Impact of the Glancing Angle Deposition on the Yttria-Stabilized Zirconia Growth and Their Thermal Barrier Coating Properties

Yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) is the most common material used as a thermal barrier in several engineering applications. The majority of films produced by physical vapor deposition (PVD) techniques use normal incidence and lead to the columnar growth normal to the substrate. The typical columnar structure of sputter-deposited films is largely influenced, among other parameters, by pressure, temperature, thickness, and the ion-to-atom ratio incident at the substrate or substrate bias voltage. Another important experimental parameter used to modify the film properties is the direction of the incident flux of the depositing species with respect to the substrate surface. In this chapter an oblique angle deposition (OAD) approach was used to grow YSZ with tilted columnar structures, to study the impact of this deposition technique on the microstructure, morphology, and, correspondingly, the thermal conductivity of YSZ films, in order to improve the insulator potential of these thin films. Additionally, in the chapter, we present a detailed description of the oblique angle deposition (OAD) technique and double-layer model used for determination of the effective thermal conductivity of YSZ samples grown over thick substrates

Synthesis by wet chemistry and characterization of LiNbO3 nanoparticles

Actually, lithium niobate (LiNbO3) has been used for optical wavelength conversion and ultrafast optical signal processing because of its outstanding rapid nonlinear optical response behavior, low switching power and broad conversion bandwidth. LiNbO3nanoparticles, which belong to the ferroelectric oxide class, were synthesized by chemical reaction with wetchemistry. Their sizedistributionwascenteredaround200 nm. Xray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used to further investigate the quality of the obtained LiNbO3powders.The present work shows thatby employingthis chemical method the correct stoichiometric phasewas obtained. This wascorroborated by XPS (X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy) results. Also, the nanoparticles showed a defined crystallinity and uniform morphology. This way of obtaining nanoparticles is innovative because of its low cost and simple way to reproduce it. It isan important method of increasing the surfacearea, controlling thephase purityand reducing theparticle size distribution. The samples were obtained under low temperature annealing at500, 650 and 800 ºC. Those features can be controlled using variables such temperature, time of synthesis,and calcination. In previous worksit wasfound that hydrothermal methods offer many advantages over conventional ceramic synthesis methods