South Dakota Mines is installing a new Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) in the university’s Engineering and Mining Experiment Station (EMES) thanks to a $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The new microscope is just one of many state-of-the-art scientific instruments inside the recently expanded EMES which serves high-tech industry alongside university researchers across the state.

The powerful SEM microscope is a centerpiece of the EMES. It allows researchers to perform high resolution imaging, chemical analysis and sample manipulation for various materials at scales ranging down to 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The new microscope is a critical resource for a wide variety of research across multiple disciplines.

“The SEM is the most heavily used research instrument on campus,” says Grant Crawford, Ph.D., the director of the Arbegast Materials Processing and Joining Laboratory at Mines and an associate professor in the Department of Materials and Metallurgical Engineering.

The new SEM is equipped with a focused ion beam that dramatically expands its capability over the old system. The ion beam allows researchers to extract samples for separate analysis and cr...

The Engineering and Mining Experiment Station (EMES) at South Dakota Mines has begun overseeing the operation and maintenance of instrumentation within the Shimadzu Environmental Research Laboratory (SERL).

The EMES was founded on the Mines campus in 1903 with a mission to serve mining industry research. Today the mission has expanded to include a much broader range of academic and industry needs with a wide array of scientific equipment that is utilized by industry professionals and university researchers across the region. The EMES has seen equipment investments by the South Dakota Board of Regents and the National Science Foundation totaling more than $2.8 million since 2011. The EMES website lists the range of scientific equipment available for academic research and industry use including the Shimadzu instrumentation.

The SERL was established in 2015 in partnership with Shimadzu Scientific Instruments by Lisa Kunza. Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Chemistry Biology and Health Sciences at Mines. The SERL is a multidisciplinary research facility that contains a suite of state-of-the-art instrumentation with a focus on environmental applications. SERL instruments enable the chemi...

“Flying 700 miles per hour through a tube using magnets and sunlight isn’t a dream.”

The baritone narrator in a video describing the proposed Great Lakes Hyperloop makes the case that a twenty-eight minute commute over the 343 miles that separate Cleveland from Chicago is a near-term reality.

For Chuck Michael (CE 77), hyperloop is the future of transportation. “This is a game-changing technology with a huge public benefit,” he says. “You could work in downtown Chicago and live in Cleveland and get to work faster than sitting on the freeway from the Chicago suburbs.”

The hyperloop concept involves a magnetically levitated capsule that is propelled through a vacuum tunnel at velocities approaching the speed of sound using renewable wind and solar energy. Michael is the head of US feasibility studies and regulatory advisor for the company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies based in Los Angeles. “We use a proprietary passive magnetic levitation system, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab,” Michael says. A small forward motion on the permanent magnetic array creates a field that aids both propulsion and levitation.

“We can levitate twenty tons at walking speed,” Michael says. A "re...

Satellites are often thought of as huge complicated devices that are deployed on the tops of rockets or in space shuttle payloads. They hold massive telescopes, sophisticated weather monitoring devices or global positioning system components.  The price tag for large satellites is often measured in billions, not millions. 

CubeSats are different. They’re smaller - think volleyball, not Volkswagen - and they’re cheaper.  NASA describes a CubeSat as a “low-cost pathway to conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations in space, thus enabling students, teachers, and faculty to obtain hands-on flight hardware development experience.”  The cost of these nanosatellites is small enough to fit into many school budgets. CubeSats are built to investigate areas of scientific interest such as the earth’s atmosphere, space weather, in-space propulsion, radiation testing, and communication, to name a few. Satellites are selected based on their investigations and how they align with NASA’s strategic plan.

One area of CubeSat research at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology is to expand from one small satellite to a swarm of small satellites working together. This has the potential to multiply the impact and effectiveness of a single CubeSat.

“Sometimes you want t...