The U.S. Department of Energy Ames Laboratory will be receiving $10 million from the Department of Energy to build a new Sensitive Instrument Facility that will be located at the Applied Science Complex.

This lab is not associated with the university. With the exception of some mutual projects, the two are separate operations of one another.

The construction for the building will cost an estimated $7.42 million, said Steve Carter, assistant facilities manager and facilities services group project manager.

Carter said the construction will take 15 to 16 months to complete and will begin in spring 2014.

“The building will house instruments that are extremely sensitive in their nature,” Carter said. “By extreme I do mean extreme. Your heartbeat standing next to the machine could create too many vibrations which can throw off the calibrations.”

The building will be rectangular shaped with offices, conference rooms and other lab building necessities.

Carter said the major aspect of the building, which is what makes the building so expensive, are the six “cells” to house the ultra-sensitive microscopes.

The cells will be divided up into areas for specific microscopes. Two cells are designed for transmission electron microscopes, which are the most sensitive, Carter said.

The building will have two TEM cells that will be set up for future discoveries and use of the TEMs. 

“We also have scanning electron microscopes, SEMs, that we actually have one or two more of in the lab,” Carter said. “The SEMs are less sensitive than the TEMs.”

An undeveloped space is being left in the building for future development of instruments as they are created.

The smallest room or cell in the building will be an 18 square feet cube and the largest will be 21 square feet. The entire building is planned to be 13,304 square feet.

In addition to the cells, there will be dry and wet labs in the building for additional research to be performed in the lab.

“Given the sensitivity of these machines in the space, the foundation and the concrete are very elaborate,” Carter said. “Also each one is contained in its own aluminum box with quarter inch aluminum plate on all six sides; the floor, the four walls and the ceiling.”

The aluminum box for each cell is used to eliminate the electromagnetic forces from the machines.

An assessment was made of the current lab facilities by the Ames Laboratory, which is another reason why the lab has received federal funding for the construction of the new building. The newest building at the Ames Lab was built in 1961.

“Several years ago we assessed our need and the state of the art equipment in the area of characterization materials, and in particular some of the atomic imaging microscopes,” said Tom Lograsso, interim director at the Ames Laboratory.

After surveying that space, the next generation of microscopes would not be able to work properly in that area so the new building is greatly needed to stay up to date with research involving the microscopes, Lograsso said.

The lab was started after World War II in 1946, on the heels of the Manhattan Project.