| Increasingly, modern engineering materials are designed on a micron or nano scale to fulfill a given set of requirements or to enhance the material's performance. In this dissertation several such materials will be studied including catalyst particles for carbon nanotube (CNT) growth by use of atomic force microscopy (AFM) and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), multi walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) by reactor scale modeling, hermetic carbon coatings by focused ion beam/ scanning electron microscopy (FIB/SEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) the latter of which was performed by Andrei Stolov at OFS Specialty Photonics Division (Avon, CT), and Ni/Yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) anodes using X-ray nanotomography (XNT) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) the second of which was performed by Barry Lai at APS (Argonne National Lab, IL). For each material, a subset of the material properties will be looked at to determine how the selected property affects either the fabrication, performance, or degradation of the material. Following the analysis of these materials, it was found that although the materials are different, the study of micron and nano scale features has many related traits. X-rays and electrons are frequently used to examine nanoscale structures, numerical study can be exploited to expedite measurements and extract additional information from experiments, and the study of these requires knowledge across many scientific fields. As a product of this research, detailed information about all of the materials studied has been contributed to the scientific literature including size dependance information about the oxidation states of nanometer size iron particles, optimal CVD reactor growth conditions for different CNT catalyst particle sizes and number of walls, a technique for rapid measurement of hermetic carbon film thickness, and detailed microstructural detail and sulfur poisoning mapping for Ni/YSZ SOFC anodes. |
