Towards Scalable Processing of Nano-Architectured Materials via Liquid Metal Dealloying

Materials with hierarchical architectures – microstructures with morphologies designed and synthesized to pro-vide a desired function – have the potential to revolutionize technologies ranging from next-generation energy storage to ultra-high specific strength structures. However, synthesizing these materials requires resource-intensive processing techniques that often do not scale well. I will describe a scalable route to creating and con-trolling nanoscale architectures using liquid metal dealloying (LMD): a self-organization process that relies on se-lective dissolution to drive the emergence of a complex architecture with a controllable morphology and feature size. Unlike conventional aqueous dealloying, LMD may be used to synthesize bulk quantities of fully-dense nano-composite materials. I will identify the key kinetic parameters controlling pattern formation in LMD and discuss how they may be tuned to fabricate materials with a variety of morphologies – globular, lamellar, and bicontinu-ous – and a large breadth of microstructural length scales – 30 nm to 10 μm. I will then give an overview of the promising thermo-mechanical properties of these new materials, including high thermal stability, high strength, and the potential to work harden. These results highlight opportunities for designing and synthesizing bulk nano-composite metals with superior properties by tuning their microstructure morphology.

Biography:

Ian McCue is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University. He received his Ph.D. and B.S. in Mate-rials Science and Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2015 and 2010, respectively. After graduating, he held a dual postdoctoral appointment at JHU and Arizona State University. Ian’s research interests include diffu-sion, morphological evolution, and physical metallurgy. His recent work focuses on utilizing self-organization to develop new nanostructured materials, and characterizing their mechanical properties. Ian received a Materials Research Society Silver Graduate Student Award in 2014 for his work on the “Mechanical properties of hierar-chical, refractory-based nanocomposites.” In 2013 he served as the co-chair of the Gordon Research Seminar on “Thin Film and Crystal Growth Mechanisms.”