Nano Carbon-metal hybrids

Nucleation

Polymers

2D Materials

Metallic       glass

 Ferroic materials

Diffusion

project:

«Atomic Diffusion In Glasses»

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Here you will find the proposed materials framed in a  coloured box . The code next to it identifies each item (foto, video, etc.) individually. You will need this code to fill in the form. Additionally, you can have an overview of the materials from all research groups at matter.soundsof.net/materials.

Glasses mixed with ions like alkali borate glasses or alkali* silicate glasses have high technological potentials for electrochemical devices such as solid-oxide fuel cells, solid-state batteries or chemical sensors. In the contrast to conventional liquid lithium-ion-batteries, these materials have a low self-discharge, a fast load capacity, a high stability, a high energy density and a reasonable and easy producibility.

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The biggest deficit, however, is the low ionic conductivity, which corresponds to a low power density and is currently a hindrance for economic and industrial applications. Hence the full knowledge of structural properties and diffusion processes is an essential requirement of manufacturing ionic glasses with a maximum of power.

Much of the interest of these materials lie in their future applications; imagine solid-state electrolytes like thin ionic glass plates instead of a lithium ion-liquid. Thinking of e-cars, the time-consuming charging compared to the fast refueling of conventional cars is still a major issue. There exists the idea not to simply charge, but to exchange the rundown accumulators with fully charged ones within seconds. Instead of refueling liquid electrolytes, which are very toxic and dangerous one could do a quick change of ionic glass plates.

The properties of these materials could allow building skyscrapers with huge glass facades, where one layer of the glass is made of photovoltaic cells and generates energy while the next layer stores the energy like solid state electrolytes made of ionic glass would do.

The aim of the research is to utterly characterise microscopic 

properties with the aid of experiments, numerical simulations and

theoretical models and eventually reveal the atomic diffusion in ionic glasses.

WAXS (Wide Angle X-ray Scattering) experiments help us to achieve information of the static structure of vitreous materials, while aXPCS (atomic-scale X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy) experiments provide us with the information of dynamical properties. Additionally computer simulations are necessary to distinguish between different types of atoms in polyatomic* systems.

Compared to other experimental techniques aXPCS is a very young discipline, hence, it is just at the beginning of its application. Not long ago it was found that aXPCS experiments cause beam-induced dynamics in oxide glasses, which on the one hand is a hindrance to obtain the actual intrinsic* dynamical properties of these materials,

but on the other hand open new possibilities of

characterising them. The beam-induced effect is

also one of the major topic we are interested in.

Beam induced dynamics  [Dif03]

Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS)

Scattering experiments allow us to look inside the material on a microscopic level. The incident X-ray beam gets scattered at the atoms of the sample. These scattered waves interfere with each other and are counted by the detector. For amorphous* materials the interference pattern is characterised by rings, the so-called Debye-Scherrer rings.

Imagine throwing a stone into the lake, which causes wave-like rings that propagate from the center of the immersing stone to the outside. Thus, throwing many stones into the lake cause an interference pattern of many evolving rings. The brightness and the thickness of the rings and the relative distances between them provide information of the atomic arrangement of the observed material.

WAXS Experiment   [Dif04]

In physical jargon one speaks about reciprocal space when analyzing these interference patterns, which means analyzing the intensity I versus the scattered wave vector q.

Structural properties are accessible via Fourier-transformation of these I(q) data into real space.

The structural analysis of amorphous materials in real space is characterised by density fluctuations. High peaks, denoted by Gaussian distributions, of the density versus distance represent a higher possibility of finding neighbouring atoms at this specific atomic distance.

Intensity I vs. scattering vector q of lithium borate glass  [Dif06]

Density function D vs. distance r

between the atoms of lithium borate glass  [Dif07]

With the increasing amount of BO4 molecules, the mobility of the ions, hence the conductivity of the vitreous material, increases. This increasing amount of BO4 can be seen by a slight shift of the first density peak to a higher distance due to the fact that the bonding length of BO4 molecules between the boron and the oxygen atom is slightly longer than that of BO3.

Atomic-scale X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (aXPCS)

The idea is simple: instead of shooting only one picture of the reciprocal space via X-ray diffraction, many pictures are shot behind one another. Thus, a movie of diffracted interference pattern is created, which is related to the motion of the atoms inside the sample. Zooming into the picture of Debye Scherrer rings leads to the so-called speckle pattern, which represents a distribution of diffracted points that is changing from frame to frame.

aXPCS Experiment  [Dif11]

Correlating the series of frames in time give us information of diffusion processes in dependence of the scattering vector q, the incident flux* of the beam and the temperature.

Beam-induced dynamics

Measuring and manipulating the sample at the same time is a well known effect when using X-ray radiation with a high energy. The worst case would be destroying the sample while measuring, which biological samples like proteins are often suffering from. Investigating oxide glasses with aXPCS causes an additional dynamical effect. This effect is reversible. This means, that it does not trigger any long-term changes of the dynamics nor the structure of the observed oxide glass. The effect depends on the incident flux of the beam.

Having a closer look at alkali oxide glasses, it also depends on the alkali concentration: when increasing the amount of alkali atoms (figure:  blue: 2% of Rb2O ,  purple: 15% of Rb2O ), the effect of the beam becomes weaker (figure: the slope of the linear curves decrease).

When we measured pure borate glass B2O3 without any alkali concentration we expected no recognisable dynamics in the sample. Surprisingly we also saw this effect, which leads to the assumption that not only the mobile ions, but also the oxygen and boron atoms are moving. The correlation time τ is a parameter of the correlation function [Dif15]:

The smaller τ, the faster the diffusion. In the figure below pure B2O3 and different concentrations of rubidium borate glasses are plotted. The smaller the reciprocal value of the flux  , the smaller τ.

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The beam-induced effect depends on the sample itself. Insulators like pure B2O3, metallic materials, semi-conducting or ion-conducting materials like alkali borate or alkali silicate glasses behave differently to the X-ray beam. Hence, it could be possible to indirectly investigate bonding properties with this effect. This recently discovered effect is still in the early stages of investigation and needs to be thoroughly investigated in order to be fully understood.

Research team

Principal Investigator: Prof. Bogdan Sepiol

Sketches & Videos: Katharina Holzweber

Diagrams: Christoph Tietz, Bogdan Sepiol, Katharina Holzweber

Experiment & Evaluation: Christoph Tietz, Michael Legenstein, Bogdan Sepiol, Katharina Holzweber

Layout & Text: Katharina Holzweber