Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Kumar, Dhananjay Dr.

Abstract

Nanostructured materials are of great interest because the properties of a material at the nanoscale may differ significantly from the properties of the same material in the bulk form. This has led to a lot of new applications for nanomaterials owing to their unique physical, chemical, electrical, optical and magnetic properties. The present work reports on the synthesis and characterization of zero, one, and two dimensional nanostructured materials. Nanostructured materials in the present study were all grown using a pulsed laser deposition technique. Gold (Au) nanodots (zero-dimensional nanostructure) were grown on silicon (Si) substrates and subsequently used in the growth of titanium nitride (TiN) nanowires (one-dimensional nanostructure). TiN nanowires were grown under different conditions; energy entering the chamber (70 mJ, 80 mJ and 90 mJ) and deposition temperature (600 °C, 700 °C and 800 °C) leading to nanowires of varying length (50 nm - 200 nm), diameter (25 nm-50 nm) and spatial density. Corrosion tests run on TiN nanowires, thin films and magnesium (Mg) bulk showed that TiN nanowires degraded faster than TiN thin films but were still better than Mg bulk. The thesis work has also focused on growing nickel (Ni) thin films (two-dimensional nanostructure) sandwiched between an alumina (Al2O3) substrate and thin film. The nickel films were deposited at different substrate temperatures (liquid nitrogen, room temperature and high temperature) keeping all other deposition parameters the same. Magnetic moment versus magnetic field measurements showed that Ni thin film samples deposited at room temperature and liquid nitrogen temperature had almost the same remanent magnetization; however, samples deposited at liquid nitrogen had the highest saturation magnetization and coercivity. The coercivity values at 10K for Ni thin film samples grown at liquid nitrogen, room temperature, and high temparature were found to be 58.92 Oe and 255.15 Oe respectively.

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