Investigation of carbon-metal nano-composite films with novel Filtered Cathodic Vacuum Arc (FCVA) deposition technique

Abstract

This final year project was motivated by the results of various previous research done on the investigation of the properties of the C/Me composite films. Since the C/Me composite films have been shown have many preferred properties and great potential of applications in fields such as coating and electronic and biochemical materials, this project has been carried out to investigate the influence of arc current, duct current and substrate temperature on the film properties in order to maximize its usability. In the project, different sets of C/Ni samples were prepared under different Ni source arc currents and deposition temperatures using Y-bend dual source FCVA system. The energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy was used to determine the metal contents in different samples. Visible Raman spectroscopy was employed to characterize the detailed bonding structures of the films. Transmission electron micro spectroscopy was used to check the nano-scale structures of the films in order to confirm with the Raman spectroscopy results. The characterization results have shown that the six-fold ring sp2 sites has increased with the increasing Ni source arc current. The deposition temperature has a much stronger influence on the bonding structure of the films, the six-fold ring ordered sp2 sites increases drastically with the increasing temperature. Further could be done on some C/Me composite films with other metals to gain a deeper understanding of the C/Me composite films.