Manufacturing of Hierarchical Composite Structures via Controlled Ceramic Nanoparticle Incorporation in Electrodeposited Thin Films

摘要

Electrochemical deposition has continued to grow as an important industry tool not only for depositing traditional metal structures, but also for manufacturing more complex composite thin films. Previous work has demonstrated the ability to manufacture metal matrix composites with precisely controlled oxide nanoparticle incorporation using a rotating disk electrode (RDE) setup (1, 2). In this method the speed of the RDE is used to directly control the rate of particle incorporation. It is feasible to manufacture higher order composite structures using this novel technique by simply varying the rotation rate of the RDE during deposition. Specific attention is given to periodically layered composite structures. These hierarchical structures are demonstrated with nanometer scale interface resolution and sub-micron to millimeter characteristic length scales (layer thicknesses). These ordered composites should yield unique mechanical properties compared to those of randomly dispersed composite structures, and have immediate industry applications.