Department of Chemical Engineering

Tunghai University

Taichung, Taiwan 40704

Republic of China

 September 21, 2005

Dear ChE Alumni:

 It has been fifty years since the foundation of Chemical Engineering Department in Tunghai University. We deeply appreciated the continuous support of our alumni.

In order to make us more competitive, we are in the process of changing name to the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering. We plan to purchase a scanning electron microscope (SEM) for teaching and research in the area of materials engineering. Attached herein please find the more detailed description of the SEM purchase plan.

The University has allocated five million Taiwanese dollars for the purchase. We need additional eight million Taiwanese dollars for the plan. Therefore, we need your kind donations to support the SEM purchase plan. Because the SEM delivery day is six months after receiving order, we have to finalize the purchase order before the end of this year.

If you wish to contribute to the SEM purchase plane, please send your check (or post money order) to:

The United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia
475 Riverside Drive, Suite 1221
New York, NY 10115
USA

Please designate “ Tunghai University” as the beneficiary and indicate that “Chemical Engineering Department Development Fund” you would like to support.

Thank you very much for your support,

Sincerely yours,

Kuo-Tseng Li

Professor and Chairman

Scanning Electron Microscope Purchase Plan
Department of Chemical Engineering

Tunghai University
Taichung , Taiwan
 9/21/2005
 

A. Background

In order make us more competitive and to meet the needs of our society, the Department of Chemical Engineering at Tunghai is going to change its name to the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering in the near future. The Department will expand the research areas to frontier materials, nano technology, biological engineering, and opo-electronics. The key focus areas in Material Engineering will be polymeric materials (e.g., polymer nano-composites and liquid crystal polymers), electronic materials (e.g. opo-electronic materials, electronic packing materials, battery materials) , surface modification and nano-catalytic materials. We plan to add several courses in the field of Material Engineering, including a course in Material Engineering Experiment.

In order to provide adequate teaching/research environment, we need facilities for micro- structure analyses (including SEM, TEM), mechanical property testing (including tensile test, fatigue test, impact test and dynamic test), polymer processing and analyses (extrusion machine, injection machine, DSC, TGA, FTIR), electronic materials processing and measurements (vacuum oven, vapor deposition equipments). We have enough facilities in mechanical property testing and polymer processing / analyses . However, we do not have adequate facilities in micro- structure analyses and electronic materials processing / measurements. We plan to build up these facilities gradually from the support of Tunghai University.

Tunghai University has allocated five million Taiwan dollars to our Department for purchasing equipments to improve the facility in materials engineering. Based on the decisions of our faculty meeting on 9/8/2005, we decided to use the money to purchase a scanning electron microscope. However, the money provided by the University is not enough to purchase the equipment we need. Therefore, additional donations from our alumni for supporting the equipment purchase are in great request. 

B. The apparatus we plan to purchase

The apparatus we plan to purchase is a field emission scanning electron microscope (abbreviated as FE SEM) equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (abbreviated as EDS) and a wavelength dispersive X-ray spectrometer (abbreviated as WDS).

Among various tools for material characterization, scanning electron microscope (abbreviated as SEM) is the one most frequently used. SEM has become the essential and required equipment for any department of materials science and engineering.

The image of SEM can provide information about surface morphology of the materials. With the use of modern field emission (abbreviated as FE) electron gun, the resolution of FE-SEM can reach 1 nm. The ultra high resolution FE-SEM is suitable for the observation of fine structures such as multi-layered film and nano particles fabricated by the nano technology.

There are several additional parts available which can expand the high resolution FE SEM to high performance analytical FE SEM. The combination of SEM and energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (abbreviated as EDS) is suitable for qualitative, semi-quantitative, and elemental map analyses in a very small region. The addition of wavelength dispersive X-ray spectrometer (abbreviated as WDS) will provide us high resolution, full quantitative elemental analysis of material surface, which is very useful for the determination of composition distribution on the material surface.

The FE SEM (JEOL JSM-7000 Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope) with EDS (INCA Energy 350 Microanalysis System) +WDS (INCA WAVE 500 System) will cost thirteen million Taiwanese dollars. Except the five million dollars provided by Tunghai University, we need to raise additional eight million dollars for the SEM purchase plan.

C. SEM users among our faculty

Ten faculty members in our department need FE SEM for their researches. The following table lists the purposes and the time needed for each individual (names are listed in alphabetical order).

D. SEM Maintenance and Management

According to the information provided by the SEM supplier, the span of SEM life is 20-30 years. The only maintenance we need is to change the pump oil every half year. The SEM will be located in the ChE building, operated by a trained technician, and supervised by the chairman of the Department.