The Boise State Center for Soft Materials houses instrumentation and expertise for characterizing polymers and soft materials, as well as for fabricating new soft materials. The center provides centralized soft materials fabrication and characterization resources and expertise for Boise State and surrounding communities.
Contact:
For more information, please contact Prof. Scott Phillips at sphillips@boisestate.edu
Resources:
The following lists provide snapshots of current capabilities for preparing and characterizing polymers and soft materials. Additional resources will continue to be added.
Polymer Synthesis:
- Low temperature polymerization capabilities
- Inert atmosphere polymerization equipment
Polymer Characterization:
- Gel-permeation chromatography equipped with a multi-angle light scatter, refractive index detector, and viscometer
- Differential scanning calorimetry
- NMR (in other shared facilities)
- UV/Vis spectrometer
- Fluorescence spectrometer
Soft Material Fabrication:
- Spin coater
- Heated press
- CO2 laser cutter
Soft Material Characterization:
- Tensile tester
- Hardness measurements
- SEM (in other shared facilities)
- TEM (in other shared facilities)
- Profilometry (in other shared facilities)
- XRD (in other shared facilities)
- SAXS/WAXS (in other shared facilities)
- Optical microscopes (in other shared facilities)
- AFM (in other shared facilities)
Polymer Degradation:
- LCMS
- NMR (in other shared facilities)
- GPC for monitoring polymer degradation