Outstanding equipment
Our most significant scientific research facilities
Here we present our remarkable equipment. CEMEF's research teams have access to a wide range of state-of-the-art equipment as well as specific resources developed in-house. It should be noted that this equipment comes from a variety of sources: pilot machines, laboratory machines, instrumented industrial machines, etc.
CEMEF invests in major equipment on a regular basis. It is also fortunate to have a team that imagines, designs and builds machines to meet the needs of certain studies.
Here are some of our original equipment.
Our latest acquisitions
A 3D microscope
In 2019, we acquired a Dual Beam Tescan Fera3® microscope equipped with a unique heat treatment chamber, the only one of its kind in the world. This microscope allows the analysis of the microstructures in 3D and the follow-up of the evolutions during heat treatments.
In the video, Nathalie Bozzolo presents and details the particularities of this new exceptional equipment.
Remarkable experimental equipment
You will find various types of outstanding equipment in our test halls and laboratories. These can be forming or characterisation machines. We present some of them here.
Outstanding FORMING equipment
In our test halls you will find processing and forming machines for metals and metal alloys as well as polymers. It is often a question of reproducing industrial processes on a laboratory scale.
Mini-fluotour
An example with the laboratory scale reverse flow bench. Here it is a question of cold forming metal tubes by the action of a knurl which pushes the material away.
This instrumented prototype has been designed and developed by the CEMEF MEA team . It enables the forces and torques involved in the process to be monitored.
In characterization
We list below some of the developments and equipment that innovate in the characterization of materials over their lifetime and in different scientific fields.
In tribology :
The Polymer Hot Rotating Tribometer
It was designed to measure the friction and wear of a polymer track in contact with a steel ball. This under various conditions, with or without lubrication and over a wide range of temperatures, speeds and contact forces.
This is another development by the MEA team.
in terms of mechanical strength
Bi-stretching prototype of living materials
It is a machine for bi-stretching bio-materials in an immersed environment under balanced bi-axial stress and loval monitoring of the deformation field. This is in order to understand the anisotropy of the studied materials.
This test bench is still today the subject of collaborative developments with the Applied Biomechanics Laboratory of the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.
See the interview with Yannick Tillier, on the collaborative project of the development of a biomimetic heart valve.
in terms of microstructurally
Mini-machine of traction under RX goniometer
This uniaxial mini traction machine has been designed to stress metallic materials at room temperature. It is coupled with X-ray diffraction analysis (in situ stress analysis).
Remarkable equipment in scientific computing
CEMEF's research activities require both scientific computing resources and experimental equipment.
We are fortunate to have significant resources at our disposal, as CEMEF invests very regularly in IT tools. They are of course essential to the progress of numerical simulation and the software developed by the centre.
A High Performance Computing Cluster is available 24 hours a day for intensive parallel calculations, modelling and simulation of material forming:
- 1120 cores distributed over 40 compute nodes interconnected by a very fast low-latency network (theoretical performance = 43 TFlops),
- 576 compute cores constituting a 2nd compute pool (theoretical performances = 12 TFlops),
- 28 TB of centralized data storage accessible by all servers and workstations.
The "Calculations and Software" - SCL Team ensures the operation and maintenance of all IT equipment and clusters.
The research teams are fortunate to have good equipment to carry out their research work. It should be noted, however, that all this equipment requires specific personnel to create, develop and maintain it.
CEMEF has two technical teams to support the research teams.