No description available.

No description available.

Observed in many physical systems, coarsening is an orderly decrease in the number of localized structures, such as particles, drops, shear bands, solitons, or point defects. Coarsening is a type of pattern formation in which the characteristic length scale between features grows while the total number of features decreases. These phenomena have been studied in many problems and several mathematical techniques for modeling these phenomena have been developed. This dissertation examines the aggregation of drops in the thin film equation, where drops may coarsen through two general mechanisms: collision and collapse. A series of simplifications to model this process is developed. Slender-body asymptotics is applied to the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid motion in order to derive the Reynolds lubrication equation. The lubrication equation is in turn simplified to a coarsening dynamical system (CDS) model for interacting drops through solvability conditions for a perturbation about a drop-type steady state. Lastly, the dynamical system is averaged into an ensemble model to describe the dynamics of the distribution of drop sizes. The ensemble model takes the form of an integro-differential equation for the distribution function, much like the model of Ostwald ripening proposed by Lifshitz and Slyozov. A convenient choice of scaling yields an intermediate asymptotic self-similar solution. This solution is compared to numerical simulations of the ensemble model and histograms of drop masses from the CDS model. The early-time dynamics before similarity are explored by varying the initial distribution of drop sizes. Interesting far-from-similarity ``stairstep'' behavior is observed in the coarsening rate when the initial distribution has a very small variance. A well-chosen initial condition with a fractal-like structure is shown to replicate the stairstep behavior. At very long times, the mean drop size grows large, requiring the inclusion of gravity in the model. The CDS model parameters are modified as a result of the dependence of drop shapes on both size and gravity. The new dynamical system predicts the coarsening rate slowing from a power law to an inverse logarithmic rate. The energy liberated by each coarsening event is shown to approach a gravity-dependent constant as the mean drop mass increases. This suggests a reason for the coarsening slow-down. / Dissertation

The objective of this research is to implement monolithic analog phase shifters based on barium strontium titanate (BST) coated sapphire substrates for IEEE 802.11b wireless local area network (WLAN) applications. It has been known that several BST thin film properties such as high relative permittivity, electric field dependence, fast polarization response, relatively low loss, and high breakdown field, allow for miniaturization and high performance of analog phase shifters. Before attempting to implement BST phase shifters, coplanar waveguides (CPWs) and interdigital capacitors (IDCs) based on various BST compositions and thicknesses have been developed and characterized to capitalize on the electrical properties of BST thin films. Based on the characteristics of BST thin films, two design topologies have been studied to implement phase shifters. The first topology is a reflection-type structure. The reflection-type phase shifter composed of a 3-dB coupler and two identical reflective terminations has provided a large phase shift with a relatively low insertion loss. The second topology is an all-pass network structure. The all-pass network phase shifter consists of only lumped elements so that one can shrink in size of devices. The total chip area of the all-pass network phase shifter is only 2.6 mm * 2.2 mm with a loss figure-of-merit (FOM) of more than 69 deg/dB at 2.4 GHz. This is the smallest size and the best performance obtained to date for BST phase shifters in the 2.4 GHz band and comparable or even better than the state of the GaAs MMIC phase shifters. The nonlinear response of the all-pass network phase shifter also was investigated with two-tone intermodulation distortion (IMD) measurement. Furthermore, the all-pass network phase shifter was studied to ascertain a design to ensure minimum performance variation over a range of temperature and to determine which BST composition performed best in the face of temperature variations. Compact beamforming networks (BFNs) for WLAN systems using client-based smart antennas have been demonstrated to validate the feasibility of BST technology for WLAN applications. The two-element BFNs have been shown to increase throughput and network capacity by rejecting interference.

Thin films are used in many energy conversion applications, ranging from photodetectors to solar cells. Accurately predicting the radiative properties of thin films when they possess rough surfaces is critical in many instances, but can be challenging due to the complexity arising from light scattering and interferences at the microscale. This work describes measurements of the spectral transmittance and reflectance of several thin-film materials (including crystalline silicon wafers and a polycrystalline diamond film) in the mid-infrared spectral region (2 20 m) using a Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometer. The transmittance and reflectance were calculated using thin-film optics for the double-side polished samples and scalar scattering theory for the single-side polished samples. The effects of partial coherence are considered using a fringe smoothing technique. The interval used for fringe smoothing was assumed to be linearly dependent on the wavenumber. Good agreement between the predicted and measured transmittance was achieved for the double-side polished silicon wafers and for the diamond film. The disagreement for some single-side polished silicon wafers may be inherently related to their surface microstructures, as suggested from surface topographic data and images obtained from surface profilometry and microscopy. By comparing the intervals used for fringe smoothing with the instrumental resolution, beam divergence in the spectrometer was found to be a major factor contributing to the partial coherence. Future research is proposed to investigate the correlation between the detailed surface characteristics and the conical-conical transmittance and reflectance.

