Research & Development
Supporting Research & Development is at the very heart of what we do at Scanwel Ltd. Our strong focus on building and maintaining relationships within academia and research institutes and supporting individuals as they progress their research careers, or move their journeys into industry, is expressed in our company mission “Leveraging technology & expertise for tomorrow’s world”.
With the ever-changing needs of an R&D environment, Scanwel’s UK based warehouse and on-site fabrication workshop is perfectly placed to supply and manufacture components to alter an existing vacuum chamber system, or design and manufacture a bespoke new one, within short timeframes.
Scanwel also partner with a number of carefully selected and highly regarded companies across the globe to supply complimentary components, such as vacuum pumps, electrical feedthroughs and manipulation accessories, for a one-stop shop approach to vacuum system manufacture.
For specialised research in surface science and semiconductors we also have very close working relationships with several prestigious companies for supply and support of spectroscopy and microscopy instruments as well as PVD equipment.
Instrumentation Manufacturing
Scientific instruments require many different components in their manufacture. Scanwel vacuum components provide airtight connections, even when a high vacuum environment is not required. With high quality, machine cut connectors/adaptors and robust seals, we can introduce manipulation tools and feedthroughs into the most complex of environments.
For the manufacture of sensors, high quality deposition is required. This can be supported by Scanwel through our partnerships in this area and provision of magnetrons, sources, effusion cells, MBE systems etc.
Thin Film Deposition
The controlled synthesis of materials as thin films (deposition) has become a fundamental step in many applications, and its advances have enabled a wide range of technological breakthroughs over the past century, such as in magnetic recording media, electronic semiconductor devices, LEDs, optical coatings and energy storage (thin-film batteries). It has also become widely used in drug-delivery systems, in the pharmaceutical industry.
In Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD), particles must be able to travel as freely as possible and therefore the complete system needs to be housed inside a vacuum deposition chamber. Scanwel Ltd has in-house capabilities to build fabricate your vacuum chamber to meet your particular requirements.
With our partner companies, we are positioned well to offer a complete solution for your PVD needs by, not only fabricating your bespoke vacuum deposition chamber, but also supplying PVD instrumentation including evaporation tools such as electron beam evaporators, effusion cells, plasma sources and magnetrons. Not forgetting that Scanwel also supply Ion pumps and controllers for UHV applications.
Semiconductor
Since their development in the 20th Century, semiconductor devices have become a staple of modern society. Even so, semiconductor research is still of great importance. With a need to analyse composite semiconductors regarding their chemical composition by XPS, their band structure or band positions with ARPES or UPS and regarding film and surface qualities and properties by SPM and LEEM or PEEM, Scanwel partners bring many years of expertise in these areas.
Scanwel support St Andrews to replace an elderly XPS-system
The chemistry department of St Andrews needed to replace the X-Ray source on an elderly XPS system. The Unique rotating anode source on the system was no longer fully supported due to its age and had broken down , power consumption was very high but the rest of the system was functioning well.
Scanwel proposed a solution using the SPECS Focus 600 monochromated X-Ray source that would fit the system..
Dr Steve Francis, St Andrews chemistry Department says: "The new source consumes a fraction of the power and has an excellent energy resolution. It has already been used to provide high resolution data for several research programs and has been invaluable for the work of Prof.Manfred Buck who is investigating self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of complex organic molecules on gold-mica substrates in the field of nano technology".
