Reducing Thermal Effect on Thermoelectric Thin Films Fabrication Using Mechanical Chopper Coupling with CO2 Laser Ablation

The aim of this experiment was to use mechanical chopper coupling with CO2 laser ablation to reduce thermal effect on thermoelectric thin film fabrication. The average power at 10 W of sealed tube CO2 laser together with the mechanical chopper was used for the thermoelectric (TE) thin film fabrication on silicon substrate in vacuum system. The 1.02 ms of pulse duration with 600 Hz of repetition rate were generated by the optimized speed of chopper at 4500 rpm with 8 channels of circular apertures which were used for the reduction of thermal effect on the bismuth antimony telluride (Bi-Sb-Te) target. The experiment results illustrated the thickness and the thin films fabricated by using 10 seconds of exposure time with the chopper, illustrated the smaller grain size than without the chopper while the thickness increased as the exposure time increased at constant speed of chopper. The output efficiency referred to the ratio of the thickness per target lost in unit time which increased from 19.6 to 181.8 μm/g per hour, due to the increase of the exposure time with the chopper while without the chopper resulted in 55.0 μm/g per hour caused by the higher temperature raise on the thermoelectric target which affected to the as-deposited thin films and the re-evaporation occurred. In this experiment, the chopper speed was measured by the digital tachometer, the target loss was analyzed by the digital analytical balance and the morphology of the 600 tilted surface of thin film was characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM).