took a diffraction pattern using the detectors that surround the capillaries. The equipment at Diamond is really highly sensitive and so it gave rather wiggly lines, but by the end, I could make out distinct peaks showing a change from the mixed salt to the cooked superconductors.

Overnight, we left the detectors taking periodic scans of the mixed salts being heated and cooled in situ so we look at the phase change. That's right: I'm doing an experiment using a synchrotron.

The beamline has a traffic light warning system. Red means 'No Entry'. And yes, I hope to get a proper photo.

Coming in Tuesday morning, I'd found my capillary had... well... exploded overnight. On the bright side though, most of the measurements had been made by that point and were waiting to be analysed. 

However, the day was rather busy. There were new users setting up, a meeting with a H&S man, who told us about the 5S process of organisation, a beamline safety meeting (extremely important), tidying up in the lab ready for the monthly Health and Safety checks (like I said, extremely important) and capillaries to load of the superconductors made on Friday. 

The data rather feel by the side for the day, but we did establish that the salts would need to be mixed in a quartz capillary to survive the heating. 

Last job of the day was to put on a new superconductor to cook. I feel I'm becoming quite  chef.

And the final capillary count (inc. the colder attempts):

Capillary 9  Ros 13

 Still winning.

Type soon!

Picture from Clipart.