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，用于大量生产纳米结构块状金属和陶瓷材料。我拿起我想要的纳米图案的金属或陶瓷基板，在它上面涂上一层紫外线抗蚀剂，然后简单地滚动到具有适当纳米级图案的柔性“一次性母版”上。在移除一次性母版并固化抗蚀剂之后，对具有图案化抗蚀剂的衬底进行化学或离子束蚀刻以形成纳米结构表面。这种方法将被应用于使用金属和陶瓷衬底的两种新应用中，以展示该技术作为一种简单、低成本的方法来制造大面积的纳米结构材料。选择单晶铁电材料作为陶瓷基板，是因为制备高性能铁电纳米柱阵列的能力对医用换能器具有重要的意义。这是由于高频超声(&gt；100 MHz)需要较小的特征尺寸。选择钒作为金属衬底。一次性母版将被用来在钒表面产生规则的纳米孔阵列，然后被阳极化以形成纳米多孔的钒氧化物表面。高比表面积、短扩散路径和相互连接的孔隙率使得该材料具有高储能能力，具有潜在的新一代电极材料的应用前景。纳米结构表面潜在的其他应用包括摩擦学、流体动力学、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.