Effect of Time on Anodized Al2O3 Nanopore FESEM Images using Digital Image Processing Techniques: A Study on Computational Chemistry

Abstract The scientific interest has been focused not only on the fabrication of various nano structured materials but also on their industrial and technological applications. Manufacturing of well-ordered nanostructures on the length scales less than dozens nm by conventional optical lithography is a great challenge. Automated microscopic image analysis provides an efficient tool for qualitative analysis in modern material science and biological studies. The main objective of the present study is to develop an automatic tool to determine the effect of time on nanopore structures formed via electrochemical anodization of high purity Al2O3 films in digital microscopic FE-SEM and EDX nano pore images. Geometric shape features are used to measure the variance of nano pore size depending on the chemical compounds, namely, concentration (%), time (min), temperature (oC) and voltage (V). The current methods rely on the subjective reading of profiles by a human expert based on the various manual staining methods. In this paper, an automated method is proposed for the effect of time on nanopore structures formed via electrochemical anodization of high purity Al2O3 films in digital microscopic nano pore images and extracting geometric shape features for the growth of Al2O3 films. It is observed that the regularity of nanopores arrangement can be significantly improved by increasing anodizing time at constant temperature and voltage, and after the anodizing process, at every interval of time there is a significant decrease in wall thickness from 58-26nm and increase in the nanopore diameter size about 31-86 nm. The experimental results are compared with the manual results obtained by the chemical expert and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method