Engineering Commons^™

Patterned Well-Ordered Mesoporous Silica Films For Device Fabrication, Todd A. Crosby

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Developing effective methods of generating thin metal oxide films are important for sensing and separations applications. An obstacle to device fabrication is controlling the size and spatial orientation of domain level pores while retaining the ability to generate arbitrary device level patterns. Well-ordered hexagonally packed cylindrical pores were created by taking advantage of block copolymer self-assembly followed by selective condensation of silica precursors using supercritical carbon dioxide as the solvent. It was possible to control the pore size by choosing PEO-PPO-PEO (Pluronic® series) triblock copolymers of differing molecular weights.

These processes were then incorporated with conventional lithographic techniques to generate …