Researchers from the School of Physics and AMBER, led by the Coleman group, have developed a new method to combine focused ion beam milling with scanning electron microscopy to generate 3D images of nanostructured films. Using this method, they have specifically printed networks of graphene and other nanomaterials. Because such a 3D image typically contains over 1 billion data points (or voxels), it can be quite challenging to perform quantitative analysis. The team developed analytic techniques to extract a number of parameters from these 3D images. This includes particle orientation and size distributions as well as information about conducting paths through these systems. In addition, because these films are porous, the team were able to measure parameters such as porosity, tortuosity (used to predict transport properties of porous materials) as well as pore size and surface area distributions. Finally, the teams were able to image printed devices, identifying issues such as internal shorts.
This work, published in Nature Communications, has been included in recent Editors’ Highlights in materials science and chemistry