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    Making Sense of Complex Carbon and Metal/Carbon Systems by Secondary Electron Hyperspectral Imaging
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2019) Abrams, Kerry J.; Dapor, Maurizio; Stehling, Nicola; Azzolini, Martina; Kyle, Stephan J.; Schäfer, Jan; Quade, Antje; Mika, Filip; Kratky, Stanislav; Pokorna, Zuzana; Konvalina, Ivo; Mehta, Danielle; Black, Kate; Rodenburg, Cornelia
    Carbon and carbon/metal systems with a multitude of functionalities are ubiquitous in new technologies but understanding on the nanoscale remains elusive due to their affinity for interaction with their environment and limitations in available characterization techniques. This paper introduces a spectroscopic technique and demonstrates its capacity to reveal chemical variations of carbon. The effectiveness of this approach is validated experimentally through spatially averaging spectroscopic techniques and using Monte Carlo modeling. Characteristic spectra shapes and peak positions for varying contributions of sp2-like or sp3-like bond types and amorphous hydrogenated carbon are reported under circumstances which might be observed on highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) surfaces as a result of air or electron beam exposure. The spectral features identified above are then used to identify the different forms of carbon present within the metallic films deposited from reactive organometallic inks. While spectra for metals is obtained in dedicated surface science instrumentation, the complex relations between carbon and metal species is only revealed by secondary electron (SE) spectroscopy and SE hyperspectral imaging obtained in a state-of-the-art scanning electron microscope (SEM). This work reveals the inhomogeneous incorporation of carbon on the nanoscale but also uncovers a link between local orientation of metallic components and carbon form.
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    Searching for order in atmospheric pressure plasma jets
    (Bristol : IOP Publ., 2017-11-10) Schäfer, Jan; Sigeneger, Florian; Šperka, Jiří; Rodenburg, Cornelia; Foest, Rüdiger
    The self-organized discharge behaviour occurring in a non-thermal radio-frequency plasma jet in rare gases at atmospheric pressure was investigated. The frequency of the azimuthal rotation of filaments in the active plasma volume and their inclination were measured along with the gas temperature under varying discharge conditions. The gas flow and heating were described theoretically by a three-dimensional hydrodynamic model. The rotation frequencies obtained by both methods qualitatively agree. The results demonstrate that the plasma filaments forming an inclination angle α with the axial gas velocity uz are forced to a transversal movement with the velocity uφ=tan(α)*uz, which is oriented in the inclination direction. Variations of ${u}_{\phi }$ in the model reveal that the observed dynamics minimizes the energy loss due to convective heat transfer by the gas flow. The control of the self-organization regime motivates the application of the plasma jet for precise and reproducible material processing.
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    Surface modification of the laser sintering standard powder polyamide 12 by plasma treatments
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2018-6-7) Almansoori, Alaa; Masters, Robert; Abrams, Kerry; Schäfer, Jan; Gerling, Torsten; Majewski, Candice; Rodenburg, Cornelia
    Polyamide 12 (PA12) powder was exposed for up to 3 h to low pressure air plasma treatment (LP-PT) and several minutes by two different atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJ) i.e., kINPen (K-APPJ) and Hairline (H-APPJ). The chemical and physical changes resulting from LP-PT were observed by a combination of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Hot Stage Microscopy (HSM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), which demonstrated significant changes between the plasma treated and untreated PA12 powders. PA12 exposed to LP-PT showed an increase in wettability, was relatively porous, and possessed a higher density, which resulted from the surface functionalization and materials removal during the plasma exposure. However, it showed poor melt behavior under heating conditions typical for Laser Sintering. In contrast, brief PJ treatments demonstrated similar changes in porosity, but crucially, retained the favorable melt characteristics of PA12 powder.