Improved Analytical Model for Thermal Softening in Aluminum Alloys Form Room Temperature to Solidus.

In advanced solid-state manufacturing processes such as friction stir welding, the metal's temperature ranges from room temperature to the solidus temperature. The material strength in the temperature range is generally required for investigating the mechanical behaviors. In this communication paper, an analytical model is proposed for describing the thermal softening of aluminum alloys for room temperature to solidus temperature, in which the concept of temperature-dependent transition between two thermal softening regimes is implemented.

Structure Inheritance in Nanoparticle Ink Direct-Writing Processes and Crack-Free Nano-Copper Interconnects Printed by a Single-Run Approach.

When nanoparticle conductive ink is used for printing interconnects, cracks and pores are common defects that deteriorate the electrical conductivity of the printed circuits. Influences of the ink solvent, the solid fraction of the ink, the pre-printing treatment and the sintering parameters on the interconnect morphology and conductivity were investigated. It was found that the impacts of all these factors coupled with each other throughout the whole procedure, from the pre-printing to the post-printing processes, and led to a structure inheritance effect.

Plasmon-Induced Heterointerface Thinning for Schottky Barrier Modification of Core/Shell SiC/SiO Nanowires.

In this work, plasmon-induced heterointerface thinning for Schottky barrier modification of core/shell SiC/SiO nanowires is conducted by femtosecond (fs) laser irradiation. The incident energy of polarized fs laser (50 fs, 800 nm) is confined in the SiO shell of the nanowire due to strong plasmonic localization in the region of the electrode-nanowire junction. With intense nonlinear absorption in SiO, the thickness of the SiO layer can be thinned in a controllable way.

Improving the electrical contact at a Pt/TiO nanowire interface by selective application of focused femtosecond laser irradiation.

In this paper, we show that tightly focused femtosecond laser irradiation is effective in improving nanojoining of an oxide nanowire (NW) (TiO) to a metal electrode (Pt), and how this process can be used to modify contact states. Enhanced chemical bondings are created due to localized plasmonically enhanced optical absorption at the Pt/TiO interface as confirmed by finite element simulations of the localized field distribution during irradiation. Nano Auger electron spectroscopy shows that the resulting heterojunction is depleted in oxygen, suggesting that a TiO layer is formed between the Pt electrode and the TiO NW.