Equipments

The MATEIS laboratory has a wide range of machines for characterising the mechanical or dielectric properties of materials (mechanical and dielectric spectrometers, mechanical, shear, traction torque compression testing machines etc. and micro- and nanoindentors). It is also possible to study the mechanical response of polymer-based materials in a wide range of loading frequencies/rates, temperatures and deformations. The PVMH team has made characterisation by  mechanical spectrometry (cf figure below) and dielectrics, its specialty.

Regarding microstructural characterisation, lthe laboratory also has all the quipment necessary to characterise the microstructure from the macroscopic to the nonometric scale (T.E.M., E.S.E.M, A.F.M., X-ray diffusion bench W.A.X.S. and S.A.X.S…) and relies on a team performant in microscopy (SNMS team). The SNMS guarantees leading edge research in the development of tools for characterising materials using electron microscopy, applied in particular to polymer materials. The laboratory’s most recent advances in this domain have been concerned with observing materials using  electron tomography, enabling us thus to carry out three-dimensional microstructural characterisation on a nanometric scale  (pertinent for nanocomposites).
This technique supplements X-ray tomography, on a micrometric scale, also available in the laboratory and particularly useful for charaterising foam and micronic composites. Another one of the laboratory’s well-known activities (cf. Figure 3) is the development of the microstructural characterisation of materials during loading (in a microscope, by tomography or using X-rays).