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Brown Bag Talk at 2011 by Martin Kocanda
Martin Kocanda
MSEE, Ph.D.
Department of Electrical Engineering
Northern Illinois University
Scanning Electron Microscopy Characterization of Epitaxially Grown
Aluminum Oxide Substrates Employed as Sensor Substrates
When: April 13th, 2011, Reception @ 12:00 m
Where: EB354, Engineering Building
Anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) films have been employed as surficial protective
coatings since the 1950s and as a decorative metallic finish during the last several
decades. The porosity, surface morphology and fabrication methods of these films have
been studied extensively. Common to commercial AAO films is the anodization process
of aluminum fabricated in the (100) crystallographic plane using inorganic electrolytes. A
more recent application of this anodic process has been the fabrication of hexagonal
templates to grow domains of nanowires and nanotubes using low solubility salts.
The use of microelectronic fabrication methods to epitaxially grow (111)
aluminum thin films and the subsequent anodization method has been recently
employed to implement nanostructured AAO materials as commercial moisture sensors
and as substrates to identify the impedance signatures of volatile organic compounds
(VOCs) and biochemical compounds. These epitaxially grown films contain nanoporous
structures having pore morphologies similar to the (100) film but appear to grow radially
from the tetrahedral and hexagonal domains. In this work, the surface morphology of
epitaxially grown porous nanostructures is elucidated using scanning electron
microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM).
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