This article was created in collaboration with the prestigious Mahatma Gandhi University in India. Copper oxide nanoparticles were embedded in a polymer matrix based on epoxy resins. Using selective plasma etching (using our oxygen plasma with a high degree of dissociation of molecules at low kinetic temperature of gas), the surface layer of the polymer was gradually and carefully removed so that the copper oxide nanoparticles protruded from the samples, while at the same time they were firmly tied so that the gas flow could not remove them from the plasma reactor. Under these conditions, a remarkably intense recombination of neutral plasma atoms on the surface of copper oxide nanoparticles was observed. Based on the monitoring of the dependence of the morphology of the samples on the content of copper oxide nanoparticles, we have set up a model of the interaction of atomic oxygen with such materials.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30437927
Heterogeneous surface recombination and the associated possibility of dynamically changing the density of atomic oxygen in reactors suitable for the treatment of delicate materials has been studied in detail in order to obtain quantitative data on the behavior of the atomic oxygen density. Our innovative sensor was used for density measurements, and a good oxidized sheet of very clean and well conductive copper (OFHC - Oxygen Free High Conductivity) was selected as the recombinator. We measured density gradients in a wide range of experimental conditions and tried to find the correlation between the appearance of the knee on the curve of the atomic oxygen density and the effective pumping velocity. According to our original hypothesis, the directed gas velocity should have an influence on the displacement of the knee, and of course, while the directed gas velocity is influnced by the effective pumping speed (in addition to other parameters, which we tried to keep as constant as possible). We have confirmed the hypothesis, but it is true that the results have quite a lot of measuring noise, so that it is not possible to deduce without hesitation the hyperbolic dependence from the experimental data. In addition, at low pumping speeds, it was observed that (depending on other parameters) the density of the atoms is too low to accurately cover the whole area with a single sensor. The maximum density was above 10^22 m^-3.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30059303