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

这项研究将开发“一次性母版”技术，用于大批量制造纳米结构块体金属和陶瓷材料。我把金属或陶瓷基板，我希望纳米图案，涂层与紫外线抗蚀剂和简单地滚到抗蚀剂一个灵活的'一次性母版'与适当的纳米尺度的图案。在去除一次性母版并固化抗蚀剂之后，化学或离子束蚀刻具有图案化抗蚀剂的衬底以形成纳米结构化表面。这种方法将被应用到两个新的应用，使用金属和陶瓷基板，以证明该技术作为一个简单的，低成本的方法，用于制造大面积的纳米结构材料。选择单晶铁电体作为陶瓷衬底，因为制造高性能铁电体的纳米柱阵列（~ 200 nm宽度）的能力对于医疗换能器具有重要意义。这是由于高频超声（>100 MHz）需要小的特征尺寸。选择钒作为金属基底。一次性母版将用于在钒表面中产生规则的纳米孔阵列，然后将其阳极化以形成纳米多孔钒氧化物表面。纳米结构表面具有高的比表面积、短的扩散路径和互连的多孔性，这使得纳米材料具有高的储能能力，并具有潜在的新一代电极材料的应用前景，其潜在的附加应用包括摩擦学、流体力学、空气动力学、生物相容性、粘合剂和催化剂。

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.