Monitoring & Maintaining Electron Microscope Performance
A two to five day course available from Protrain
This course is a must for anyone looking after an electron microscope. The course covers all the areas that we feel will help an operator to judge a problem, fix it themselves, or have the correct information to be able to talk knowledgably to service staff over the phone in order to decide a course of action.
Not just a maintenance course but a course that has been designed to lead an operator through all that is required to fully understand an SEM, a TEM and an EDS system.
The course covers the way the units of the SEM and TEM columns work, gun, lenses and deflection coils, as well as the structure of the EDS detector. Then it moves on to discuss the components of the vacuum system how they work and how they relate to each other when in operation. A short section covers the components and the structure of the electrics and electronics. The course then moves on to two areas where the alignment of the microscopes is outlined in detail. The following section covers the basic maintenance of the instruments, removing parts from the microscopes, cleaning and general maintenance procedures appropriate for the gun, column liners, scintillators, screens, filament alignment and flaming apertures. amongst other points. The course then moves on to discuss the monitoring of performance in SEM, TEM and EDS systems, resolution, and the calibration of magnification, drift rate and contamination rate. This section including general advice on high resolution operation of the microscopes and the desired settings for performance. The next sections deal with analysing instrument performance, problems that arise with the instruments with a view to understanding the problem and finding a fix. There follows a section on fine tuning the instrument set up. The final section deals with typical problems found in SEM, TEM and EDS systems and routes to their solutions, here we include emergency procedures for window failure on an EDS system as well as solutions to many of the day to day instrument hiccups.
Add practical periods on the microscopes when the procedures outlined may be put into practice, and real faults rectified, and you will see how this course may be a valuable asset to those responsible for running electron microscopes.
"Wow we started with a 'scope [TEM] that was producing out of focus images and now we are running at 150,000X"
Australian scientist
"Its just like an instrument service but we are actually doing it ourselves"
South African microscopist
"You are teaching them your life as an engineer, shouldn't this cost a fortune?"
Electron Microscope Engineer with a world wide brief
Could YOU help us run a course in YOUR country?
updated 06/10/2011