Our facilities

We have multiple instruments available for use for IPAC members and external users. These include both dry and wet measure analytical equipment.

The Silica Fibre Fabrication Facility is a multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art facility for speciality silica fibre research. It includes the North Terrace Silica Preform Facility for preform production, and the Thebarton Silica Fibre Drawing Facility with a 6-meter tower. The Facility supports research in new lasers, telecommunications, sensing, and medical treatments.

The Soft Glass and Fibre Fabrication Facility at the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing is part of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF) OptoFab Node. It offers state-of-the-art equipment and expertise for manufacturing soft glasses (including fluoride, tellurite, and germanate) and drawing them into optical fibres. Capabilities include controlled batching, melting, casting, preform extrusion, and drawing to create core-clad and unique microstructured fibres.

The Bragg Crystallography Facility provides capabilities and expertise to determine the 3D atomic structure of molecules. The Facility offers single-crystal X-ray structure determination for chemical compounds and biomolecules, providing vital information for chemical, biological, and pharmaceutical research. Other facilities on campus support protein crystal growth and the facility also offers Powder X-ray Diffraction (PXRD) for materials characterisation and analysis.