Design of stable nanostructure configurations in ternary alloys

Abstract

The development of stable nanocrystalline binary alloys, which possess a large volume fraction of grain boundaries at elevated temperatures, is a promising route to high yield strength materials. Previous studies have focused on alloying by selecting solute elements that segregate at grain boundaries to stabilize the nanostructure. A selection criterion has been established for designing stable binary nanocrystalline materials. This thesis explores the extension of this concept to the design of multicomponent nanostructured systems. In contrast to the simplicity of a binary system where not many topological possibilities are accessible, multicomponent nanostructured systems are shown to occupy a vast space where the large majority of interesting configurations will be missed by a regular solution approximation. This thesis describes research to develop a conceptual basis for the thermodynamic properties of multicomponent nanocrystalline alloys, and to design interesting ternary configurations not accessible in binary systems. The conditions necessary to achieve the desired nanostructure configurations are developed in a model that takes solute interactions into consideration. Based on the model, we performed a systematic case study on one alloy system expected to exhibit nanocrystalline stability: Pt-Pd-Au. As a control, two binary systems (Pt-Au, Pt-Pd) were produced for comparison. While a uniform distribution of Pd is observed in binary Pt-Pd alloys at 400 °C, the results from scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) reveal that Pd segregation behavior was induced by the Au grain boundary segregation in the ternary system at 400 °C. Our work on induced co-segregation behavior of Pt-Pd-Au alloy is just a simple example of solute interaction in nanocrystalline alloys. Our approach more generally presents a new design framework to control the complex configurations possible in nanocrystalline materials by alloying element selection.