In this study, a novel process was developed to produce Al/AlN composites by infiltrating molten Al ingot into a mixture of Al and lamp carbon powders. The findings revealed that, during the process, Al2O3 on the surface of Al powder reacted with nitrogen gas and was transformed to AlN. The degree of nitridation was greatly enhanced by adding only less than 3 wt.% lamp carbon, because lamp carbon could act as a dispersion agent as well as a reduction agent. The Al-based composites containing in situ AlN phases showed coefficient of thermal expansion values of ∼11 × 10−6/℃, which were comparable to those of composites containing 60% ex situ AlN particles.
We propose a two-step UV irradiation procedure to fabricate polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) films by lamination. During the first UV treatment, before lamination, the UV-curable monomers coated on one film substrate are solidified through photo-polymerization as the phase separation between the liquid crystals and the monomers. Introducing an adhesion-enhancement layer on the other plastic substrate and controlling the UV irradiation conditions ensure that UV-induced cross-linkable functional groups remain on the surfaces of the photo-polymerized layers. Thereby, the adhesion stability between the top and bottom films is much improved during a second (post-lamination) UV treatment by further UV-induced cross-linking at the interface. Because the adhesion-enhancement and PDLC layers prepared by the bar-coating process are solidified before lamination, the PDLC droplet distribution and the cell gap between the two plastic substrates remain uniform under the lamination pressure. This ensures that the voltage-controlled light transmittance is uniform across the entire sample.
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