Facilities and infrastructure

Research Facilities and Infrastructure

Our new, expanded experimental laboratory opened in April 2019. It contains three multi-anvil presses, including a new 1000-ton Walker-style and a 2000-ton cubic anvil press from Voggenreiter (Mainleus, Germany). Two new automated piston-cylinder apparatuses manufactured by GUKO (Uslar, Germany) were delivered and installed in January 2020. Two 50-year old manual piston-cylinder apparatuses that were installed by Prof. Trevor Green remain in operation.

The geochemical laboratories of Macquarie Geoanalytical contain all necessary instrumentation for the study of natural rocks and for the analysis of experimental charges: scanning electron microscopes with quantitative EDS, several Laser-ablation ICP-MS instruments, Raman spectroscopy, XRF and XRF imaging, and TIMS.

Multi-anvil presses operate at sample pressure from about 3–20 GPa, equivalent to depths in the Earth of 100–660 km, or the whole of the upper mantle. Left: The 1000-ton press with Walker-type module; Middle: Mingdi Gao preparing a calibration experiments for the 1000-ton press; Right; the 2000-ton press.

Piston-cylinder presses operate at sample pressures from 0.5–3 GPa equivalent to depths of 12–100 km in the crust and uppermost mantle, covering most of the conditions at which melting occurs in the Earth. These two new apparatuses from GUKO have a special cooling facility that promotes the quenching of high-pressure melts to glasses and prevents abundant breakages in metal parts.