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Description
Recently, the use of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires as an interphase in composite materials has been demonstrated to increase the interfacial shear strength between carbon fiber and an epoxy matrix. In this research work, the strong adhesion between ZnO and carbon fiber is investigated to elucidate the interactions at the interface that result in high interfacial strength. First, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are performed to calculate the adhesive energy between bare carbon and ZnO. Since the carbon fiber surface has oxygen functional groups, these were modeled and MD simulations showed the preference of ketones to strongly interact with ZnO, however, this was not observed in the case of hydroxyls and carboxylic acid. It was also found that the ketone molecules ability to change orientation facilitated the interactions with the ZnO surface. Experimentally, the atomic force microscope (AFM) was used to measure the adhesive energy between ZnO and carbon through a liftoff test by employing highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) substrate and a ZnO covered AFM tip. Oxygen functionalization of the HOPG surface shows the increase of adhesive energy. Additionally, the surface of ZnO was modified to hold a negative charge, which demonstrated an increase in the adhesive energy. This increase in adhesion resulted from increased induction forces given the relatively high polarizability of HOPG and the preservation of the charge on ZnO surface. It was found that the additional negative charge can be preserved on the ZnO surface because there is an energy barrier since carbon and ZnO form a Schottky contact. Other materials with the same ionic properties of ZnO but with higher polarizability also demonstrated good adhesion to carbon. This result substantiates that their induced interaction can be facilitated not only by the polarizability of carbon but by any of the materials at the interface. The versatility to modify the magnitude of the induced interaction between carbon and an ionic material provides a new route to create interfaces with controlled interfacial strength.
ContributorsGalan Vera, Magdian Ulises (Author) / Sodano, Henry A (Thesis advisor) / Jiang, Hanqing (Committee member) / Solanki, Kiran (Committee member) / Oswald, Jay (Committee member) / Speyer, Gil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Atmospheric turbulence distorts the path of light passing through the air. When capturing images at long range, the effects of this turbulence can cause substantial geometric distortion and blur in images and videos, degrading image quality. These become more pronounced with greater turbulence, scaling with the refractive index structure constant, Cn2. Removing effects of atmospheric turbulence in images has a range of applications from astronomical imaging to surveillance. Thus, there is great utility in transforming a turbulent image into a ``clean image" undegraded by turbulence. However, as the turbulence is space- and time-variant and statistically random, no closed-form solution exists for a function that performs this transformation. Prior attempts to approximate the solution include spatio-temporal models and lucky frames models, which require many images to provide a good approximation, and supervised neural networks, which rely on large amounts of simulated or difficult-to-acquire real training data and can struggle to generalize. The first contribution in this thesis is an unsupervised neural-network-based model to perform image restoration for atmospheric turbulence with state-of-the-art performance. The model consists of a grid deformer, which produces an estimated distortion field, and an image generator, which estimates the distortion-free image. This model is transferable across different datasets; its efficacy is demonstrated across multiple datasets and on both air and water turbulence. The second contribution is a supervised neural network to predict Cn2 directly from the warp field. This network was trained on a wide range of Cn2 values and estimates Cn2 with relatively good accuracy. When used on the warp field produced by the unsupervised model, this allows for a Cn2 estimate requiring only a few images without any prior knowledge of ground truth or information about the turbulence.
ContributorsWhyte, Cameron (Author) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Thesis advisor) / Espanol, Malena (Thesis advisor) / Speyer, Gil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021