Engineers to use surface scanning to improve manufacturing

Researchers at the Centre for Materials and Structures at Liverpool University, led by Prof Paul Chalker, are establishing a Low Energy Ion Scattering (LEIS) facility with funding from EPSRC.

The technique fires beams of low energy ions at the surface of an object to reveal information about the atomic structure of the surface.

The researchers aim to develop a tool to examine the surface of components during the manufacturing process itself, or upon exposure to reactive environments. In this way they hope the approach will lead to improved manufacturing methods and better products.

As the beam of low energy ions is directed at the surface to be studied, the charged particles interact with it, according to Chalker. “They hit the surface of any material you want to look at really quite gently, and the ions interact with the atoms in the surface of the material and bounce back,” he said.

The amount of energy that the ions lose when they interact with the surface depends on the mass of the atom, he said. In this way the technique can reveal details about the type of atoms in the surface of the material.