Facilities

Teaching labs

Our main teaching lab is highly flexible, with a capacity of 60 students and three separate bays for teaching, making the laboratory equally useful for both small and large class sizes. Our labs also contain state-of-the-art equipment such as our glovebox, 30 fumehoods, and support a variety of modern spectroscopic, analytical and computational instrumentation.

NMR machines

Our £1.2 million Solid State NMR machine weighs 3 tonnes and is identical to one used at Cambridge University. We also possess two solution state NMR machines that cost in the region of £300,000; one of these is used primarily for research, the other for teaching. These are used by our Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy research group to characterise and measure the properties of atoms, molecules, solids, materials and biological systems.

Nanoscribe

The Nanoscribe Photonic Professional GT is the fastest microscale 3D printer available, with an achievable feature size of 1 µm (micrometer) and smaller.

Electron and atomic force microscopes

Our Keysight 5500 allows you to view objects magnified millions of times, and images in air, fluids, and under controlled environmental and temperature conditions. Our Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope has a magnification range of 25× to 1,000,000.

Glovebox

This impressive piece of equipment is located in one of our teaching labs, and is used to handle and synthesise air-and-moisture sensitive compounds. This may be used for certain research projects in your final year. 

Mass Spectrometry equipment

Our array of separations equipment, costing several £100,000, allows the identification and quantification of trace compounds. Applications of this include impurity monitoring, food and beverage analysis, forensics and toxicology, agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

Collaborative Technology Access Programme (cTAP)

The £11.3m cTAP building provides businesses access to facilities and expertise located in the Chemistry Department currently unavailable to inwardly investing businesses within the UK.

We also have access to an array of other instrumentation located in Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC), as well as the Department of Physics and the Department of Engineering. We believe strongly that collaboration between different disciplines is essential for the progression of chemical research, and therefore our equipment is also available for use by members of these departments.