Synthesis and Characterization of Nanoporous Alumina Films and Their Application to Nanorod Array Fabrication

Download or read book Synthesis and Characterization of Nanoporous Alumina Films and Their Application to Nanorod Array Fabrication written by Negar Abolhassani Monfared and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this study is to synthesize and characterize the nanoporous structures that can be obtained by the anodization of thin film aluminum sputter deposited on a silicon wafer substrate. This study also investigated the application of nanoporous alumina to fabricate nanorod arrays by using preceramic polymers. Although there are many studies on the effect of anodizing conditions on anodized alumina, there are a few studies on anodizing of thin film aluminum. Anodized thin films of aluminum supported on silicon could have several applications that involve integrating the nanoporous structures into chemical and biological sensors and as templates for creating hierarchically complex nanostructures that are integrated with microelectronic circuits. In this study the different attributes of anodizing parameters in the synthesis of nanoporous structures on thin film aluminum compared to the results of studies on aluminum bulk is investigated. These differences can be due to attributes of the material, the resistance of the substrate and the reactions of substrate during anodizing. In this study the effects of different anodizing parameters and the contribution of each parameter were investigated using statistical approaches for quantification of pore sizes, their distributions and pore densities. This approach has never been previously used for studying the aluminum anodization. Until now, studies have always been based on average of the structure parameters with the hypothesis of homogeneity and uniformity of the structure which is not the case for anodization of thin film aluminum. To investigate the relative effect of each parameter, the Taguchi method and signal-to-noise calculation were applied. A new fabrication method for making nanorod arrays was introduced. In this method, nanoporous alumina was used as a casting mold for being filled by a preceramic polymer. KDT Ceraset polysilazane 20 (PSZ) and KDT Ceraset polyureasilazane (PUSZ) were two preceramic polymers which were selected for this purpose. To understand the changes in the chemical structure during the different steps of curing process of these preceramic polymers and also to find a better process for fabrication of nanorod arrays, the effect of curing conditions on these preceramic polymers were investigated.