Journal of Electron Microscopy Advance Access originally published online on November 28, 2006
Journal of Electron Microscopy 2006 55(5):245-252; doi:10.1093/jmicro/dfl032
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Development of a specimen heating holder with an evaporator and gas injector and its application for catalyst
1 Hitachi High Technologies Corp. Hitachinaka, Ibaraki, 312-0057 Japan
2 Hitachi Hi-Tech Science Systems Co. Ltd Hitachinaka, Ibaraki, 312-0057 Japan
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kamino-takeo{at}naka.hitachi-hitec.com
A specimen heating holder equipped with a gas injector and an evaporator has been developed for use with conventional transmission electron microscopes (TEMs). The developed specimen holder allows both synthesis of metal oxide support and deposition of catalyst nano-particles in situ. Since the holder is designed to be used in small gapped high-resolution objective lens pole-piece, all the procedure from the synthesis of support material to the deposition of catalyst as well as the behavior of the catalyst nano-particles on the support can be observed at near atomic resolution. The developed specimen holder was applied to the study of AuPd catalyst. First, air was injected onto heated aluminum particles via a gas injector to synthesize Al2O3 support. Then,nano-particles of AuPd were deposited on the Al2O3 support. After the deposition, the synthesized Al2O3 support was heated and air was injected again to observe behaviors of the deposited AuPd nano-particles at elevated temperatures in the aerial environment. Behaviors of the AuPd nano-particles such as coalescence, segmentation and diffusion to the Al2O3 support were dynamically observed at atomic level high resolution.
Keywords specimen heating holder, AuPd, Al2O3, in situ TEM observation
Received 24 August 2006, accepted 19 October 2006