The plasma dynamic synthesis of aluminum nitride in system with gaseous and solid precursors

Abstract

Aluminum nitride is widely-used material for semiconductor devices and ceramics production. Despite the large number of known ways to obtain AlN powder, the problem of synthesizing high-purity and nanosized product is still urgent. This paper shows results on plasma dynamic synthesis of aluminum nitride using system based coaxial magneto plasma accelerator. The influence of using gaseous or solid precursors on such characteristics of the final product as phase content and particle size distribution was investigated. According to X-Ray diffractometry AlN phase content is increased in the case of use of solid nitrogen-containing precursor (melamine) in comparison with the use of gaseous nitrogen. The particle sizes distribution histograms are built in accordance with the data of bright-field TEM-images and shown in this paper. The most of particles are less than 100 nm in both experiment but there are some differences, depended on the precursor type, that are also described.