Pat and Harry presented their work at the Royal Society of Chemistry Solid-State Chemistry Group Christmas meeting, here in Birmingham. Pat gave an oral presentation on his work investigating ZIF-67 crystallisation, and Harry gave a poster about the latest developments to the in-situ electric field cell at beamline I19-2 at Diamond. Well done both!
Tag: Crystallisation
Following on from our CCDC-funded public engagement project about MOFs and crystallisation in the summer, we have produced five activity sheets for hands-on activities that you can do at home!
The activities are (i) Crystallisation of a magic crystal tree, (ii) Jigsaw puzzle nucleation, (iii) Magnetic tile crystals, (iv) Mineral crystals, and (v) Construction toy self-assembly.
Sounds interesting? The activity sheets can be downloaded from our Outreach pages here.
We welcome Valentina Walls and Oliver Rawlings to the group to carry out their fourth-year MSci research projects. Valentina will be investigating the metastable intermediates in ZIF synthesis, while Oliver will be devising ways to test the robustness of MOF synthesis.
This weekend we took our new hands-on outreach activities to CoCoMAD festival and it was a roaring success!
We had mineral specimens from the Lapworth museum, a growing ‘magic’ crystal tree, jigsaw puzzle nucleation, magnetic tile crystals, The Nucleation Game with live music and a giant interactive crystal that everyone got involved in helping to grow.
More information about the activities, including those you can do at home, can be found on our Outreach page.
Thanks to CoCoMAD for having us, to the CCDC and RSC for funding, to our musicians Pablo Sonnaillon and Tanguy Pocquet, to all our volunteers (Georgia, Thomas, Pat, Yomi, Sophie and Titas) and especially to our undergraduate summer interns Alice and Keyuan for developing all the activities and materials especially for the event!
Hamish gave a talk at the Pint of Science Festival 2024, at the Hop Garden in Harborne, entitled “Order from chaos – making crystals from molecular soup”. From the programme:
Crystals are all around us, from materials and rocks to medicines and technology. They are made up of atoms and molecules arranged in regular structures, that have specific properties and behaviour. But how do they form in the first place? This talk will take you on an atomic journey from the dynamic chaos of molecular soup to the beauty, order and function of crystalline materials.
Hamish’s talk also included audio analogies to different steps in the process of crystallisation, in the form of jazz music composed by collaborator Pablo Sonnaillon. It was great to receive several questions from the audience about it, perhaps the best being “If a crystal was a type of music, what would it be?”. Answers on a postcard please!
Yeung Research Group at UoB 