Aerosols: A Sustainable Route to Functional Materials

Abstract

Sustainability is an increasingly important topic in the design and manufacture of materials, with the need to reduce the environmental impact of producing materials being of paramount significance. A competing interest to this is the ability to produce functional materials in large volumes from a fast, on-line process, which can be integrated easily into existing industrial setups. Herein, we present aerosol-assisted chemical vapour deposition (AACVD) routes to advanced functional materials. We will show that by careful design of precursors and manipulation of deposition conditions, it is possible to achieve high sustainability whilst maintaining fast growth rates and large scale production of thin film functional materials.

Enhanced electrical properties of antimony doped tin oxide thin films deposited via aerosol assisted chemical vapour deposition

“…1,10 Aerosol-assisted chemical vapour deposition (AACVD) is a low-cost and versatile technique with the potential to be scaled up for the commercial production of thin films. 15 Unlike, other methods, AACVD negates the need for highly thermally stable and volatile precursors which widens the choice available for producing films with tuneable properties. 16 In this paper we doped tin(IV) oxide with varying concentrations of antimony.…”

Heterojunction α‐Fe2O3/ZnO Films with Enhanced Photocatalytic Properties Grown by Aerosol‐Assisted Chemical Vapour Deposition

“…Herein, we grew film coatings of the a-Fe 2 O 3 /ZnO heterojunction by using aerosol-assisted chemicalv apour deposition (AACVD); af acile, inexpensive ands calable thin-film-deposition technique, [23] which has previously been used to prepare avariety of high-quality films with controllable morphology,t hickness and crystal structure. [24] In this study,w eg rew both a-Fe 2 O 3 /ZnO and ZnO/a-Fe 2 O 3 heterojunctions, in which the ZnO and a-Fe 2 O 3 layers, respectively,a re present at the surfaceo f the coatings.W em easured the photocatalytic activity of these heterojunction coatings against stearica cid under UVA-light irradiation, and found significantly enhanced activity in the a-Fe 2 O 3 /ZnO heterojunction, compared to the parentm aterials ZnO and a-Fe 2 O 3 .H owever, the ZnO/a-Fe 2 O 3 heterojunction showedn om arked improvement.…”

Combining single source chemical vapour deposition precursors to explore the phase space of titanium oxynitride thin films

“…[1][2][3] For many applications, however, the synthesis of the mixed anion material as a thin film would be desirable. Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is a widely used and scalable technique for thin film growth, [4][5][6][7] and can be used to deposit films of oxides, sulfides, nitrides and indeed mixed anion materials. 4,[8][9][10] However, compared to simple binary phases, mixed anion materials present a significantly greater challenge as their ternary phase diagrams can contain multiple stable structural phases with different anion ratios.…”