Influence of organic solvent treatment on elasticoluminescent property of europium-doped strontium aluminates

Abstract

The influence of an organic solvent treatment on elasticoluminescent (ELS) characteristics of mechanoluminescent (ML) sensor using the composite film consisting of an ELS material and epoxy resin was investigated. We used strontium aluminate doped with a small amount of europium (SrAl2O4:Eu, SAOE) as an ELS material in this study. After evaluating the ELS characteristics of the fabricated ML sensors using SAOE treated with/without various organic solvents, SAOE treated with methanol and ethanol showed lower ELS intensities than that of untreated SAOE. In contrast, the ELS response curves against strain for the ML sensors using SAOE treated with acetone and toluene, overlapped with that of untreated SAOE. From the characterization of SAOE treated with alcohols, such as methanol and ethanol, we can hypothesize that poor ELS characteristics is due to the degradation of the SAOE grain surfaces by the hydrolyze reaction of SAOE with hydroxyl group of alcohol. Thus, on the basis of the obtained results, we can conclude that the selection of organic solvent used in the preparation of SAOE film is of considerable importance in the development of ML sensor with a highly-reliable ELS characteristic.

Trap-controlled mechanoluminescent materials

“…The second phase of nonlinearity occurs at much higher energy of deformation/strain, and originates from a saturation effect, which arises from the low number of trapped carriers remaining in material. In summary, many trap-controlled ML materials exhibit nonlinear ML phenomena at low and high strain energies [7,16,20,83,89,93,158,194,[238][239][240][241][242].…”

“…While offering advantages over conventional stress sensing devices, the low ML intensity of composite materials could undermine their potential to monitor the structural health of buildings and bridges during daylight hours. To date, efforts to increase the intensity of ML of materials have focused on the crystal structures and trap levels of the ML material, for example by optimizing protocols to synthesize ML particles and coatings [17,19,137,150,152,164,166,208,240,[265][266][267][268][269][270][271][272][273][274][275] that include adjusting the composition deficiency (Section 2.2) [142,150,151,173], exposing the material to SHI irradiation (Section 4.7.1) [247], by substituting host ions in the crystal [94,95,194,[265][266][267] and co-doping crystals with rare earth or transition metal ions [87,88,91,92,123,231,248,249,[268][269][270][...…”

Development of highly sensitive mechanoluminescent sensor aiming at small strain measurement

“…6,8,17 The ELS evaluation system is made up of metal test piece (SUS631, 200 Â 20 Â 0:5 t mm) attached with an SAOE film (10 Â 10 mm) and a commercial strain gage (Kyowa Electronic Instruments Co., Ltd., Japan), a CCD camera, material testing machine (MTS 810, MTS Systems Co., US), and a computer, as shown in Fig. 1.…”

Effect of citric acid on formation of oxides of Cu and Zn in modified sol-gel process: A comparative study

“…owing to their fascinating properties with different morphologies (size, shape and distribution). [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] It is well-known that the fascinating properties of the nanostructured materials arises mainly because of enhanced surface-to-volume (S/V) ratio and changes in the density of states (DOS) as a result of spatial confinement. 8,9 Among the various Transition Metal Oxides (TMO), NiO (nickel oxide), CuO (copper oxide) and ZnO (zinc oxide) are multifunctional materials with numerous applications.…”