Petrology and Mineralogy Lab
The PetCAT Scan Project
The NSF-funded PetCAT Scan Project was established to combat COVID restrictions as classes and labs were quickly moved online for everyone's safety. This facility helps instructors teaching Mineralogy, Petrology and other classes relying on microscopes to quickly generate high-definition scan of their thin-section collection. We would offer access to the facility to other faculty in the region at “no-cost” during spring 2022 to help instructors rapidly moving on-line in response to the pandemic.
The ZEISS Axio Scan instrument quickly and automatically generates high resolution and multi-channels virtual thin sections allowing a complete investigation of the optical properties of minerals such as birefringence and pleochroism for a great online teaching experience.
Project is funded by NSF: Award Number # 2037848
Here is a video demonstrating how the ZEISS Axio Scan.Z1 works!
The ZEISS Axio thin section scanner takes high resolution pictures of thin sections in both plane-polarized light (PPL) and cross-polarized light (XPL) and at multi-polarization angles. Several lens objectives are available. The scanning time depends to the objective and scanning mode selected. The instrument has a capacity of 50 scans per batch.
Example of image resolution at different objectives (5x, 10x, 20x and 40x)
Different channels and techniques at different objectives determine the file size of the thin section scans.
There are a variety of applications for our virtual thin section scans. This chart can help you determine what techniques and objectives you want for your thin sections!