Room-Temperature Atomic Layer Deposition of Al2O3 for Anticorrosion Coating on Metal Surfaces

Abstract

A room-temperature atomic layer deposition (RT-ALD) of Al2O3 as an anticorrosion coating for metal surfaces was developed using trimethylaluminum (TMA) and a plasma excited humidified argon. The schematic of ALD system is shown in Fig.1. TMA as the aluminum precursor was introduced with a mass flow controller. A remote plasma system generating excited humidified argon was installed to the ALD chamber. The source gas for the oxidizing gas is a mixture of water vapor and argon. The plasma was generated in a glass tube with an induction coil with a frequency of 13.56 MHz and a RF power of 100 W. For the Al2O3 deposition, we repeated the cycle of TMA saturation and oxidizing gas treatment at RT. The TMA exposure was set at 5.86×10-3 Torr×40 sec. The saturation of TMA on the hydroxylated surface was confirmed by the IR absorption spectroscopy. The plasma excited oxidizing gas was injected for 2 min. As a result, we show the anticorrosion test of ALD coated metal in a HCl solution. We used SUS430 plates with a size of 20×50×0.5 mm3 as the sample. In this test, we used a not-attenuated HCl solution with a concentration of 35 %. All the samples were immersed in the HCl solution for a certain amount of minutes at room temperature and we observed its surface coloring. Fig.2 shows a picture of the tested samples. The not-treated SUS430 sample clearly exhibits a white stain by the HCl corrosion. On the other hand, the Al2O3 coated sample maintained a mirror surface, which indicates that the RT-ALD coated film works as the anti-corrosion film against the acid solution. In the conference, we discuss the applicability of the RT-ALD to the anticorrosion coating for metal components. Acknowledgements This work was partly supported by JST-CREST, JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 15H03536 and 15K13299. Figure 1