In Situ Investigation of Titanium Nitride Surface Dynamics: The Role of Surface and Bulk Mass Transport Processes

111 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.The above SiNx-TiN results suggest new design strategies for nanoscale materials in which nanocomposite systems and processing conditions are purposefully selected in order to obtain tissue phases, which exhibit local epitaxy with the encapsulated crystallites. This provides higher interfacial bond strength, which further reduces the probability of grain boundary sliding and thus yields enhanced materials' strength. One can envision a new class of super-to-ultra hard all-crystalline ceramic nanocomposites formed during primary (film deposition) or secondary (age processing) phase transformations in which both the interfacial structure and the overall preferential crystallographic orientation is controlled.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD