Nanostructured ceramics and their composites possess improved properties such as tensile strength, fatigue strength, hardness, and wear resistance. Freestanding, near-net shape, nanostructured Al2O3 components can be synthesized via plasma-spray forming. In this study, plasma-spray parameters were optimized and an innovative substrate cooling technique was developed to retain nanosize Al2O3 in ...

The catalytic hydrogenation of p-nitrophenol to p-aminophenol was investigated over alumina supported nickel catalysts prepared by impregnation reduction method and mechanical mixing method. The catalysts were characterized by XRD and FESEM. The results show that the nickel particle diameter of alumina supported nickel prepared by impregnation reduction method (denoted as Ni/Al2O3) is slightly ...

Metal nanoparticles are commonly supported on metal oxides, but their utility as catalysts is limited by coarsening at high temperatures. Rhodium oxide and rhodium metal nanoparticles on niobate and tantalate supports are anomalously stable. To understand this, the nanoparticle-support interaction was studied by isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC), environmental transmission electron microsc...

In order to obtain a good passivation of a silicon surface, more and more stack passivation schemes have been used in high-efficiency silicon solar cell fabrication. In this work, we prepared a-Si:H(i)/Al2O3 stacks on KOH solution-polished n-type solar grade mono-silicon(100) wafers. For the Al2O3 film deposition, both thermal atomic layer deposition (T-ALD) and plasma enhanced atomic layer dep...

This work presents vertical flash memory devices with protein-assembled PbSe nanocrystals as a floating gate and Al2O3 as a control oxide. The advantage of a vertical structure is that it improves cell density. Protein assembly improves uniformity of nanocrystals, which reduces threshold voltage variation among devices. The introduction of Al2O3 as a control oxide provided lower voltage/faster ...

The characterization of mixed oxides of TiO2/SiO2 and TiO2/Al2O3 prepared by sol-gel methods is described. Application of the TiO2/Al2O3 material for the photocatalytic decomposition of salicylic acid gave improved activity relative to TiO2-only materials. The photocatalytic activity of TiO2/SiO2, TiO2/Al2O3, and TiO2 toward the photocatalytic decomposition of phenol demonstrated the enhancemen...

Corundum, a-Al2O3, is the thermodynamically stable phase of coarsely crystalline aluminum oxide, but syntheses of nanocrystalline Al2O3 usually result in g-Al2O3. Adsorption microcalorimetry, thermogravimetric analyses, and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller adsorption experiments, coupled with recently reported high-temperature solution calorimetry data, prove that g-Al2O3 has a lower surface energy than ...

In this study, the physical and electrical characteristics of Al2O3/La2O3/Al2O3/Si stack structures affected by the thickness of an Al2O3 barrier layer between Si substrate and La2O3 layer are investigated after a rapid thermal annealing (RTA) treatment. Time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) tests indicate that an Al2O3 barrier laye...

Al2O3 is commonly used as host material for Er-doped integrated optical amplifiers. In this paper, a Graeco-Latin square is used in DC reactive magnetron sputtering deposition experiment in order to get low optical losses Al2O3 layer. By reasonable selection and careful arrangement of experimental parameters, an optimal combination of deposition parameters is obtained via statistic analysis wit...

High-temperature surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) sensing is significant for practical detections, and pinhole-containing (PC) metal@oxide structures possessing both enhanced thermal stability and superior SERS sensitivity are served as promising SERS sensors at extreme sensing conditions. Through tuning the Al2O3 precursors' exposure time during atomic layer deposition (ALD), Al2O3 she...