Ready to heat !
15 December 2023.
Christmas gift has arrived: a new machine to study the mechanical properties of metals at high temperature and low oxygen fugacity !
In HotCores, we want to study the mechanical properties of the Earth's inner core. The Earth's inner core is a 1200 km radius ball of solid iron alloys sitting at the center of the Earth. Conditions of pressure are tremendous, 330 to 365 GPa (3.0 to 3.6 megabars) and approximately 6000 K. The iron alloy in the inner core is close to melting temperature, with its outer boundary sitting at the exact crystallization temperature at 330 GPa.
The inner core conditions of pressure and temperature are hard to reproduce in the lab. This is why part of the HotCores project involves looking at ambient pressure analogues. We won't get the pressure right, but we will be able to look at metals close to the melting temperature, a not so easy task.
The machine is now delivered and up and running. Let's start the measurements!