Material characterization methods experiment

Classical characterization methods (gas sorption, TEM, SEM, FTIR, XPS and elemental analysis) were used to describe the resulting porous carbon structures. Temperature-dependent experiments have shown that all the various materials kept the nitrogen content almost unchanged up to 950 °C, while the thermal and oxidation stability was found to be significantly increased with N-doping as compared to all pure carbons. Last but not least, it should be emphasized that the whole material synthesis occurs in a remarkably energy and atom-efficient fashion from cheap and sustainable resources. 

The ZLC method offers advantages of speed and simplicity and requires only a very small adsorbent sample thus making it useful for characterization of new materials. The basic experiment using an inert carrier (usually He) measures the limiting transport difiiisivity (Do) at low concentration. A variant of the technique using isotopically labeled tracers (TZLC) yields the tracer diffiisivity and counter diffusion in a binary system may also be studied by this method. To obtain reliable results a number of preliminary experiments are needed, e.g. varying sample quality, nature of the purge gas, the flow rate and, if possible, particle size to confirm intracrystalline diffusion control. 

The powder diffraction experiment is the cornerstone of a truly basic materials characterization technique - diffraction analysis - and it has been used for many decades with exceptional success to provide accurate information about the structure of materials. Although powder data usually lack the three-dimensionality of a diffraction image, the fundamental nature of the method is easily appreciated from the fact that each powder diffraction pattern represents a one-dimensional snapshot of the three-dimensional reciprocal lattice of a crystal. The quality of the powder diffraction pattern is usually limited by the nature and the energy of the available radiation, by the resolution of the instrument, and by the physical and chemical conditions of the specimen. Since many materials can only be prepared in a polycrystalline form, the powder diffraction experiment becomes the only realistic option for a reliable determination of the crystal structure of such materials. 

We have utilized this wealth of background information in the design of our experiments. We use ultrafast laser techniques to drive sustained shocks into thin films of energetic materials, which are then interrogated using several different kinds of ultrafast spectroscopic and interferometric probes. The remainder of this chapter will describe these experiments in detail, especially the ultrafast laser shock production and characterization methods and the spectroscopic and interferometric anomalies caused by working with thin films, and present... 

Experiments to characterize high cycle CF life according to the Basquin Law (Eq 1) follow from ASTM standards for metals in moist air (see ASTM E 466, Practice for Conducting Constant Amplitude Fatigue Tests of Metallic Materials and E 468, Practice for Presentation of Constant AmpUtude Fatigue Test Results for Metallic Materials). Such methods were detailed for steels and aluminum alloys in aqueous chloride solutions [38,39,57-59,69,79,80], Typical data are presented in Figs. 2, 11, and 12. 

Another useful parameter in characterizing the stiffness of a gel network is hardness. Hardness is measured by indenting a probe into the gel at a specified velocity while measuring the force required for the indentation The force required to indent the gel to a certain depth is the hardness. While the measured hardness does depend strongly on the modulus of the gel, it also depends on many other measurement parameters such as the size and shape of the gel sample, probe size, speed, and indentation depth. Additionally, the applied strain field is very non-uniform. The strain and strain rate near the probe can be high, but because the gel is incompressible, the entire volume of the gel experiences deformation due to the displacement of gel by the probe. Thus hardness is at best a relative measure of gel material properties. However, since hardness is used by some common gel manufacturers to specify their materials, it is important to understand it in the context of other rheological characterization methods. 

Size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) has been used to characterize the unimer-micelle distribution. However, SEC is not an absolute method and thus requires calibration. Since it is practically impossible to calibrate a SEC apparatus for the unimers and micelles formed by a block copolymer, only indicative MW values can be obtained. Moreover, several authors have noted a strong perturbation of the unimer-micelle equilibrium during SEC experiments even when interaction of the material with the SEC column was minimized [4,61,62],... 

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