Floating Zone Single Crystal Furnace Installed in BCMaterials

Floating Zone Single Crystal Furnace Installed in BCMaterials
A single crystal of pure nickel has been successfully grown in the new Floating Zone furnace recently installed in BCMaterials. The furnace is a compact, self-contained unit, with all the controls located on the front of the machine. It can grow single crystal bars of 6 mm in diameter and 10 cm in length. The maximum attainable temperature is 2200ºC. A screen shows an amplified, live image of the crystal as it grows.

Fig2-FloatingZoneDetail-283x300

In this amplified image, the seed can be seen connected to the supply material by a drop of molten Nickel. During the growth four halogen lamps surround the crystal, and the light is focused into a small spot on the surface of the material, heating it up to the melting point. The lamps move up at a slow controlled rate melting new material from the top, and allowing the liquid to solidify slowly at the bottom, giving the atoms in the melt enough time to form a single crystal.

Such a furnace will be used in the currently ongoing research on Magnetic Shape Memory Alloys, as well as in other advanced materials that are being developed at BCMaterials.

Fig1-Floating-Zone-Furnace-273x300

Related news

See all news
  • Amaia Zarandona, New Doctor of BCMaterials

    News

    We would like to congratulate Amaia Zarandona Rodríguez for obtaining her PhDs in Materials Science and Technology from the UPV/EHU. On May 22, Amaia made a brilliant defense of her thesis titled “…
  • Pablo Docampo, New Ikerbasque Professor at BCMaterials

    News

    We are glad to welcome Pablo Docampo as new Ikerbasque Research Professor at BCMaterials. Prof. Docampo received his DPhil in 2012 from the University of Oxford focussing on the electronic…
  • Invited Talk with Aaron Mailman (May 20th)

    Events

    BCMaterials is proud to host Dr. Aaron Mailman, Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) in a new invited talk. The talk is titled: “Organic Radicals as Functional…
  • Qi Zhang Appointed Visiting Professor at NUAA (China)

    Awards

    Our Ikerbasque Research Professor, Qi Zhang, was appointed visiting professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) this April. Zhang, who has an extensive research career in…