#5
Post
by lumonicphoto » Fri Oct 30, 2020 1:57 am
Yeah, there are a handful of us with SEMs but they are not for the technically challenged. I have done a bunch to this unit, I had to replace the turbo recently when the old one's bearings started becoming unhappy. A friend has a few SEMs in his garage in various states of operation.
We found this SEM on cragislist of all places, picked it up and had to do a repair on the high voltage power supply for the secondary electron detector. You can fid quite a few of them surplus as places get newer ones with better features. But like I said, you need to be able to work with vacuum systems and high voltage as well as a pretty decent knowledge of analog and digital electronics. There is very little support for these machines.
I actually dont use a sputter coater, you dont actually need one for a lot of imaging. If you do choose to go that route you will need to have a bottle of argon gas as that is what is ionized for the sputter gun to work. You can also do evaporative coatings, gold, gold alloys, and carbon are used. I built a mini vacuum system for carbon coating as you need that for doing EDX work.
No, you dont need to restrict access, there is nothing dangerous about a SEM, one in operating condition is completely safe. Vibration is an issue though, mine sits in the corner of the living room on carpet, I can start running into issue with vibration when I get in the 10-40000x range. Wood floors are not the most conducive to low vibration environments!
I use it here and there, I have EDX on it so I can do elemental analysis of materials with it, but that takes LN2 to make it work so I have to go fill up my big dewar when I plan on using that. I used it now and then when I was working for a diabetes research company working on glucose detection electrodes. Mostly it just sits though.
