The Nano Research Facility at DCU aims to enhance and support research within academia and industry by providing open access to high end, state-of-the-art scientific equipment. It is staffed by an experienced team of Research Technical officers, thus enabling DCU researchers, visiting research teams and industry to collaborate in state-of-the-art labs, augmenting the process of bringing research from concept through to final prototyping and ultimately, commercialisation.
The National Research Facility (NRF) building is part of DCU’s Equipment Access Solutions enterprise and it houses two Core Facilities:
The Materials Processing Core Facility is focussed around 3D printing/Additive Manufacturing, Electrode printing and Micro/Nano Fabrication.
The Analysis Core Facility has a vast array of techniques for measuring materials and surfaces such as white light and stylus profilometry, Atomic Force Microscopy, STED microscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy, Mass Spectrometry, Micro/Nano particle sizing, BET analysis and many spectroscopy techniques.
These Core Facilities are used by internal and external researchers at hourly rates but are also used for service/solution type work where samples are run by our technical experts and charged out as work orders. Please see the brochure.
The DCU NRF will soon house an ALD/XPS (Atomic Layer Deposition / X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy) cluster tool which will allow atomic layer deposition of many types of materials and analysis of each layer all under ultra low vacuum.
The NRF will also soon commission a state of the art Multicolour – Multidimensional Ultrafast Laser Spectroscopy Facility comprising a femtosecond Ti-sapphire laser with optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs), UV-Vis-NIR and NIR-MIR respectively, coupled to an Ultrafast Transient Absorption Spectrometer and a 2D-IR Multi-Dimensional Spectrometer.
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Photo credit DCU
