Nanoporosity Evolution During Dealloying

Selective dissolution/dealloying of metal alloys is commonly used to synthesize nanoporous structures. During dealloying, the morphological evolution over minutes timescales involves an interplay between chemical dissolution leading to increased surface area and ligament formation, coarsening of ligaments, reduction in surface area via local collapse within ligaments, and material defect formation. Ligament relaxation (collapse, defect-formation, etc.) events happen at picosecond-nanosecond timescales, whereas dissolution events proceed at seconds timescales. To resolve the underlying materials phenomena in unprecedented detail, we introduce a novel multiscale framework that combines lattice kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) and molecular dynamics (MD) with an appropriate handshaking algorithm [AS Sandupatla, A Chatterjee, Acta Materialia 213, 116974 (2021)].