KIT Center MathSEE

Development of quantitative electron tomography approaches for nanoporous materials

  • Contact:

    Roland Griesmaier, Christian Kübel

  • Funding:

    MathSEE Anschub 19/1

Electron tomography is a well-established tool for high-resolution visualization of the 3D structure of materials in a wide range of applications. It has seen tremendous developments, first in terms of automation of the data acquisition and incorporation of different signals and more recently due to new developments in reconstruction algorithms such as DART and TVM-CS enabling increasingly reliable 3D reconstructions even for limited aperture data. While it has been shown that these approaches can yield 3D reconstructions at the atomic scale in very selected cases, high fidelity reconstructions suitable as basis for quantitative modelling, e.g. of flow and diffusion properties in mesoporous materials, are very challenging to perform due to the combination of limited aperture artifacts and the limited accuracy of the 3D reconstruction algorithms. However, this would be needed to quantitatively describe and understand the role and effects of the mesoporous support in various applications such as catalysis or separation media (HPLC). Therefore, we aim to develop a new compressive sensing algorithm as an improved 3D reconstruction approach dedicated to provide a high-fidelity reconstruction of mesoporous materials at the 1 nm scale based on electron tomography tilt-series.