A giant breakthrough in the field of nanoscience! For the first time, American scientists successfully combined up to eight kinds of metal elements that cannot be mixed together to form a uniform nanostructure, called high-entropy alloy nanoparticles. How powerful is this? Nanoparticles that combine more than 3 elements.
In the past, scientists were not convinced that it was possible to compress multiple elements into a single material. It was very difficult to mix and compress different elements into individual particles, but came from the University of Maryland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Chicago and Johns Hopkins University. The researchers have demonstrated that they can combine up to 8 different metallic elements to form high entropy alloy nanoparticles with uniform crystal structure.
You can imagine that the nanoparticles formed by the combination of different elements are like LEGO toys. If you only have 3 colors or sizes of elements, the final composition and structure is also limited to some forms. But it is made of 8 metal elements. The nanoparticles are like expanding the toy box several times. You can freely create more toy combinations in it.
High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are alloys of 5 or more equal amounts of approximately equal amounts of metals, which have a considerable degree of material science engineering due to their potential for many desirable properties. Attention. In the past, the main metal components in the alloy may be only 1-2, for example, iron-based, and then adding some trace elements to enhance its characteristics, the result is an iron-based alloy. High entropy alloys and general alloys are different, combined A variety of metals but not brittle.
The study was led by Liangbing Hu, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland. He said that this new type of high-entropy nanoparticles has a wide range of applications, in particular catalysts for emerging energy environmental technologies, and energy storage (batteries or supercapacitors), / Plasma imaging.
The high-entropy alloy nanoparticle manufacturing process uses a two-step method of instantaneous heating followed by instant cooling, exposing platinum, cobalt, nickel, copper, iron, palladium, gold, tin and other metal elements to a temperature of about 3,000°F (about 1650°C). In the next 0.055 seconds, the elements are mixed evenly and then cooled instantly to make the elements stable to form unique nanomaterials that are next to each other, such as nickel atoms next to nickel atoms, copper atoms, and platinum atoms. This physical method is simple. Just no one applied it to the manufacture of nanoparticles.
In order to explore the potential use of new nanoparticles, the researchers used them as advanced catalysts for ammonia oxidation reactions. The results confirmed that they possess highly efficient catalyst properties, and the ammoxidation reaction reached 100%.
In fact, this thing is too new, and even researchers are not sure of the ability to use all the fields of this high entropy alloy nanoparticle. The materials science textbook only discusses the use of alloys consisting of three different elements. The paper was published in Science. "Journal.