Effect of wetting durability on Al surface by high current ion beam treatment

Aluminum and aluminum alloys have been considered as one of the most important materials in various industries. However, poor wettability of Al limits its use for industrial applications. Therefore, many researchers have tried to improve the surface properties of Al by conventional methods such as polymer coating or plasma treatments. However, due to the water-soluble property of a polymer coating or low energy of plasma treatment, the wetting performance gradually deteriorates with increasing time and numbers of wet/dry cycles. Ion beam technology has been extensively used for decades to modify the surface properties of materials because of its much technological superiority to the conventional diffusion and coating methods. The previous experiments results provided wettability of ion beam treated Al surface: (1) The contact angle of hydrophobic aluminum surfaces were remarkably up to around 20 .deg. by ion beam treatment. (2) We obtained results that formation of AlN layer and thickness effect to wettabilty of Al surface through XPS and AES analyses. However, the wettability mechanism on Al by ion beam treatment is not proved certainly. Formation of compressive stress is not well understood. This is partly caused by the difficulty of quantifying important parameters such as ion energy and flux in many experiments. Therefore in this study, it was anticipated main factors that affect wetting durability through XPS and SEM/EDX analysis and many literatures