Over the past four months, I designed and built an automated profilometry system to drive surface topography mapping in UBC's robot-enabled Electron Microscopy Laboratory ๐ฌ.
Last week, I wrapped up my research work at The University of British Columbia with the Experimental Micromechanical Characterisation Research Group, funded by an Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA).
The system allows the user to map surface topography and measure material removed from a sample. This design process involved modelling components in SolidWorks and programming Python-based control to ultimately integrate a confocal sensor and a precision stage into a motorized optical microscope. Attached is an image of the profilometer's full topography scan and 3-D map (credit:
G. Francolini) of a Canadian quarter, measuring the heights of 144,400 points across its surface.
A huge thanks to Dr. Ben Britton and Graeme Francolini for your mentorship and supervision, as well as the rest of @ExpMicroMech for the continuous guidance, and thank you, @NSERC_CRSNG, for supporting my research. Through this project, I've found the crossover between mechanical design, software engineering, and materials research that I'd always been searching for :)