Ingenieurwissenschaften und zugeordnete Tätigkeiten
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Toxicological studies have shown that some types of carbon nanotubes may provoke asbestos-like effects including chronic inflammation and lung cancer. Inhaled carbon nanotubes may reach the deep lung tissue. Alveolar macrophages are responsible to remove such foreign objects from the alveoli in a process called phagocytosis. If a macrophage fails to uptake a nanotube completely, cell lesions give rise to inflammation. It is currently assumed that short, long and flexible, and granularly agglomerated (tangled) nanofibres are clearable by macrophages, whereas biodurable long and rigid nanotubes persist in the lung tissue. The flexural rigidity of nanofibres is therefore believed to an important material property that governs fibre toxicity and needs to be investigated. The present work aims at determining the rigidity of nanofibres by detecting their resonance frequencies using a Dynamic Scanning Electron Microscope (DySEM) setup. By depositing and fixing a nanofibre to an oscillating support, it can be excited to vibrations and treated as a cantilevered beam. This way, its elastic modulus can be determined via Euler-Bernoulli’s beam theory. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were deposited on high frequency piezoelectric quartz crystals mounted on a scanning electron microscope (SEM) holder. When introduced into the SEM chamber and connected to a frequency-sweeping waveform generator, the quartz crystal actuates the deposited fibre. A lock-in amplified processes the secondary electron detector signal resulting from the electron beam modulated by the vibrating nanofibre. Whenever a fibre resonance is detected, the SEM image of the fibre is stored to identify the fibre oscillation mode. The found resonance frequencies and modes allow determining the elastic modulus according. Since the frequency spacing of resonances is predicted by Euler-Bernoulli, the mode number can be checked and elastic modulus values be averaged. A significant number of MWCNTs have been classified according to their level of rigidity. The applicability and reliability of the method will be discussed.
Background: Gas sensors are very important in several fields like gas monitoring, safety and environmental applications. In this approach, a new gas sensing concept is investigated which combines the powerful adsorption probability of metal oxide conductive sensors (MOS) with an optical ellipsometric readout. This concept Shows promising results to solve the problems of cross sensitivity of the MOS concept.
Results: Undoped tin oxide (SnOx) and iron doped tin oxide (Fe:SnOx) thin add-on films were prepared by magnetron sputtering on the top of the actual surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensing gold layer. The films were tested for their sensitivity to several gas species in the surface plasmon resonance enhanced (SPREE) gas measurement. It was found that the undoped tin oxide (SnOx) shows higher sensitivities to propane (C3H8) then to carbon monoxide (CO). By using Fe:SnOx, this relation is inverted. This behavior was explained by a change of the amount of binding sites for CO in the layer due to this iron doping. For hydrogen (H2) no such relation was found but the sensing ability was identical for both layer materials. This observation was related to a different sensing mechanism for H2 which is driven by the Diffusion into the layer instead of adsorption on the surface.
Conclusion: The gas sensing selectivity can be enhanced by tuning the properties of the thin film overcoating. A relation of the binding sites in the doped and undoped SnOx films and the gas sensing abilities for CO and C3H8 was found. This could open the path for optimized gas sensing devices with different coated SPREE sensors.