Customer Stories: Sir Prof. Colin Humphreys about the Phenom SEM for Materials Science

Material science is a really important subject because if you look at objects we use, often the limiting factor is the materials we use. So if you look at a lawnmower, if it breaks, it's something, a blade that breaks or material that's breaking. If you look at solar power, solar power to have on your roof of your house, for example, they're not very efficient, about 20% efficient. We'd like to make them more efficient. That's limited by the materials we use. A jet engine, the fuel it uses, flying across the Atlantic. If you can make the materials work at higher temperatures, they're more efficient. So you use less fuel and less carbon emissions. So materials just about controls everything we do. It's a really important topic. Now I'm standing beside a microscope here, which can resolve single atoms. To use this microscope, you need two years training minimum. And then when you try and take an image of a material you put in, it takes you perhaps three or four hours to align the microscope first. So these microscopes are very difficult to use. They see single atoms, wonderful results, but you've got to be really skilled and trained to use them. What's wonderful about the Phenon is you can train someone to use it in 15 minutes and then they can bring a specimen down, put it into the microscope, 10 minutes later they've got their images. And the Phenon not only gives images, it also has an attachment called an X-ray attachment. And by looking at the X-rays emitted by the material, so an electron beam comes down, hits the material, X-rays are emitted. Those are characteristic of the material. So you can tell if the material you're looking at is gold or copper or silver. We've decided to use a Phenon because it's just so useful for a wide variety of applications. And I'll tell you a medical one. So this is an artificial hip which goes into a patient and it's one which has failed. And this is the hip which goes into the femur part of the body. And this goes into your pelvis and the hip goes into, the artificial hip goes like this, and you can see it rotating around like this. And these hips can fail for a variety of reasons. Well one possible problem is that metal can come off this bit here and deposit on the plastic here. And it can just be a thin layer of metal so you can't actually see it with the naked human eye. But what you can do, you can place this, this whole body, into the Phenon microscope and you can image at high resolution but then we can use the X-rays emitted when the electron beam strikes this to say what the metal is. So we can say without doubt that the metal from this, which is titanium, has actually deposited on here. And that's bad news because the titanium on there can get into your bloodstream which is bad. So this is going to help save people's lives. This is actually something which has failed. This is real bone cement. It's come out of a patient, right? Failed one. And what is great is you can put this whole thing into the microscope. This big microscope here, you have to take a narrow section of it and so you can miss what you're looking for. So I think the Phenon is just a remarkable instrument. It should be in every materials department in the country and in the world and every biological department in the world and also in senior schools. It would be wonderful just to turn people onto science as well. So every laboratory should have one.