FEI today announced that Japan’s JFE Steel Corporation has ordered a Titan™ 80-300 for its research centre in Kawasaki. JFE Steel, a leading global supplier of steel products, is the first Japanese customer to order the Titan S/TEM. In its 2006 fiscal year, it produced more than 30 million tons of raw steel and reported more than US $23 billion in revenues.

Designed for dedicated correction and monochromator technology, the Titan S/TEM is the world’s highest resolution commercially-available microscope, yielding powerful sub-Angstrom imaging and analysis. JFE Steel’s Titan S/TEM will be utilised primarily for chemical-microstructural characterisation of coated layers and advanced metrology and precipitates, and to obtain chemical bonding data from layer interfaces.

“The steel industry is very competitive and being able to reduce design cycle times is the primary key to success,” commented Kaoru Sato, PhD, general manager of the Analysis & Characterisation Research Department at JFE Steel. “In our business, this means developing high-performance steel products whose properties depend on nanometre-sized precipitates, sub-nanometre clusters and the behaviour of interfaces between surface coatings and steel matrices. We are always looking for better, faster and more accurate ways to characterise our nano-world and are convinced that Titan, with its unsurpassed resolution, will help us leap forward.”

“FEI’s ultra-high resolution instruments are playing an important role in nanoscale research and development throughout the world and now in Japan,” commented Don Kania, FEI’s president and chief executive officer. “As the world’s leader in providing enabling Tools for Nanotech™, FEI is honoured to bring the Titan with its innovative, groundbreaking results to the important Japanese market. This is another demonstration of the growing need for tools to create nano-enabled products today.”

Until the introduction of the Titan, most ultra-high resolution microscopy was limited to resolutions between 1 and 2 Å. However, below 1 Å different material properties can be observed. The power of the Titan enables microscopy to be taken to the next level where new discoveries on the structure–property relationships of functional materials become possible. Equipped with this tool, researchers at JFE Steel will have a greatly enhanced ability to understand, characterise and create new materials.

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