About Materials Prep
The electronic lab notebook built for metallography.
Materials Prep is the electronic lab notebook built for metallography. We made it because we needed it ourselves.
Why we built it
PACE Technologies has been making metallography sample preparation equipment since 1997. In 2011, our co-founder Dr. Donald Zipperian published the Metallographic Handbook (PDF, 14 MB), a reference for metallographic sample preparation built on years of bench-tested procedures. A new edition has been in the works for some time.
While organizing material for that update, we ran into the same problem every metallography lab runs into. Recipes lived in Word documents on someone's laptop. Hardness readings sat in spiral notebooks. Micrographs piled up in folders nobody could search. Don had been writing his methods by hand for years, and we could see what worked and what didn't, but we couldn't query it, share it, or organize it cleanly for the next edition.
So we built the tool we wished we had. Materials Prep started as a way to help Don capture his prep journals, recipes, etchants, and micrographs in one place, ready for the handbook update and usable at the bench day to day. Once it was working for us, we realized every metallography lab has the same problem.
Open to any lab, on any equipment
A lot of the digital tools and technique libraries in metallography sit behind a vendor login. You buy the equipment, you get the database. We don't think a lab's prep journal should be tied to whose grinder is on the bench.
Materials Prep works for any lab using any vendor's equipment. Your data is yours. Your recipes are yours. We don't gate features behind a hardware purchase, and we don't tie your prep notes to your equipment vendor.
The team behind it
PACE Technologies is a family-owned company founded in 1997 by Dr. Donald and Cathy Zipperian, recognized with the Presidential “E” Award for excellence in exporting U.S. products and services in 2015. We make sample preparation equipment and consumables used in laboratories worldwide.
Don Zipperian and the technical team contribute the recipe and etchant content drawn from decades of bench experience.
How to reach us
Email pace@metallographic.com. Materials Prep is built and operated from Tucson, Arizona, USA.
For free educational metallography resources, visit metallography.org.