Liang, Hui = 纳米线器件的制备和表征 / 梁慧. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-48). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Liang, Hui = Na mi xian qi jian de zhi bei he biao zheng / Liang Hui. / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Nanowire-based devices --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1.1 --- Properties of various nanowires --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1.2 --- Nanowire growth methods --- p.3 / Chapter 1.1.3 --- Introduction to EBL --- p.4 / Chapter 1.1.4 --- Properties of nanowire and the arrays and related devices --- p.6 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Experimental --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1 --- Nanowire preparation --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- ZnS nanowire growth --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Sb2S3 nanowire growth --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2 --- Device fabrication --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Single-nanowire device --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Multiple-nanowire device --- p.17 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Silicon device --- p.17 / Chapter 2.3 --- Characterizations --- p.18 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Morphological and structural characterizations of the nanowires --- p.18 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Two-probe measurements --- p.18 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- Four-probe measurements --- p.19 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Results and Discussion --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1 --- Optimal factors for sample preparation --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Trial of spin coating --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Trial of Coating thickness --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Trial of e-beam lithography --- p.22 / Chapter 3.1.4 --- Trial of dosage --- p.23 / Chapter 3.1.5 --- Trial of development time --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- Electrical Properties of devices made --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- UV-visible response of single ZnS nanowire devices --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- The optoelectronic characteristics of single Sb2S3 nanowire devices --- p.32 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- The optoelectronic characteristics of multiple-nanowire devices --- p.35 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Temperature dependent resistance and magnetoresistance of the silicon device --- p.41 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- Conclusions --- p.44 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- References --- p.45

Using electron beam evaporation for the production of polycrystalline silicon (pc-Si) thin-film solar cells is an attractive alternative to PECVD deposition. Due to its faster deposition rate, using evaporation technology could significantly reduce module production costs. Other advantages are lower running costs, and the fact that no toxic gases are involved. However, currently no on-shelf equipment is available, and research in this field often relies on in-house designed systems. These can have various problems with reliability, deposition uniformity, and due to their custom design require frequent maintenance. In this work, a newly purchased electron beam evaporation system was upgraded and redesigned to be capable of depositing amorphous Si diodes for the fabrication of pc-Si thin-film solar cells. The main goal of the upgrade was to provide a safe and reliable tool which allows for the deposition of high purity semiconductor material. Reliable and safe operation was accomplished by designing the entire electrical supply circuit and incorporating various safety interlocks. Source cross-contamination issues were addressed by installing a specially designed shroud (source housing). To provide uniform substrate temperatures up to 600??C, a heater was specially designed, fabricated, installed and tested. Accurate design of all mechanical system components was realised by using 3D product design software (ProEngineer). The new evaporator was commissioned, which included testing and calibration of all the system components required for depositing on substrate sizes of up to 10x10cm2. Over this area a Si film thickness uniformity of +/-2%, performed with a maximum deposition rate of 7nm/s was achieved. Initial experiments using solid phase crystallisation and rapid thermal annealing revealed a sheet resistance uniformity of +/-4% for the Phosphorus and +/-7% for the Boron dopant effusion cell. Experimentation via Raman spectrometry and X-ray diffraction has revealed good crystalline properties, of the crystallised Si films, which is comparable to those of existing evaporation systems. Although the system was upgraded to achieve deposition pressures below 3x10-7 mbar, experiments have shown that this quality of vacuum may not be necessary for the fabrication of low impurity films. The system is now ready for further research in the field of thin-film photovoltaics, and the first functioning devices have been fabricated.

Salmonella Typhimurium continues to be a leading cause of human gastroenteritis worldwide. This organism is a facultative intracellular pathogen, meaning that it is able grow and reproduce within the host cell it inhabits. S. Typhimurium has the ability to invade and replicate within human intestinal epithelial cells, which in turn causes induced cell death or apoptosis. The human intestinal epithelial cells, HCT-8, were challenged with live, heat inactivated, and electron beam inactivated S. Typhimurium for various time points. Infected cell monolayers were collected for RNA extractions, and Real-time PCR was performed on the samples to analyze differential gene expression. Genes of the host cell that were expected to be differentially expressed were shortlisted and Real-Time PCR analysis was performed. Internalized Salmonella within the host cell was unable to be successfully visualized using fluorescent light microscopy. However, differential gene expression for a common transcriptional regulator and inflammatory chemokine were observed to be expressed significantly higher in response to e-beam inactivated Salmonella infection. Genes coding for extracellular and intracellular pattern-recognition receptors of the host cells were shown to be up-regulated in response to e-beam inactivated Salmonella infection at 4 and 24 hours, but were not statistically significant. Additional studies must be conducted to definitively confirm e-beam irradiated Salmonella has the ability to invade human host cells.

