ABSTRACT
The electrodeposition of stainless steel-like FeCrNi alloys for miniaturised devices is appealing as it would allow combining excellent material properties (e.g. corrosion resistance, hardness, biocompatibility) at low-cost. However, conventional baths often contain hazardous hexavalent chromium. Cr-based alloys electrodeposited from environmentally friendly trivalent chromium electrolytes are crucial for industrial application for facilitating the transition towards sustainable and ecological production and processing. Nevertheless, this process has not been comprehensively studied or understood in depth: especially the role of organic agents (common additives for improving Cr(iii)-based plating; e.g. glycine) in terms of material properties of the electrodeposits. The aim of this work was to investigate the electrodeposition of FeCrNi coatings from a 'green' Cr(iii)-glycine electrolyte. Novel information was attained by analysing films developed under various conditions and characterising them using a combination of advanced techniques. The evolution of microstructure (from amorphous to nanocrystalline) in correlation with film composition (i.e. metals ratio and presence of impurities) and elemental 3D spatial distribution was achieved for coatings produced from different anode materials and thermal post-treatment. The influence of Cr(iii) and glycine in terms of coating atomic contents (i.e. Fe-Cr-Ni-O-C-N-H) was evaluated for films in which both the applied current density and electrolyte composition were varied. These results, together with a thorough analysis on metals speciation/complexation allowed us to propose various Cr(iii)-based electroreduction mechanisms, and to observe, upon annealing, segregation and distribution of impurities, as well as of oxides and metals with respect to microstructure variation, providing an explanation for the amorphisation process.
ABSTRACT
We demonstrate for the first time that multivariate statistical analysis techniques can be applied to atom probe tomography data to estimate the chemical composition of a sample at the full spatial resolution of the atom probe in three dimensions. Whereas the raw atom probe data provide the specific identity of an atom at a precise location, the multivariate results can be interpreted in terms of the probabilities that an atom representing a particular chemical phase is situated there. When aggregated to the size scale of a single atom (â¼0.2 nm), atom probe spectral-image datasets are huge and extremely sparse. In fact, the average spectrum will have somewhat less than one total count per spectrum due to imperfect detection efficiency. These conditions, under which the variance in the data is completely dominated by counting noise, test the limits of multivariate analysis, and an extensive discussion of how to extract the chemical information is presented. Efficient numerical approaches to performing principal component analysis (PCA) on these datasets, which may number hundreds of millions of individual spectra, are put forward, and it is shown that PCA can be computed in a few seconds on a typical laptop computer.
ABSTRACT
The first dedicated local electrode atom probes (LEAP [a trademark of Imago Scientific Instruments Corporation]) have been built and tested as commercial prototypes. Several key performance parameters have been markedly improved relative to conventional three-dimensional atom probe (3DAP) designs. The Imago LEAP can operate at a sustained data collection rate of 1 million atoms/minute. This is some 600 times faster than the next fastest atom probe and large images can be collected in less than 1 h that otherwise would take many days. The field of view of the Imago LEAP is about 40 times larger than conventional 3DAPs. This makes it possible to analyze regions that are about 100 nm diameter by 100 nm deep containing on the order of 50 to 100 million atoms with this instrument. Several example applications that illustrate the advantages of the LEAP for materials analysis are presented.
