Bright IDEAS Award: A low cost route to manufacture nanostructured materials

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This research will develop 'disposable master' technology for large volume manufacture of nano-structured bulk metallic and ceramic materials. I take the metallic or ceramic substrate that I wish to nanopattern, coat it with a UV resist and simply roll onto the resist a flexible 'disposable master' with an appropriate nano-scale pattern. After removing the disposable master and curing the resist, the substrate with the patterned resist is chemically or ion beam etched to form a nanostructured surface. This approach will be applied to two novel applications using metallic and ceramic substrates to demonstrate the technology as a simple, low-cost method for manufacture of large areas of nanostructured materials. Single crystal ferroelectrics are chosen as the ceramic substrate, since the ability to manufacture nano-pillar arrays (~200nm width) of high performance ferroelectric is of significant interest for medical transducers. This is due to the need for small feature sizes for high frequency ultrasonics (>100 MHz). Vanadium is chosen as the metal substrate. The disposable master will be used to produce a regular array of nano-holes in the vanadium surface, which is then anodised to form a nano-porous vanadium oxide surface. The high surface area, short diffusion paths and interconnected porosity results in the material having high energy storage with potential application of new generation of electrode materials.Potential additional applications for nanostructured surfaces include tribology, hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, biocompatibility, adhesives and catalysts.