Using electron beam evaporation for the production of polycrystalline silicon (pc-Si) thin-film solar cells is an attractive alternative to PECVD deposition. Due to its faster deposition rate, using evaporation technology could significantly reduce module production costs. Other advantages are lower running costs, and the fact that no toxic gases are involved. However, currently no on-shelf equipment is available, and research in this field often relies on in-house designed systems. These can have various problems with reliability, deposition uniformity, and due to their custom design require frequent maintenance. In this work, a newly purchased electron beam evaporation system was upgraded and redesigned to be capable of depositing amorphous Si diodes for the fabrication of pc-Si thin-film solar cells. The main goal of the upgrade was to provide a safe and reliable tool which allows for the deposition of high purity semiconductor material. Reliable and safe operation was accomplished by designing the entire electrical supply circuit and incorporating various safety interlocks. Source cross-contamination issues were addressed by installing a specially designed shroud (source housing). To provide uniform substrate temperatures up to 600??C, a heater was specially designed, fabricated, installed and tested. Accurate design of all mechanical system components was realised by using 3D product design software (ProEngineer). The new evaporator was commissioned, which included testing and calibration of all the system components required for depositing on substrate sizes of up to 10x10cm2. Over this area a Si film thickness uniformity of +/-2%, performed with a maximum deposition rate of 7nm/s was achieved. Initial experiments using solid phase crystallisation and rapid thermal annealing revealed a sheet resistance uniformity of +/-4% for the Phosphorus and +/-7% for the Boron dopant effusion cell. Experimentation via Raman spectrometry and X-ray diffraction has revealed good crystalline properties, of the crystallised Si films, which is comparable to those of existing evaporation systems. Although the system was upgraded to achieve deposition pressures below 3x10-7 mbar, experiments have shown that this quality of vacuum may not be necessary for the fabrication of low impurity films. The system is now ready for further research in the field of thin-film photovoltaics, and the first functioning devices have been fabricated.

Thesis(M.S.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references.

Multiple thin films which are conducting, insulating and semiconducting are important components of integrated circuit technology. Circuits are fabricated from these layers by patterning the films to form isolated circuit elements which are themselves interconnected by patterned films (1).

The design of high quality electron generators to meet specific requirements is important in the application of these devices to a variety of materials processing systems (including welding, cutting and additive manufacture), X-ray tubes for medical, scientific and industrial applications, microscopy and lithography. Designs can be analysed by field solvers, and electron trajectories plotted to provide an indication of the beam quality. Incremental improvement of designs has normally been executed by trial and error, and this can be a time consuming activity requiring expert intervention for each iteration of the design process. The unique contribution made to knowledge by this work is the application of optimisation techniques to the design of electron guns to produce beams with the required optical properties. This thesis presents a review of the design of electron guns, including a discussion of thermionic cathode material properties and their suitability for use in electron guns for processing materials, the influence of space-charge on gun design and the derivation of salient beam metrics to characterise the beam. Beam quality metrics have been developed that allow quantification of electron beam characteristics, allowing objectives to be set for the optimisation process. Additionally, a method is presented that enables real world measurements to be directly compared with modelled beams. Various optimisation methods are reviewed. A genetic algorithm was selected, which would use gun modelling and beam characterisation calculations as the objective function, as a suitable method for application to this problem. However, it was recognised that selections for the best evolutionary parameters, the population size, number of parents, the mutation rate and mutation scale, were not readily determined from published work. An investigation is presented where a range of evolutionary parameters was tested for a set of geometrical problems, which had some similarity to electron gun design but could be computed sufficiently quickly to enable an extensive survey, and the most efficient combination of parameters was identified. Detail is given of the customisation of a genetic evolutionary optimisation method for the design of electron guns. Examples are presented of electron gun design optimisation processes to meet specified beam requirements within defined geometric and electrical constraints. The results of this work show that optimum evolutionary parameter settings for the geometric problem vary with the complexity of the problem and trends have been identified. Application of these parameters to an electron gun optimisation has been successful. The derived beam parameter metrics have been applied to electron guns as an objective function. Comparisons of modelled predictions of the beam characteristics with the measured real world values have been shown to be reasonable.

