| 英文摘要: | CBET - 1626619
Decaluwe, Steven
This award will fund acquisition of an Environmental X-ray Photoelectron Spectrometer (E-XPS) to establish a unique regional facility for exploring behavior of material surfaces in operating and/or reactive environments and for training in advanced measurements at the
Colorado School of Mines (CSM) and collaborating institutions across the Rocky Mountain region. For many functional materials critical to our nation's energy and environmental future, performance depends on material surface properties during device operation, which can vary quite significantly from surface properties under conditions typically measured by standard high vacuum surface analysis tools. For this reason, the E-XPS user facility established by this award will enable new insights into in a diverse array of material-dependent technologies and scientific fields. This E-XPS center will significantly expand access for new and interested users across the Rocky Mountain Region in engineering, chemistry, geophysics, and other disciplines to employ E-XPS to study materials and surfaces in active environments. The instrument will be installed and established as a self-sustaining user facility at CSM to advance XPS capabilities in the region for both internal and external users. The established facility will provide world-class material science research and education experiences for the next generation of science and engineering leaders from CSM and elsewhere. The facility will advance students' knowledge of instrumentation, instrument capabilities, sample preparation, and data analysis relevant to their respective fields of study in undergraduate and graduate coursework and research activities.
Heterogeneous interfaces play a critical role in many engineered processes and natural systems. Active surfaces mediate multi-phase chemical reactions, often instigate fracture or failure in materials or devices, and are very sensitive to local environments. Because surface properties under active conditions can deviate significantly from bulk properties, the inability for many researchers to study interfacial chemical states during device operation or in relevant ambient conditions presents a substantial barrier to fundamental scientific insight. The E-XPS will provide invaluable non-destructive evaluation of surface and near-surface states for materials and devices in real and operating environments, thereby overcoming the limitations of conventional, lab-based XPS at UHV conditions.
The E-XPS user facility established by this award will allow measurements of solid-vapor and solid-liquid-vapor interfaces at pressures up to 25 mbar, temperatures up to 800°C, and can operate with electrochemical perturbation of non-equilibrated surfaces. These capabilities enable surface characterization in realistic chemical, electrochemical, and thermal environments for processes related to energy conversion, chemical processing, geochemistry, and materials degradation. The unit can measure lateral or depth profiles in a single spectrum, and can operate under standard XPS (i.e. UHV) conditions, thereby meeting a critical need at CSM.
E-XPS has only recently expanded from heavily oversubscribed synchrotron-based user facilities to laboratory-scale instruments. This user facility will therefore greatly improve access and throughput for E-XPS capabilities, enabling groundbreaking and collaborative interdisciplinary materials research at CSM and at collaborating regional universities and federal research labs. Expected users from numerous engineering disciplines, physical sciences, and geological sciences will employ the E-XPS instrument to address outstanding questions about material surface behavior in arenas such as energy conversion technologies, geochemistry, environmental processes, and materials fabrication. It is further anticipated that technological implications of these unique measurements in active environments will draw in industrial users in these fields. |