Essay
Just scratching the surface: Nanoscale wear on the fluorite (CaF2) [111] cleavage plane
2013
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/4367
Abstract
For effective use, the surfaces of fluorite components need to be very smooth. Polishing is the usual process employed to achieve this. As the demands for minimizing roughness increase, an understanding of polishing mechanisms is needed, including the conditions and variables involved. The AFM tip is equivalent to a single polishing particle. The tip position, velocity, and applied force on the surface by the tip can be easily controlled and manipulated. Repeated scanning allows the number of times the tip is moved back and forth across a particular location to be determined. The same tip can then be used to image the scanned region before and after to see any changes that occurred. My goal was to measure the depths of the resulting surface changes and in turn quantitatively explore fluorite surface polishing and wear phenomena. I found that both of these parameters were strongly linked to the resulting depth of wear, showing roughly linear dependence in these variables. The results to date parallel the effects seen previously on single crystal brushite and calcite samples. To our knowledge we observed for the first time partial layer wear, that is, wear depths smaller than the predicted crystallographic step height. These experiments highlight valuable information about the surface properties of fluorite while also suggesting interesting and promising avenues for further research.
Metrics
16 File views/ downloads
27 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Just scratching the surface: Nanoscale wear on the fluorite (CaF2) [111] cleavage plane
- Creators
- Catherine Erickson (Author)
- Contributors
- J. T. Dickinson (Advisor)
- Academic Unit
- Honors Theses (WSU Pullman, Passed with Distinction)
- Identifiers
- 99900590553101842
- Copyright
- http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/; http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata; http://purl.org/eprint/accessRights/OpenAccess; In copyright; Publicly accessible; openAccess
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Essay