Society's growing demands for energy results in rapid increase in oil consumption and motivates us to make unconventional resources conventional resources. There are enormous amounts of heavy oil reserves in the world but the lack of cost effective technologies either for extraction, transportation, or refinery upgrading hinders the development of heavy oil reserves. One of the critical problems with heavy oil and bitumen is that they require large amounts of thermal energy and expensive catalysts to upgrade. This thesis demonstrates that electron beam (E-Beam) heavy oil upgrading, which uses unique features of E-Beam irradiation, may be used to improve conventional heavy oil upgrading. E-Beam processing lowers the thermal energy requirements and could sharply reduce the investment in catalysts. The design of the facilities can be simpler and will contribute to lowering the costs of transporting and processing heavy oil and bitumen. E-Beam technology uses the high kinetic energy of fast electrons, which not only transfer their energy but also interact with hydrocarbons to break the heavy molecules with lower thermal energy. In this work, we conducted three major stages to evaluate the applicability of E-Beam for heavy oil upgrading. First, we conducted laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of E-Beam on hydrocarbons. To do so, we used a Van de Graff accelerator, which generates the high kinetic energy of electrons, and a laboratory scale apparatus to investigate extensively how radiation effects hydrocarbons. Second, we studied the energy transfer mechanism of E-Beam upgrading to optimize the process. Third, we conducted a preliminary economic analysis based on energy consumption and compared the economics of E-Beam upgrading with conventional upgrading. The results of our study are very encouraging. From the experiments we found that E-Beam effect on hydrocarbon is significant. We used less thermal energy for distillation of n-hexadecane (n-C16) and naphtha with E-Beam. The results of experiments with asphaltene indicate that E-Beam enhances the decomposition of heavy hydrocarbon molecules and improves the quality of upgraded hydrocarbon. From the study of energy transfer mechanism, we estimated heat loss, fluid movement, and radiation energy distribution during the reaction. The results of our economic evaluation show that E-Beam upgrading appears to be economically feasible in petroleum industry applications. These results indicate significant potential for the application of E-Beam technology throughout the petroleum industry, particularly near production facilities, transportation pipelines, and refining industry.

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The E-beam curable BMI resin systems and phenylethynyl terminated AFR-PEPA-4 oligomer together with an imide model compound N-phenyl-[4-(phenylethynyl) phthalimide] were synthesized and characterized. E-beam exposure cannot propagate the polymerization of BMI system until the temperature goes up to 100oC. However, a small amount of oligomers may be generated from solid-state cure reaction under low E-beam intensity radiation. Higher intensity E-beam at 40 kGy per pass can give above 75% reaction conversion of BMI with thermal cure mechanism involved. NVP is a good reactive diluent for BMI resin. The cure extents of BMI/NVP increase with the increase of the dosage and applied dosage per pass. The reaction rate is much higher at the beginning of the E-beam cure and slows down after 2 dose passes due to diffusion control. Free radical initiator dicumyl peroxide can accelerate the reaction rate at the beginning of E-beam cure reaction but doesn’t affect final cure conversion very much. According to the results from FT-IR, 200 kGy total dosage E- beam exposure at 10 kGy per pass can give 70% reaction conversion of BMI/NVP with the temperature rise no more than 50oC. The product has a Tg of 180oC. The predicted ultimate Tg of cured AFR-PEPA-4 polyimide is found to be 437.2oC by simulation of DSC Tg as a function of cure. The activation energy of thermal cure reaction of AFR-PEPA-4 oligomer is 142.6 ± 10.0 kJ/mol with the kinetic order of 1 when the reaction conversion is less than 80%. The kinetics analysis of the thermal cure of N-phenyl-[4-(phenylethynyl) phthalimide] was determined by FT-IR spectroscopy by following the absorbance of the phenylethynyl triple bond and conjugated bonds. The thermal crosslinking of N-phenyl-[4-(phenylethynyl) phthalimide] through phenylethynyl addition reaction has a reaction order of 0.95 and an activation energy of 173.5 ± 8.2 kJ/mol. The conjugated bond addition reactions have a lower reaction order of 0.94 and lower activation energy (102.7 ± 15.9 kJ/mol). The cure reaction of N-phenyl-[4-(phenylethynyl) phthalimide] can be described as a fast first-order reaction stage followed by a slow second stage that is kinetically controlled by diffusion.