Careful preparation and cleaning of various types of components is indispensable prior to their surface treatment or final assembly. Various surface treatment operations that require such care include vacuum deposition, electrodeposition, electroless deposition, various dip coatings, etc. Surface preparation is essential for achieving good and firmly adhered coatings. Trace of residual surface ...

Metal-assisted chemical etching of silicon is an electroless method that can produce porous silicon by immersing metal-modified silicon in a hydrofluoric acid solution without electrical bias. We have been studying the metal-assisted hydrofluoric acid etching of silicon using dissolved oxygen as an oxidizing agent. Three major factors control the etching reaction and the porous silicon structur...

We report on the large photoluminescence redshift observed in nanostructures fabricated using n-type GaN by ultraviolet (UV) metal-assisted electroless chemical-etching method. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) characterization showed nanostructures with size dispersion ranging from 10 to 100 nm. We observed the crystalline structure using high resolution transmission electron microscopy (...

We report the first investigation into the potential of electroless nickel deposition to form ohmic contacts on single layer graphene. To minimize the contact resistance on graphene, a statistical model was used to improve metal purity, surface roughness, and coverage of the deposited film by controlling the nickel bath parameters (pH and temperature). The metalized graphene layers were pattern...

Vertically-aligned silicon nanowires (SiNWs) that demonstrate reductions of phonon thermal conductivities are ideal components for thermoelectric devices. In this paper, we present large-area silicon nanowire arrays in various lengths using a silver-induced, electroless-etching method that is applicable to both n- and p-type substrates. The measured thermal conductivities of nanowire composites...

This paper reports the implementation of temporal capillary microfluidic patterns and biological nanoscaffolds in autonomous microfabrication of nanostructured symmetric electrochemical supercapacitors. A photoresist layer was first patterned on the substrate, forming a capillary microfluidics layer with two separated interdigitated microchannels. Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) macromolecules suspe...

FexNi100-x thin films were deposited on conductive (Cu) and non-conductive (Pd activated glass) substrate using an electroless, polyol method. The stoichiometry of film composition, as compared to the precursor concentration, strongly depended on the substrate position. When the substrate was immersed in the refluxing solution, Fe-deficient films were deposited. However Fe-rich films were synth...

In this report, vulcan XC-72 supported PtNi alloy catalyst nanoparticles were synthesized by electroless deposition method using NaBH4 as a reduction agent. The properties of the synthesized Pt-Ni/C catalysts were investigated and evaluated. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) results showed that PtNi alloy catalysts dispersed well on the carbon supports and their particle size was in the ra...