Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Stress-Strain Management Of Heteroepitaxial Polycrystalline Silicon Carbide Films, Christopher William Locke

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Silicon carbide (SiC) is one of the hardest known materials and is also, by good fortune, a wide bandgap semiconductor. While the application of SiC for high-temperature and high-power electronics is fairly well known, its utility as a highly robust, chemically-inert material for microelectrical mechanical systems (MEMS) is only beginning to be well recognized. SiC can be grown on both native SiC substrates or on Si using heteroepitaxial growth methods which affords the possibility to use Si micromachining methods to fabricate advanced SiC MEMS devices.

The control of film stress in heteroepitaxial silicon carbide films grown on polysilicon-on-oxide substrates has …

Diamond Based-Materials: Synthesis, Characterization And Applications, Qiang Hu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The studies covered in this dissertation concentrate on the various forms of diamond films synthesized by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method, including microwave CVD and hot filament CVD. According to crystallinity and grain size, a variety of diamond forms primarily including microcrystalline (most commonly referred to as polycrystalline) and nanocrystalline diamond films, diamond-like carbon (DLC) films were successfully synthesized. The as-grown diamond films were optimized by changing deposition pressure, volume of reactant gas hydrogen (H2) and carrier gas argon (Ar) in order to get high-quality diamond films with a smooth surface, low roughness, preferred growth orientation and high sp3 bond …

Fabrication And Characterization Of Electrospun Cactus Mucilage Nanofibers, Yanay Pais

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work seeks to fabricate, optimize, and characterize nanofibers of cactus Opuntia ficus-indica mucilage and Poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) by electrospinning. Mucilage is a neutral mixture of sugars produced by cactus and PVA is a non-toxic, water-soluble, synthetic polymer, which is widely used as a co-spinning agent for polymers. Mucilage was extracted from the cactus pad and prepared for electrospinning by mixing with acetic acid. Two types of PVA were used differentiating in high and low molecular weights. Concentrations of PVA were varied to find an adequate threshold for fiber formation. Changing the ratio of PVA to cactus mucilage produced …