Facilities

Wilmore LabsMuch of the materials engineering laboratory facilities, as well as all of its academic, administrative and graduate student offices, are located in Wilmore Laboratories. The building, which is conveniently located at the center of the campus' engineering quadrant, underwent a multi-year, $14 million state-of-the-art renovation, which was completed in the Fall 2001 semester. Wilmore Labs is within a five-minute walk from Foy Student Union, Haley Center and many of the other major classroom buildings and dormitories on campus.

The building now houses over 12,000 square feet of laboratory space, which includes a Class 100-level clean room and unique equipment for the high-temperature processing of materials. A few examples of what our equipment can do include:

  • making single crystals by melting tungsten at more than 3400°C locally with an electron beam
  • simulating the effects of gravity on molten metals with large centrifuges
  • designing and building our own equipment to used on the International Space Station

Laboratory space in Wilmore Laboratories can be divided into three major categories. The equipment listed below represents only a portion of the full range of resources available to our research teams:

  • Materials processing laboratoriesinclude an autoclave, presses, pultrusion, injection molding and thermoforming machines for composites; hot and cold isostatic presses for powder-based materials, sputter-coating facilities for the deposition of coatings, a variety of crystal growth systems and a Gleeble thermomechanical processing system.
  • Materials characterization facilities include both scanning and transmission electron microscopes (SEM and TEM), automated x-ray diffractometers, scanning tunneling microscope, thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, AC-impedance spectroscopy and quantitative image analysis equipment.
  • Mechanical testing facilities include ambient and high-temperature testing facilities and dynamic testers. An environmental exposure chamber complements these facilities.

Multidisciplinary research directed by or involving materials engineering faculty may often find students working in laboratories across the campus (and at off-campus laboratories) with students, faculty and researchers from other engineering disciplines or other fields of study.