TABLE OF CONTENTS As early as 1953, Keller,1 who worked in the alumina lab of the American Alumina Company, reported preparation and structure features of ordered channel AAM templates obtained by the electrochemical method and electromicroscopy observations, respectively. However, due to the technology limitation, the channel distribution of alumina membranes synthesized by them was disordered. After 20 years, many researchers made a lot of studies into synthetic methods. It was not until the early 90s that Moskovits's group2 synthesized alumina templates with the porous density of 10 10 10 11/cm -2. Then, Martin 2 5 synthesized alumina templates with the pore diameters ranging from 12 to 250 nm.
In 1995, Masuda,6 who worked in Kyoto University, first reported that they synthesized alumina membranes composed of highly-ordered and hexagonally close-packed arrays. After that, they improved the synthesis technique to obtain the alumina template, containing almost perfect and hexagonal channel arrays with long-range ordering (ordered channel AAM templates).7
In the following, preparation and structure features of ordered channel AAM templates will be systematically introduced, and the ordered channel array formation mechanism of alumina templates will be analyzed simply.
We simply named the ordered channel AAM template "AAM" in the following. The preparation process of AAM includes three main steps: pre-treatment, anodization and post-treatment.
Pretreatment
The pure alumina plate (purity: 99.999%, thickness: 0.2 to 0.3 mm) is first washed in turn in acetone and ethanol. After...
