ORNL Process Could be White Lightning to Electronics Industry

December 2, 2015 | DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

That process consists of standard atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition with a similar furnace, temperature and time, but there's a twist. The difference is what Stehle describes as "a more gentle, controllable way to release the reactant into the furnace and figuring out how to take advantage of inner furnace conditions. These two factors are almost always neglected."

Stehle continued: "I just thought carefully beforehand and was curious. For example, I remind myself that there are many conditions in this experiment that can be adjusted and could make a difference. Whenever I see non-perfect results, I do not count them as another failure but, instead, another condition adjustment to be made. This 'failure' may become valuable."

Co-authors of the paper. are Harry Meyer, Raymond Unocic, Michelle Kidder, Georgios Polizos, Panos Datskos, Roderick Jackson and Ivan Vlassiouk of ORNL and Sergei Smirnov of New Mexico State University. Funding was provided by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. A portion of the research was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Science, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the DOE's Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov/.

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