Reactive vapor-phase dealloying-alloying turns oxides into sustainable bulk nano-structured porous alloys
Shaolou Wei (Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials)
Yan Ma (TU Delft - Team Maria Santofimia Navarro, Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials)
D. Raabe (Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials)
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Abstract
For millennia, alloying has been the greatest gift from metallurgy to humankind: a process of mixing elements, propelling our society from the Bronze Age to the Space Age. Dealloying, by contrast, acts like a penalty: a corrosive counteracting process of selectively removing elements from alloys or compounds, degrading their structural integrity over time. We show that when these two opposite metallurgical processes meet in a reactive vapor environment, profound sustainable alloy design opportunities become accessible, enabling bulk nanostructured porous alloys directly from oxides, with zero carbon footprint. We introduce thermodynamically well-grounded treasure maps that turn the intuitive opposition between alloying and dealloying into harmony, facilitating a quantitative approach to navigate synthesis in such an immense design space. We demonstrate this alloy design paradigm by synthesizing nanostructured Fe-Ni-N porous martensitic alloys fully from oxides in a single solid-state process step and substantiating the critical kinetic processes responsible for the desired microstructure.
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