Glancing Beam X-ray Diffraction, Perfectionism and VPNs
Surface Ventures
Not-for-profit providing world-class surface science webinars for academics and industry professionals
Hello all,
Hope you're well. On the 11th of February, it was the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Being male, I lack the experience to talk on this with any authority but it would be remiss of me to not highlight the inequalities faced by females in science and engineering and the under-representation of women in these fields. One of my supervisors, Prof Anne Neville, was a great proponent of outreach to promote science and engineering to get more children engaged with science and technology. With Anne's strong support, I and other researchers were fortunate to spend time doing outreach at local schools. I can only hope that this small amount of work helped to open science and engineering as career options to those children. Catch you in the next issue in two weeks.
Research highlights: Highly Cited
Columnar microstructures are synonymous with PVD technologies. Generally, however, the ion flux is applied perpendicular to the substrate so that the films grow perpendicularly up from the substrate. This of course applies in idealised circumstances and real parts have varying geometries. So what happens when the angle of the depositing incident flux is varied? Read more in "Glancing Angle Deposition and Growth Mechanism of Inclined AlN Nanostructures Using Reactive Magnetron Sputtering" by Bairagi et al.
Productivity Resources: Perfectionism
I'm sure that many of us have had problems with procrastination. I certainly have, it was a mixture of perfectionism and anxiety over my work or creation. In this TedTalk, Jon Youshaei explores procrastination in creation and whether quality should always be prioritised over quantity.
Interesting Infographics
The world is going electric. It's not as simple as it seems however as the demand for batteries is monumental requiring 293 new mines to reach the global demand by 2030. Read more about this infographic from the Visual Capitalist.
From our Partner
Closely mimicking real-world conditions is the best way to provide accurate and reliable measurements of mechanical properties and predict materials' behaviour. The NanoTest Xtreme utilising active tip and sample heating, horizontal loading, highly local heating and high vacuum allows users to reliably measure mechanical properties on the nano-scale as a function of temperature, free from thermal drift or oxidation.
As temperatures increase, so does the chance of component failure due to creep. Utilising small-scale measurements to understand microstructure is particularly important as grain boundaries facilitate diffusion processes in creep. The NanoTest Xtreme allows for long duration creep tests due to its high thermal stability.
You can find other high temperature notes on the Micro Materials Website. You can find videos relating to high temperature nanomechanical characterisation on the Micro Materials YouTube Channel.
The latest and upcoming from Surface Ventures
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Notable and quotable
“Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live." – Mae Jemison
What we’re reading
X-ray diffraction is a key characterisation tool for materials science. Though the fundamental physics that underlies the technique is simple to graph, there are numerous measurement types and operation modes as well as the interpretation of the data itself. "Back-to-Basics tutorial: X-ray diffraction of thin films" by Harrington and Santiso aims to lower the barrier for researchers to to perform meaningful XRD analysis.
An app a day
If you ever talk to me about my computing hobbyist projects, I will inevitably mention how terrible I am at anything to do with networking. When I built my small home server, I was faced with a dilemma. How do I access it remotely? Thankfully, there's an app for that. Tailscale allows you to create a mesh network via VPN so all of your devices can connect to each other.
The Lighter Side of the Internet
I've come across the image below several times but it always seemed so ridiculous so it couldn't be true. Alex Chan has explored this in a blog post and it seems it the maximum size of 381 x 381 km is indeed true. But what happens if you try to exceed that limit? Read and find out!
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Curated By Dr Samuel McMaster
Content Manager – Surface Ventures