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Nanocrystalline Materials Essay

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Introduction To explain nanocrystalline materials, it should have been explained that “nano” concept at first. Nanostructures are relatively new and interesting subject to investigate, they are in a scale which is between 0-100 nanometers (1 nanometer, nm is equal to 10-9 meter). There are some types of nanostructured materials such as lamellar (1-dimensional), filamentary (2-dimensional) and crystallites (3-dimensional). If grains of the material are made up of crystals, then “nanocrystalline materials” term is what they are called. In this case, nanocrystalline materials have grains which are the size of < 100 nm typically. An example of nanocrystalline material of SnO2 is imaged with STM as seen in Fig. 1 [1] and SEM image of nanocrystalline diamond thin films as seen in Fig. 2. [2] Fig. 1. STM image of nanocrystalline SnO2 [1] Fig. 2. SEM image of nanocrystalline diamond thin films. [2] In nanocrystalline materials there are numerous superior properties which actually are very useful and promising about future works and applications. The reason for the superior properties is that nanocrystalline materials have very high number of atoms at their grain boundaries which are in nanometer scale. Some of the properties that can be enhanced and increased by making nanocrystalline materials rather than the coarse-grained materials are higher strength, higher hardness, increased diffusivity, increased mechanical properties and so on [3]. This is why people have studied in

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