Operations and Maintenance Support: Surface Science Western, Western Nanofabrication and Tandetron Accelerator Facilities

这项OMSRE申请旨在维护西部大学位于、运营和维护的三个专门从事材料科学的设施。表面科学西部，Tendetron加速器和西部纳米制造设施分别于1981年，1986年和2004年在西部运行。除了三名董事（shoessmith, Goncharova, lagugn<s:1> - labarthet），他们总共雇佣了16名员工，他们都是西方大学的教授。这些设施自成立以来一直没有中断过，使其成为任何需要材料和表面表征、材料植入和表面图案方面专业知识的研究人员的首选设施。这些设施每年都非常成功地参与了400多份手稿以及腐蚀科学或传感应用等关键领域的专利。为了使这些设施中的众多仪器保持最高的运行水平，研究设备的维护和运营支持补助金至关重要，它可以通过减少维护和运营成本来进一步促进和便利我们的用户访问，而目前这些成本仅由使用这些设施的研究人员的用户费用来支持。只有三名全职员工的工资和福利由西方理学院承担。因此，这些设施产生的收入足以支付13名员工的全部工资和福利，包括学术使用费和工业合同。这对我们的维护预算造成了很大的压力，并阻止了我们的一些设备在合理的时间内进行现代化和升级。

This OMSRE application aims at maintaining three facilities specialized in material science that are located, operated and maintained at Western University. Surface Science Western, the Tendetron accelerator and the Western Nanofabrication Facilities been operated at Western since 1981, 1986 and 2004, respectively. All together, they employ 16 employee in addition to their three directors (Shoesmith, Goncharova, Lagugné-Labarthet) that hold professor positions at Western. The facilities have been running with no interruption since their inception making them facilities of choice for any researcher in needs of expertise in material and surface characterization, material implantation and surface patterning. The facilities have been very successful participating to more than 400 manuscripts annually as well as patents in critical fields such as corrosion science or sensing applications. In order to maintain the numerous instruments located in these facilities at their highest operation levels, the Maintenance and Operational support for research equipment grant is critical to allow one to further promote and facilitate the access to our users by reducing the maintenance and operational costs that are presently only supported by the user-fee from the researchers using the facilities. Only three full-time employee have their salaries+benefits covered by the Faculty of Science at Western. The facilities together are therefore generating enough revenues to cover the full salaries+benefit of 13 employees from the academic user-fee and industrial contracts. This causes an important strain on our maintenance budget and prevent modernization and upgrades of some of our apparatus in reasonable time. The requested budget aims at maintaining the instrument located in the facilities and facilitating its access by limiting the operational costs. This will allow to reduce users fee, and subsequently to continue promoting our facility in a more efficient way to our local, national and international users.