Can you compare prices (if published) on TPTC and MRSEC?

Ok, I'll go with NU. Where would we start on synthesis? What sorts of equipment do we have for this?

Ok, I'll go with NU. Where would we start on synthesis? What sorts of equipment do we have for this?

@mmoderwell Short version: River North itself has nothing for inorganic synthesis. The shared lab spaces nearby (mHUB in Fulton Market, Portal Innovations) are hardware- and biotech-oriented — no arc melters, no glovebox furnaces, nothing you'd want near magnet powders.

The realistic closest fit is IIT's Thermal Processing Technology Center in Bronzeville, about 10-15 minutes from River North. It's a fee-for-service facility that takes external users, and it actually has the equipment this work needs: vacuum arc melter, ball mills, high-temperature furnaces, and XRD on site. That covers the melt-and-anneal side of RE-free magnet synthesis better than any downtown shared space.

Other options, in order of proximity:

• UIC is the closest university (~2 miles west), but access means partnering with a PI rather than paying for time. Fine if a collaboration is the goal, slower if you just want melt buttons this month.

• UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering (Hyde Park) has solid synthesis and characterization core facilities, again via collaboration.

• Argonne is ~25 miles out but is the heavyweight for characterization — VSM/SQUID magnetometry, APS beamlines, CNM — and external users can apply through their user programs. Worth doing once you have samples worth measuring properly.

• Northwestern's MRSEC in Evanston is honestly still the strongest magnet-synthesis ecosystem in the region, for what it's worth; the drive is the only real cost.

If the priority is "start melting things soon without a formal collaboration," IIT's TPTC is the answer. If the priority is full characterization of whatever comes out, pair it with an Argonne user proposal.

cc @will, maybe you can find something in your area and we both can get in the lab.

Nice. Looks like MLTOF has a VSM https://sites.northwestern.edu/mltof/instruments/

Is arc melting enough to make buttons with tungsten, given it's very high melting point?

@mmoderwell Good catch on the VSM. That actually closes the gap I flagged earlier: arc melt and anneal at CMPF, measure hysteresis and magnetization right there at MLTOF. The whole loop is now in one campus.

On tungsten: you don't melt it, you dissolve it. The arc spot on the copper hearth can locally exceed tungsten's melting point (3422 °C), but a tungsten button doesn't work — the water-cooled hearth pulls heat out of the bottom faster than bulk W can melt, so you get a partially fused bead on top of frozen metal. W is what the electrode itself is made of for exactly this reason.

The standard workaround, used routinely for tungsten-containing refractory alloys: melt the low-melting constituents first into a liquid pool, then drop W chips in so they dissolve, followed by several flip-and-remelt cycles for homogeneity. It works but it's slower than normal and W's density (19.3 g/cm³) means segregation if you don't remelt enough. If a composition were really W-heavy you'd skip melting entirely and go powder metallurgy (blend, press, sinter or SPS).

That said, none of our screening compositions contain tungsten — MnAl, Mn-Ge, Heusler-type systems. The element that actually bites in arc melting for our targets is manganese: it's volatile at melt temperatures, so you charge 2-5% excess Mn and expect some composition drift on the first button. That's the one to plan around.

@mmoderwell @will Worth saying: this doesn't have to be Chicago-specific. Most research universities run fee-for-service shared facilities that take external users — the two tells are whether they publish rates and whether they have an external-user registration portal (IIT's TPTC and Northwestern's NUcore both do). Wherever Will is based, if there's a university with a materials or mechanical engineering department within reach, there's very likely an equivalent to TPTC or CHiMaD nearby. @will if you say roughly where you are, I'll run the same search I did for Chicago and come back with named facilities and their access paths.

@mmoderwell Pulled what's actually published. Short answer: NU publishes numbers, TPTC mostly doesn't.

TPTC (IIT): no hourly rate sheet exists anywhere public. Their facilities page says equipment is available "under a fee-for-service scheme" and routes all pricing questions to Prof. Sammy Tin ([email protected], the center director). The only published price point is annual industry memberships of $5k-$30k/yr, which isn't the model you'd use anyway. So a real quote means one email.

NU MRSEC / NUANCE: rates are published as 2026-27 PDFs per facility (updated 2026-09-01, so current). Representative daytime hourly rates:

Non-NU academic users are explicitly eligible ("researchers from regional academic, commercial, government, and non-profit companies") but there's a separate sheet per tier, so which column you land in should be confirmed with the facility manager. Training is a flat rate ($400-920 depending on instrument and tier). Sources: Keck-II rates, EPIC rates.

One honest caveat on the comparison: neither of these answers the synthesis question directly. NUANCE is characterization (microscopy, XPS, SIMS) and the MRSEC synthesis/metallurgy facilities don't publish rates at all, just a visitor-agreement-plus-training process. TPTC is the only one of the two with the actual heat-and-beat equipment (arc melting, thermal processing) you'd need for magnet work, and its pricing is opaque. So the practical read: TPTC for making things, NUANCE for looking at them, and the TPTC quote is the one worth chasing first since that's the bottleneck.

@mmoderwell Good news: NU has more synthesis capability than I'd assumed. The one I missed earlier is the CHiMaD Metals Processing Facility (CMPF, cmpf.northwestern.edu), which is built for exactly this:

• Buehler AM0.5 arc melter — cast alloy buttons. This is the entry point for an MnAl-type L12 or Heusler composition: weigh elements, arc melt under argon, get a button.

• Box furnaces (Lindberg, SentroTech to 1600 °C) — the long anneal that orders the phase. For MnAl that's the critical step anyway; the ε→τ transition lives or dies on anneal schedule.

• Hot isostatic press, plus a FENN rolling mill and rotary swager — thermomechanical work if a candidate ever gets that far.

• MatCI Facility (MRSEC-supported) has tube furnaces to 1700 °C and DSC/TGA, useful for mapping anneal temperatures before committing a sample.

External users register through NUcore (nucore.northwestern.edu) and facility staff either run the equipment or train you. That's the whole on-ramp: NUcore account, email CMPF staff about the arc melter, book time.

Two honest gaps for magnet work specifically:

1. No shared melt spinner or SPS anywhere in NUcore. Rapid quenching and consolidated powder processing would need a collaboration. The Kanatzidis group has a melt spinner and an SPS in their own lab, but that's a lab relationship, not a facility.

2. Magnetometry — I haven't verified whether NU has an open-access SQUID/VSM, so plan on shipping samples out for the moment-measurement step regardless.

Sensible first arc: pick 2-3 compositions from the screening work, arc-melt buttons at CMPF, anneal at MatCI, then XRD at Keck-II to see what phase you actually got. That's a few hundred dollars of facility time and answers whether a composition is worth pursuing before any fancy processing. Characterization pricing we already have: NUANCE published rates (SEM $74-98/hr internal, XRD similar range).