In recent years, aluminum nitride has undergone significant advancements and has found extensive application in optoelectronic and microelectronic devices due to its remarkable physicochemical properties. The quality of aluminum nitride powder plays a critical role in determining device performance, thus making the synthesis of high-quality powder a prominent area of research. The sol–gel method is a widely used approach for producing superior powders. In this study, we investigated the ammonolysis-polymerization mechanism of tris(dimethylamino)aluminum monomer and dimer using Gaussian16 software at the B3LYP-D3BJ/6-311G(d,p) level. Our objective was to provide theoretical guidance for the experimental synthesis of aluminum nitride powders using the sol–gel method. Our findings demonstrate that the ammonolysis reaction of tris(dimethylamino)aluminum dimer proceeds through six spontaneous steps. The two calculated polymerization steps also exhibit spontaneous behavior. All reactions demonstrate rapid occurrence, suggesting the theoretical feasibility of the ammonolysis-polymerization reaction of tris(dimethylamino)-aluminum dimer for synthesizing aluminum nitride.

In inertial confinement fusion, metal coating can be used as a protective layer on hollow microspheres, which plays an important role in improving the performance of the target. The aluminum coating was deposited on the glow discharge polymer microsphere by magnetron sputtering technique. Rotation and knocking were utilized to make microspheres bounce randomly. The effects of changing the length of striking interval on the quality of the aluminum coating was investigated. X-ray camera, white light interferometer, SEM and XRD were utilized to characterize the coating. The results show that the thickness of the aluminum coatings on the hollow microsphere surface is about (2 +/- 0.1) mu m. The coatings' surface is smooth and free of cracks, with a roughness below 75 nm. The coatings are found with a columnar crystal structure and preferentially orienting at the (111) crystal face. The repeatability of the experiments is demonstrated to be good. It is found that knocking can effectively improve the shadowing effect in the process of coating growth. The wall thickness uniformity increases and the surface roughness is affected. When the striking interval is 15 s, the comprehensive quality of the microsphere aluminum coating is the best with the wall thickness uniformity up to 93.5%, the surface roughness of 30.43 nm, and the grain size of the preferred crystal face of 13.66 nm, respectively.