The minority carrier lifetime that is something that is not easy to characterize. It appeared that everything has an effect on this highly important parameter, e.g. size, orientation and distribution of grains, defects and microcracks of base material, also thickness, type of surface cover. However, measurement is essential if one wishes to determine the quality of the texture. The first attempt came out well. Waiting for more...

Main studies carried out during the month:

- preparation of an article for the AMT conference: „Microstructure and properties of AlMnFeCu and AlMnFeSi melt spun ribbons strengthened with quasicrystalline particles”
- preparation of an abstract: „Effect of Ti, Zr and Hf addition on microstructure and properties of rapidly solidified Al-Mn-Fe alloy” for the 20th International Symposium on Metastable, Amorphous and Nanostructured Materials (ISMANAM) 2013
- preparation of an abstract for a symposium „Materials Science for Industry” with the title „Quasicrystalline alloys Al-Mn-Fe obtained using rapid quenching – structure and properties”.
- additional training in SEM technique using PHILIPS XL30 X, Oxford Instrument equipment.
- some additional trials to perform thermomechanical analysis on melt spun ribbons (based on ternary composition as well as quaternary alloys with Hf, Zr, Ti and Mo addition).

In march I busied myslef with preparing an article for the upcoming AMT conference. I chose to discuss the relation between microstructure evolution and its influence on martenstic transformation temperature. DSC, XRD, SEM and TEM results are shown and discussed in detail in terms of grain growth and structure changes bewteen as cast, bulk and melt spun alloys.

Fisrt trail of silver thin film anealing. The MIF technique(metal island film) was used for nanoparticles formation. Unfortunately nanoparticles posess very different irregular shapes amd the microstructure surperss obtainig controlable plasmonic properties.

My activities in February:

During this month I performed extensive literature overview on hardening behaviour of Mg-Zn-Ca alloys.

A bit of history:

The first systematic attempt to characterize hardening behaviour in Mg-Ca-Zn alloys was performed by Nie and Muddle[1997]. The researchers investigated the binary Mg-1 wt% Ca alloy and ternary Mg-1Ca-1Zn wt% alloy. The age hardening response of the binary alloy is not very significant. However, by adding zinc the aging response is significantly enhanced and the time to the peak hardness is shortened. The beneficial effect of zinc in enhancement of the aging response of the binary Mg-Ca alloy was also confirmed by Gao et al. [2005].