This course consists of a series of video lectures with educational content curated from the knowledge and experience of the technical specialists within the Experimental Techniques Centre here at Brunel University of London. Created and narrated by materials science expert Dr Myles Worsley, this course was produced in collaboration with Brunel Hydrogen and contains video and music contributions from artists in residence Elinor Coleman and Kat Pegler.
Designed with learner flexibility in mind, the topics have been broken down into digestible 5–10 minute videos to allow those taking the course to proceed at their own pace. The topics covered and approximate durations are as follows:
- Introduction (15 min): Highlights why materials characterisation is important and gives examples of the instrumentation. (written by Dr Myles Worsley)
- Part A - Materials (1h): Covers the core concepts of materials science, a little bit of the fundamental chemistry knowledge necessary to understand what materials characterisation techniques do. From the atom to the periodic table, it describes how materials come together through bonding and the properties that they can have. (written by Dr Myles Worsley)
- Part B - Surface Interactions (45 mins): How materials interact with each other, in particular how gases adsorb onto solid surfaces. This gives insight into considerations when one material comes into contact with another. (written by Dr Myles Worsley)
- Part C - Electron Microscopy (2h): Divided into two parts covering the theory behind electron microscopy and then their practical operation. The first part considers the anatomy of an SEM and why these are high magnification instruments that can resolve structures in very high detail through various electron interactions. Then in part two how various components can be configured to obtain the results that you require from the technique and what considerations need to be made. (written by Dr Myles Worsley and Dr Ashley Howkins)
