Morphological studies of nanoporous anodic aluminium oxide membranes

There have been few studies on the characterisation of anodic aluminium oxide (AAO) membranes and AAO-based nanocomposite. For example, investigations of the effects of humidity and heat treatment on surfaces of the NAAO membrane have provided significant implications for different applications of this material, for example in catalysis, chemical sensing, filtration applications, asymmetric epoxidation and template synthesis such as nanowire and nanotube arrays. This study investigates morphological properties of NAAO membrane using fractal methods and attempts to establish various relationships between geometrical based characterisations using microstructure images with the physico-chemistry properties of the material. To date, fractal concepts have provided powerful tools for describing different physical properties for nanomaterial. Box counting technique is used to determine the fractal dimension of palladium (Pd) nanoparticle distributed in NAAO membrane's SEM binary images. The relation between fractal dimension and Pd nanoparticle size distribution is examined. Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.