Heroimage Institut Fuer Oberflaechenforschung

The following processing techniques are available:

MethodEquipment
Electrochemical and Corrosion testingPC controlled potentiostats, incl. Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS):
- GAMRY Interface 1000 x 6,
- GAMRY Interface 1010 x 6,
- Gamry Reference 600 x 2,
- Ivium OctoStat 200,
- Gill AC, ACM Instruments x 5.

14 x eudiometers for hydrogen evolution measurements, of which 10x are coupled with OHAUS Scout electronic balances for automated recording of evolved gas.

Mettler-Tolledo Seven Excellence for potentiometric measurements, conductometry and dissolved oxygen optode measurements.
6 x pH meters from Metrohm and Hanna.
Local Electrochemistry SVET-SIET-DVIT-SECM functionality by custom made integration of Applicable Electronics, PyroScience (FireSting) and Unisense (Fx-6 Uniamp) equipments.
- Continuous monitoring of local current density, local pH, dissolved oxygen and hydrogen concentration in the diffusion layer with amperometric, potentiometric and fiber-optics micro-probes.
- DVIT for high-resolution time-lapse optical imaging, including difference imaging mode at magnification up to 200 times.
- For biodegradable metals, a flow-through cell (peristaltic pump Medorex) is equipped with thermostat enabling measurements at 37oC and pH controlled by CO2 supply.
Environmental TestingSalt spray and climate test cabinets, temperature range -40°C to +80°C.
Alternating immersion set-ups.
Natural corrosion test site.
Tensile testing, loads up to 100 kN, strain rates: 0.1 µm/h to 70 mm/h.
Rotary bending machines, max. bending moment 200 Nm.
Deadweight load frames, loads up to 20 kN.
Electrodynamic material testing system MTS Acumen 3, dyn. max. 3kN, frequency max.100Hz.
Surface TreatmentLaboratory scale PEO systems (DC, pulsed DC and bipolar power supplies).
Optical emission spectroscopy (PLASUS EmiCon).
Laboraroty treatment line.
Spin/dip coaters for polymer coatings.
Surface analysisXPS (KRATOS AXIS Ultra DLD), including Auger spectroscopy (SEM/SAM), UV-photo emission (UPS), and secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS).
Raman confocal spectroscopy/microscopy (Bruker Senterra).
IR Spectroscopy and icroscopy (ATR, Transmission and Glancing Angle) (Bruker Tensor 27/Hyperion 2000).
Laser scanning microscope LSM 800, Carl Zeiss Microscopy Deutschland GmbH, structures and sufaces in µm scale.
Tribology (Pin-on Disc and Oscillating TRIBOtester).
Hardness and scratch testing (Anton Paar, Micro Combi Tester, MCT³ ).
Glow Discharge Optical Emission Spektroscopy (Spectruma GDA650HR).
X-ray diffraction including glancing angle analysis (D8 Advance, Bruker AXS).
Electron Microscopy SEM Tescan Lyra 3 with several detectors (SE, BSE, In-Beam SE, In-Beam BSE, Secondary ION, STEM Bright / Dark-Field, STEM HADF)
equipped with
ToF-SIMS (Tofwerk C-ToF)
FIB Gallium / Nanomanipulator,
Mono GIS with Platinum Orsay Physics,
EDX Oxford Aztec with Ultim 100 & Extreme Detectors

SEM Tescan Vega III SBU with BSE and SE detectors, EDX-System IXRF Iridium Ultra

Sputter-coaters: carbon Cressington 108 and gold Cressington 108 Auto/SE
MetallographyTwo laboratories for metallographic preparation: one for Mg and Mg-alloys, one for all other materials
Cutting: Buehler Isomet 4000, Buehler Isomet 1000, Struers Secotom-10
Embedding: Struers Labopress-3 for hot embedding samples; cold embedding with various material; pressure pot for special needs

Grinding & Polishing:
ATM Saphir 360, disc diameter 250 + 300mm / for manual grinding or polishing;
ATM Saphir 550.3 and Struers Tegra (Pol-35 + Force-5), disc diameter 300mm / semiautomatic preparation with holder for up to 6 samples or single pressure;
Kurth oscillating, eccentric grinding and polishing machine for polishing samples with low pressure
Optical microscopyOlympus BX53 metallurgical microscope.
Olympus GX53 inverted metallurgical microscope.
BX and GX with lenses 1,25x – 100x / brightfield, darkfield, polarization, DIC.
Olympus DSX110 Free-angle Wide-zoom Digital Microscope.
Digital camera Olympus UC90
Database & image analysis Olympus Stream
OtherParticle size measurement system for powders and particles in liquids (Malvern Panalytical Mastersizer 3000)

Zeta potential determination of particles in liquid media (Colloid Matrix Stabino)

Adhesion Tester (POSITEST AT-M).

UV-Vis Spectrophotometer (Shimadzu UV-2600i).
Contact angle measuring system (Kruess DSA25E) with temperature control unit.
IT Infrastructure 
WorkstationsIntel Xeon CPU E5-2699 v4 22 Cores, 128GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000, 4TB SSD
2x AMD EPYC 7542 32 Cores, 256GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 48GB, 4TB SSD, 10TB HDD
2x AMD EPYC 7542 32 Cores, 512GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super, 4TB SSD, 10TB HDD
Available HPC Resources and Access 
Hereon Strand160 Nodes with 48 cores (=7680). Up to 768GB RAM per Node. 20x Tesla V100. Up to 100TB available for data.
HLRS Hawk5632 Nodes with 128 cores (=720896). 256GB RAM per Node. 192x Tesla V100. Up to 500TB available for data.
Modelling softwareGaussian 16 (Density functional theory, group license in which we included WTN, possibility to add further Hereon research groups).
Turbomole 7.5 (Density functional theory, group license).
VASP 5.4.4 & 6.1.0 (Density functional theory, group license with specific user list).
CP2k (Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics, open source).
LAMMPS (Molecular Dynamics, open source).
GROMACS (Molecular Dynamics, open source).
Comsol 5.3 & 5.6 (Finite Element Modelling, 2 floating licenses).
Nutils (Finite Element Modelling, open source).
FEniCS (Finite Element Modelling, open source).
PreCICE (Coupling Library for FEM, open source).
rdkit (Generation of molecular descriptors for quantitative structure-property relationship models, open source).
alvaDesc 2.0 (Generation of molecular descriptors for quantitative structure-property relationship models, Three single licenses).
alvaModel 1.0.2 (Model generation for quantitative structure-property relationships, 1 license for test purposes).
CFD solvers incl Lattice Boltzmann (open source).
Gitlab (incl. AI tools, Jupyter).