Effect of internal stress and microstructure on the hydriding of Pd thin films
(2012)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Proost, Joris
- Abstract
- (en) Hydrogen is gaining more and more importance as an energy carrier for mobile and stationary applications as a consequence of both environmental and economical realities. Thin film metal hydrides occupy an important place in this context, providing technological answers to crucial detection and permeation issues, but also turning out to be an excellent research solution for storage issues, enabling for cheap and efficient large scale compositional studies for a wide range of alloys. In these fields of applications, internal stress and microstructural effects are of fundamental importance, as they affect both the kinetics and thermodynamics of hydriding. They are also key technological parameters that determine, for instance, the autonomy of hydrogen vehicles, the filling time of hydrogen tanks or the response time of hydrogen sensors. In the present thesis, a self-consistent kinetic model for Pd thin film hydriding has been developed, based on high resolution in-situ curvature measurements using a Multi-beam Optical Sensor. This allowed to measure in real time the internal stress evolution in cantilevered Pd thin films during a hydriding cycle, thereby unraveling the kinetic details of hydride formation. Its combination with a variation of the thin film deposition and annealing parameters further allowed, for the first time, to quantitatively address the effect of internal stress on the hydriding of Pd thin films independently of the microstructure, and inversely, to quantitatively address the effect of microstructure independently of internal stress. Our experimental and theoretical results show that both contributions are kinetically and thermodynamically substantial, and may lead to interesting materials engineering applications.
- Affiliations
Citations
Delmelle, R. (2012). Effect of internal stress and microstructure on the hydriding of Pd thin films. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/237384