What have a Formula One car and a Roman centurion's helmet got in common? They are both subjects of study at the Royal Military College laboratories
The Department of Materials and Medical Sciences at the Royal Military College of Science (Cranfield) at Shrivenham has recently chosen a Leica DM IRM research microscope and Leica DC 300 digital camera to help them investigate characteristics of different metals.
Alistair Doig, director of the Centre for Materials Science and Engineering, explained: "The Department plays an educational role within the college but also offers a consultancy service to external companies and establishments, bringing in additional income for more equipment. At present, these projects range from assessing the cause of metal fatigue in Formula 1 and rally racing cars, to looking at the grain structure of the metals used for Roman armour for the Archaeology Department of Reading University." "The projects are very diverse and so we use a variety of techniques including optical microscopy, fractography and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
Due to the size of some of the specimens we deal with, for example the cheek plate of a roman helmet, an inverted microscope was required.
We were also interested in a microscope with high resolving power and multiple contrast techniques to enable us to extract as much information as possible from each sample.
The Leica DM IRM and DC 300 combination was chosen because it admirably fulfilled these requirements and the high resolution digital images are invaluable in sharing and presenting our results with our collaborators and clients." Alistair concluded: "Whenever we choose new equipment we are looking for a good compromise between quality and cost and the Leica microscope and camera impressed us more than the other instruments we saw."
