The Laboratory of Energy Materials and Devices at the University of Houston is headed by Prof. Yao. The lab occupies an area of ~1600 sqft in W443 and W449, Engineering Building 2. This space is compartmentalized into a materials synthesis lab and a device characterization lab, all conforming to the highest safety standards.

Materials Synthesis lab

• Two bench-top fume hoods
• Two walk-in fume hoods
• One CVD tube furnace for nanomaterials synthesis (MTI)
• One CVD tube furnace for high temperature annealing up to 1100 °C
• Two muffle furnaces (MTI)
• 10 autoclave reactors
• Schlenk glassware with mechanicl pump
• Rotary evaporator
• Two vacuum ovens (MTI)
• Constant temperature bath (Tokyo Rikakikai, PSL-1810, -80 -> 0 °C)

Characterization lab

• MBraun argon glove box for battery assembly (double length)
• Biologic VMP3 potentiostat (16 channels, with DC and AC ability)
• Battery testers (100 channels)
• High-energy ball miller
• Coin cell crimping machine
• Olympus optical microscope
• Varian UV-Vis
• FTIR Spectrometer (Nicolet iS5)
• Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer (Keithley 4200)
• Probe station

Shared equipment at Nanofabrication Lab and TCSUH

• FEI XL-30 Field Emission SEM with JCNabilty e-beam Lithography Option
• JOEL 2010 Transmission Electron Microscope with EELS
• Veeco Dimension 3000 Atomic Force Microscope
• FEI Dual-Beam FIB 235 System
• Custom built e-beam evaporator
• AJA ATC-2200-V UHV magnetron sputtering system with six magnetron sources
• Physical Electronics X-ray photoelectron spectrometer

Computational Facility
Computer support for student research is available through the Engineering Computing Center (ECC), Central Campus Computing Services (CCCS), and the individual faculty’s research laboratories. The ECC is the College’s largest open lab with 152 computer workstations, a scanner, and secure printers, and is open seven days a week. The operating environment includes 80 computers running XP, 60 computers running both XP and Linux, and 12 Sun Solaris 8 stations. The CCCS provides computers running the Macintosh and Windows NT operating systems as well as a variety of software for academic use and Internet access.