| AVS 57th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Energy Frontiers Topical Conference | Thursday Sessions |
| Session EN+AS-ThM |
| Session: | Surface and Interface Analysis of Materials for Energy |
| Presenter: | T. Nunney, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK |
| Authors: | T. Nunney, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK R.G. White, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK N. Bulloss, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK P. Camus, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK J. Konopka, ThermoFisher Scientific, UK H.M. Meyer III, Oak Ridge National Laboratory |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
In order to meet the challenges of more economical and environmentally benign energy production, a new generation of complex materials and devices is being developed, these include thin film solar cells, fuel cells, and batteries. In all stages of development there is a requirement for materials characterization and analysis; from the initial development stages, through to testing of the finished article. Most materials need to be analyzed for compositional homogeneity across the sample surface and also for layer chemistry, interface chemistry and thickness through the sample. It is rare that a single technique can achieve all of these testing requirements, and therefore a complementary approach involving several techniques is demanded.
In this presentation we will discuss how a multi-technique approach can address a variety of technical problems, illustrated by examples from real applications case studies. We will mainly concentrate on the information supplied from two techniques, XPS and EDS, but we will also consider the additional data that can be obtained from other sources such as Raman spectroscopy.
X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is ideally suited to the quantitative determination of the surface chemistry and the way in which that chemistry changes in the surface, near-surface and interface region of the materials.
Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) collects characteristic X-rays generated by rastering an electron beam over a solid sample to generate a full elemental X-ray spectrum at each pixel of the electron image. The latest generation silicon drift detectors for EDS are capable of collecting and storing hundreds of thousands of X-ray counts per second. This large volume of X-ray data, collected across the sample, allows for rapid identification and characterization of surface defects and lateral compositional variations. Software advances now allow rapid, multivariate statistical analysis processing of very limited amounts of X-ray data to determine not only the elemental distribution across the sample but also the chemical phase distribution.