Phonon Scattering in a Sol-Gel Glass

Author(s):  
J. M. Grace ◽  
A. C. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sung Woon Cho ◽  
Jun Hyeon Kim ◽  
Sangwoo Shin ◽  
Hyung Hee Cho ◽  
Hyung Koun Cho

We fabricated the crystallized InGaZnO thin films by sol-gel process and high-temperature annealing at 900°C. Prior to the deposition of the InGaZnO, ZnO buffer layers were also coated by sol-gel process, which was followed by thermal annealing. After the synthesis and annealing of the InGaZnO, the InGaZnO thin film on the ZnO buffer layer with preferred orientation showed periodic diffraction patterns in the X-ray diffraction, resulting in a superlattice structure. This film consisted of nanosized grains with two phases of InGaO3(ZnO)1and InGaO3(ZnO)2in InGaZnO polycrystal. On the other hand, the use of no ZnO buffer layer and randomly oriented ZnO buffer induced the absence of the InGaZnO crystal related patterns. This indicated that the ZnO buffer with highc-axis preferred orientation reduced the critical temperature for the crystallization of the layered InGaZnO. The InGaZnO thin films formed with nanosized grains of two-phase InGaO3(ZnO)msuperlattice showed considerably low thermal conductivity (1.14 Wm−1 K−1at 325 K) due to the phonon scattering from grain boundaries as well as interfaces in the superlattice grain.


2016 ◽  
Vol 09 (01) ◽  
pp. 1650010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yin Wu ◽  
Jun Wang ◽  
Xinba Yaer ◽  
Lei Miao ◽  
Boyu Zhang ◽  
...  

To examine the effect of crystal size and orientation effect on ZT, polycrystalline NaxCo2O4 materials were prepared by pressing layered crystals obtained in sol–gel (SG) synthesis, molten salt synthesis (MSS) with and without additional ball milling (BM) treatment and 1:1 molar ratio mixture (Mixture) of BM powder and MSS powders. We found that the orientation effect and crystal size for four samples follow Mixture < SG < BM < MSS and BM < Mixture < SG < MSS, respectively. Electrical conductivity was obviously enhanced in the highly orientated BM and MSS samples when compared with SG and Mixture. It appears that the crystal size plays a dominant role in thermal conductivity rather than Seebeck coefficient by controlling the phonon scattering at grain boundaries. Thermal conductivity for BM was significantly decreased in comparison to MSS, although both BM and MSS show comparable orientation effect. The maximum ZT value is developed to near 0.51 at 814[Formula: see text]K upon increasing the electrical resistivity and decreasing the thermal conductivity, which are mainly governed by the condition of crystal size and orientation effect.


Author(s):  
Jin Fang ◽  
Laurent Pilon ◽  
Christian Reitz ◽  
Torsten Brezesinski ◽  
E. Joseph Nemanick ◽  
...  

This paper reports, for the first time, the cross-plane thermal conductivity of amorphous and crystalline templated cubic mesoporous titania thin films from 30 to 320 K. Both sol-gel and nanocrystal-based films were synthesized by evaporation-induced self-assembly with porosity of 30% to 35%, respectively. The pore diameter in sol-gel mesoporous films ranged from 14 to 25 nm and film thickness from 120 to 370 nm. Crystalline domains in crystalline mesoporous films were 9 to 13 nm in diameter. The thermal conductivity was measured between 30 and 320 K using the 3ω method. The experimental setup and the associated analysis were first validated by comparing experimental measurements with data reported in the literature for high purity silicon substrate and thermal oxide films over the temperature range considered. The thermal conductivity of sol-gel dense and mesoporous TiO2 films was found to increase with increasing temperature. The thermal conductivity of polycrystalline dense film was strongly dependent on temperature while that of dense amorphous and mesoporous films increased slowly with increasing temperature. The amorphous mesoporous TiO2 films featured very small thermal conductivity due to the fact that heat was mainly transferred by very localized non-propagating vibrational modes. Despite the particles crystallinity, the nanocrystal-based film showed significantly lower thermal conductivity than that of the sol-gel polycrystalline mesoporous thin films due to the strong phonon scattering at the nanocrystal boundaries.


Author(s):  
Z. L. Wang

A new dynamical theory has been developed based on Yoshioka's coupled equations for describing inelastic electron scattering in thin crystals. Compared to existing theories, the primary advantage of this theory is that the incoherent summation of the diffracted intensities contributed by electrons after exciting vast numbers of different excited states has been evaluated before any numerical calculation. An additional advantage is that the phase correlations of atomic vibrations are considered, so that full lattice dynamics can be combined in the phonon scattering calculation. The new theory has been proven to be equivalent to the inelastic multislice theory, and has been applied to calculate energy-filtered diffraction patterns and images formed by phonon, single electron and valence scattered electrons.A calculated diffraction pattern of elastic and phonon scattered electrons for a parallel incident beam case is in agreement with the one observed (Fig. 1), showing thermal diffuse scattering (TDS) streaks and Kikuchi pattern.


Author(s):  
George C. Ruben ◽  
Merrill W. Shafer

Traditionally ceramics have been shaped from powders and densified at temperatures close to their liquid point. New processing methods using various types of sols, gels, and organometallic precursors at low temperature which enable densificatlon at elevated temperatures well below their liquidus, hold the promise of producing ceramics and glasses of controlled and reproducible properties that are highly reliable for electronic, structural, space or medical applications. Ultrastructure processing of silicon alkoxides in acid medium and mixtures of Ludox HS-40 (120Å spheres from DuPont) and Kasil (38% K2O &62% SiO2) in basic medium have been aimed at producing materials with a range of well defined pore sizes (∼20-400Å) to study physical phenomena and materials behavior in well characterized confined geometries. We have studied Pt/C surface replicas of some of these porous sol-gels prepared at temperatures below their glass transition point.


