Standard Technical Procedure for Oxidation of Copper in a Resistive Furnace: An Approach for a Research Laboratory

Standardization through documentation of the thermal oxidation of copper in a muffle furnace is reported in this work. The standard was proposed by considering four sequential stages: development, evaluation, implementation and validation. Development involved technical analysis for proposing a documentation of the technical procedure. Evaluation stage was performed by revision and correction to the draft of the technical procedure by five reviewers. Implementation of the thermal oxidation of copper following the documented technical procedure was performed for two different users. The last stage (validation) involved comparison of the properties of two copper oxide sheets obtained by different users. In this stage, XRD patterns were used as an indirect measurement of reproducibility by comparing the number of peaks, intensity of the peaks, crystalline phases present in the copper oxide layer, and FWHM of the peaks. Additionally, weight and thickness measurements were included to the characterization of copper oxide. We have concluded that standardization of the technical procedure for thermal oxidation of copper in a research laboratory allowed to improve reproducibility in the properties of copper oxide.