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No description available.

I have explored the use of the matrix assisted pulsed laser evaporation (MAPLE) and MAPLE direct write (MDW) to create thin films of biological materials. MAPLE is a novel physical vapor deposition technique used to deposit thin films of organic materials. The MAPLE process involves the laser desorption of a frozen dilute solution (1-5%) containing the material to be deposited. A focused laser pulse (~200 mJ/cm2) impacts the frozen target, which causes the solvent to preferentially absorb the laser energy and evaporate. The collective action of the evaporated solvent desorbs the polymeric solute material towards the receiving substrate placed parallel and opposite to the target. The bioresorbable polymer PDLLA and the anti-inflammatory pharmaceutical dexamethasone were processed using MAPLE, and characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. MDW is a CAD/CAM controlled direct writing process. The material to be transferred is immersed in a laser-absorbing matrix or solution and coated onto a target or support positioned microns to millimeters away from a receiving substrate. Using a UV microscope objective, a focused laser pulse is directed at the backside of the ribbon, so that the laser energy first interacts with the matrix at the ribbon/matrix interface. This energy is used to gently desorb the depositing material and matrix onto the receiving substrate. I have deposited neuroblasts within a three-dimensional extracellular matrix. These two laser processing techniques have enormous potential for functional medical device and tissue engineering applications.

As the minimum feature size in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices shrinks, the leakage current through the gate insulator (silicon oxide) will increase sufficiently to impair device operation. A high dielectric constant (k) insulator is needed as a replacement for silicon oxide in order to reduce this leakage. Hafnium-based materials are among the more promising candidates for the gate insulator, however, it is hampered by material quality and thus has been slow to be introduced into high volume integrated circuit production. Hafnium oxynitride films are deposited by Metalorganic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) and downstream microwave Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) employing different oxidants including O2, N2O, O2 plasma, N2O plasma, N2O/N2 plasma, and O2/He plasma in the current research. The effects of oxidants on deposition kinetics, morphology, composition, bonding structure, electrical properties and thermal stability of the resultant films each are investigated. The possible chemical/physical causes of these observations are developed and some mechanisms are proposed to explain the experimental results. Oxygen radicals, which are known of present in oxidizing environments are determined to play an essential role in defining both structures and the resultant electronic properties of deposited hafnium oxynitride films. This systematic investigation of oxidant effects on CVD grown hafnium oxide/oxynitride layers, in the absence of post-deposition annealing, provides new understanding to this area with potential importance to the integrated circuit industry.

Reducing fabrication and operation costs while maintaining high performance is a major consideration for the design of a new generation of solid-state ionic devices such as fuel cells, batteries, and sensors. The objective of this research is to fabricate nanostructured materials for energy storage and conversion, particularly porous electrodes with nanostructured features for solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) and high surface area films for gas sensing using a combustion CVD process. This research started with the evaluation of the most important deposition parameters: deposition temperature, deposition time, precursor concentration, and substrate. With the optimum deposition parameters, highly porous and nanostructured electrodes for low-temperature SOFCs have been then fabricated. Further, nanostructured and functionally graded La0.8Sr0.2MnO2-La0.8SrCoO3-Gd0.1Ce0.9O2 composite cathodes were fabricated on YSZ electrolyte supports. Extremely low interfacial polarization resistances (i.e. 0.43 Wcm2 at 700¡ãC) and high power densities (i.e. 481 mW/cm2 at 800¡ãC) were generated at operating temperature range of 600¡ãC-850¡ãC. The original combustion CVD process is modified to directly employ solid ceramic powder instead of clear solution for fabrication of porous electrodes for solid oxide fuel cells. Solid particles of SOFC electrode materials suspended in an organic solvent were burned in a combustion flame, depositing a porous cathode on an anode supported electrolyte. Combustion CVD was also employed to fabricate highly porous and nanostructured SnO2 thin film gas sensors with Pt interdigitated electrodes. The as-prepared SnO2 gas sensors were tested for ethanol vapor sensing behavior in the temperature range of 200-500¡ãC and showed excellent sensitivity, selectivity, and speed of response. Moreover, several novel nanostructures were synthesized using a combustion CVD process, including SnO2 nanotubes with square-shaped or rectangular cross sections, well-aligned ZnO nanorods, and two-dimensional ZnO flakes. Solid-state gas sensors based on single piece of these nanostructures demonstrated superior gas sensing performances. These size-tunable nanostructures could be the building blocks of or a template for fabrication of functional devices. In summary, this research has developed new ways for fabrication of high-performance solid-state ionic devices and has helped generating fundamental understanding of the correlation between processing conditions, microstructure, and properties of the synthesized structures.