No Arabic abstract
We demonstrate a facile method to produce crystallographically textured, macroporous materials using a combination of modified ice templating and templated grain growth (TGG). The process is demonstrated on alumina and the lead-free piezoelectric material sodium potassium niobate. The method provides macroporous materials with aligned, lamellar ceramic walls which are made up of crystallographically aligned grains. Each method showed that the ceramic walls present a long-range order over the entire sample dimensions and have crystallographic texture as a result of the TGG process. We also present a modification of the March-Dollase equation to better characterize the overall texture of materials with textured but slightly misaligned walls. The controlled crystallographic and morphologic orientation at two different length scales demonstrated here can be the basis of multifunctional materials.
Double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) combined the advantages of multi-walled (MW-) and single-walled (SW-) CNTs can be obtained by transforming the precursors (e.g. fullerene, ferrocene) into thin inner CNTs inside SWCNTs as templates. However, this method is limited since the DWCNT yield is strongly influenced by the filling efficiency (depending on the type of the filled molecules), opening and cutting the SWCNTs, and the diameter of the host SWCNTs. Therefore, it cannot be applied to all types of SWCNT templates. Here we show a universal route to synthesize ultra-thin DWCNTs via making SWCNTs stable at high temperature in vacuum. This method applies to different types of SWCNTs including metallicity-sorted ones without using any precursors since the carbon sources were from the reconstructed SWCNTs and the residue carbons. The resulting DWCNTs are with high quality and the yield of inner tubes is comparable to/higher than that of the DWCNTs made from the transformation of ferrocene/fullerene peapods.
Volume shrinkage, grain growth, and their interaction are major events occurring during free sintering of ceramics. A high temperature sintering dilatometry curve is influenced by these both phenomena. It is shown that the continuum theory of sintering can be utilized in the format enabling the extraction of the maximum amount of information on the densification and grain growth kinetics based on a simple dilatometry test. We present here the capability of such a fast approach (Dilatometry based Grain growth Assessment DGA) utilized for the modeling of sintering and grain growth of zirconia.
Single crystal metal films on insulating substrates are attractive for microelectronics and other applications, but they are difficult to achieve on macroscopic length scales. The conventional approach to obtaining such films is epitaxial growth at high temperature using slow deposition in ultrahigh vacuum conditions. Here we describe a different approach: sputter deposition at modest temperatures followed by annealing to induce secondary grain growth. We show that polycrystalline as-deposited Cu on alpha-Al2O3(0001) can be transformed into Cu(111) with centimeter-sized grains. Employing optical microscopy, x-ray diffraction, and electron backscatter diffraction to characterize the films before and after annealing, we find a particular as-deposited grain structure that promotes the growth of giant grains upon annealing. To demonstrate one potential application of such films, we grow graphene by chemical vapor deposition on wafers of annealed Cu and obtain epitaxial graphene grains of 0.2 mm diameter.
Most metallic and ceramic materials are comprised of a space-filling collection of crystalline grains separated by grain boundaries. While this grain structure has been studied for more than a century, there few rigorous results regarding its global properties available in the literature. We present a new, rigorous result for three-dimensional grain structures that relates the integral of the Gaussian curvature over the grain boundaries to the numbers of grains and quadruple junctions. The result is numerically verified for a grain structure consisting of periodic truncated octahedra.
Using confocal Raman and fluorescence spectroscopic imaging in 3-dimensions, we show direct evidence for Nd3+-Nd3+ interactions across grain boundaries (GBs) in Nd3+:YAG laser ceramics. It is clearly shown that Nd3+ segregation takes place at GBs leading to self-fluorescence quenching which affects a volume fraction as high as 20%. In addition, we show a clear trend of increasing spatial inhomogeneities in Nd3+ concentration when the doping levels exceeds 3 at%, which is not detected by standard spectrometry techniques. These results could point the way to further improvements in what is already an impressive class of ceramic laser materials.