Author(s):  
V. Kaushik ◽  
P. Maniar ◽  
J. Olowolafe ◽  
R. Jones ◽  
A. Campbell ◽  
...  

Lead zirconium titanate films (Pb (Zr,Ti) O3 or PZT) are being considered for potential application as dielectric films in memory technology due to their high dielectric constants. PZT is a ferroelectric material which shows spontaneous polarizability, reversible under applied electric fields. We report herein some results of TEM studies on thin film capacitor structures containing PZT films with platinum-titanium electrodes.The wafers had a stacked structure consisting of PZT/Pt/Ti/SiO2/Si substrate as shown in Figure 1. Platinum acts as electrode material and titanium is used to overcome the problem of platinum adhesion to the oxide layer. The PZT (0/20/80) films were deposited using a sol-gel method and the structure was annealed at 650°C and 800°C for 30 min in an oxygen ambient. XTEM imaging was done at 200KV with the electron beam parallel to <110> zone axis of silicon.Figure 2 shows the PZT and Pt layers only, since the structure had a tendency to peel off at the Ti-Pt interface during TEM sample preparation.


Author(s):  
J.M. Schwartz ◽  
L.F. Francis ◽  
L.D. Schmidt ◽  
P.S. Schabes-Retchkiman

Ceramic thin films and coatings are of interest for electrical, optical, magnetic and thermal barrier applications. Critical for improved properties in thin films is the development of specific microstructures during processing. To this end, the sol-gel method is advantageous as a versatile processing route. The sol-gel process involves depositing a solution containing metalorganic or colloidal ceramic precursors onto a substrate and heating the deposited layer to form a crystalline or non-crystalline ceramic coating. This route has several advantages, including the ability to create tailored microstructures and properties, to coat large or small areas, simple or complex shapes, and to more easily prepare multicomponent ceramics. Sol-gel derived coatings are amorphous in the as-deposited state and develop their crystalline structure and microstructure during heat-treatment. We are particularly interested in studying the amorphous to crystalline transformation, because many key features of the microstructure such as grain size and grain size distribution may be linked to this transformation.


Author(s):  
P. G. Kotula ◽  
D. D. Erickson ◽  
C. B. Carter

High-resolution field-emission-gun scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) has recently emerged as an extremely powerful method for characterizing the micro- or nanostructure of materials. The development of high efficiency backscattered-electron detectors has increased the resolution attainable with backscattered-electrons to almost that attainable with secondary-electrons. This increased resolution allows backscattered-electron imaging to be utilized to study materials once possible only by TEM. In addition to providing quantitative information, such as critical dimensions, SEM is more statistically representative. That is, the amount of material that can be sampled with SEM for a given measurement is many orders of magnitude greater than that with TEM.In the present work, a Hitachi S-900 FESEM (operating at 5kV) equipped with a high-resolution backscattered electron detector, has been used to study the α-Fe2O3 enhanced or seeded solid-state phase transformations of sol-gel alumina and solid-state reactions in the NiO/α-Al2O3 system. In both cases, a thin-film cross-section approach has been developed to facilitate the investigation. Specifically, the FESEM allows transformed- or reaction-layer thicknesses along interfaces that are millimeters in length to be measured with a resolution of better than 10nm.


Author(s):  
J. Tong ◽  
L. Eyring

There is increasing interest in composites containing zirconia because of their high strength, fracture toughness, and its great influence on the chemical durability in glass. For the zirconia-silica system, monolithic glasses, fibers and coatings have been obtained. There is currently a great interest in designing zirconia-toughened alumina including exploration of the processing methods and the toughening mechanism.The possibility of forming nanocrystal composites by a phase separation method has been investigated in three systems: zirconia-alumina, zirconia-silica and zirconia-titania using HREM. The morphological observations initially suggest that the formation of nanocrystal composites by a phase separation method is possible in the zirconia-alumina and zirconia-silica systems, but impossible in the zirconia-titania system. The separation-produced grain size in silica-zirconia system is around 5 nm and is more uniform than that in the alumina-zirconia system in which the sizes of the small polyhedron grains are around 10 nm. In the titania-zirconia system, there is no obvious separation as was observed in die alumina-zirconia and silica-zirconia system.


Author(s):  
R. T. Chen ◽  
R.A. Norwood

Sol-gel processing has been used to control the structure of a material on a nanometer scale in preparing advanced ceramics and glasses. Film coating using the sol-gel process was also found to be a viable process technology in applications such as optical, porous, antireflection and hard coatings. In this study, organically modified silicate (Ormosil) coatings are applied to PET films for various industrial applications. Sol-gel materials are known to exhibit nanometer scale structures which havepreviously been characterized by small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), neutron scattering and light scattering. Imaging of the ultrafine sol-gel structures has also been performed using an ultrahigh resolution replica/TEM technique. The objective of this study was to evaluate the ultrafine structures inthe sol gel coatings using a direct imaging technique: atomic force microscopy (AFM). In addition, correlation of microstructures with processing parameters, coating density and other physical properties will be discussed.The materials evaluated are organically modified silicate coatings on PET film substrates. Refractive index measurement by the prism coupling method was used to assess density of the sol-gel coating.AFM imaging was performed on a Nanoscope III AFM (by Digital Instruments) using constant force mode. Solgel coating samples coated with a thin layer of Ft (by ion beam sputtering) were also examined by STM in order to confirm the structures observed in the contact type AFM. In addition, to compare the previous results, sol-gel powder samples were also prepared by ultrasonication followed by Pt/Au shadowing and examined using a JEOL 100CX TEM.


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