Liquid-Like, Self-Healing Aluminum Oxide during Deformation at Room Temperature
[1];
[3];
[4];
[5]
- Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States). Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering
- Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States). Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering; Univ. of Central Florida, Orlando, FL (United States). Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center (AMPAC) and Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering
- Xi’an Jiaotong Univ. (China); Southeast Univ., Nanjing (China). Center for Advancing Materials Performance from the Nanoscale (CAMP-Nano) and State Key Lab. for Mechanical Behavior of Materials
- Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States). Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN)
- Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States). Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering
Effective protection from environmental degradation relies on the integrity of oxide as diffusion barriers. Ideally, the passivation layer can repair its own breaches quickly under deformation. While studies suggest that the native aluminum oxide may manifest such properties, it has yet to be experimentally proven because direct observations of the air-environmental deformation of aluminum oxide and its initial formation at room temperature are challenging. In this letter, we report in situ experiments to stretch pure aluminum nanotips under O2 gas environments in a transmission electron microscope (TEM). We discovered that aluminum oxide indeed deforms like liquid and can match the deformation of Al without any cracks/spallation at moderate strain rate. At higher strain rate, we exposed fresh metal surface, and visualized the self-healing process of aluminum oxide at atomic resolution. Unlike traditional thin-film growth or nanoglass consolidation processes, we observe seamless coalescence of new oxide islands without forming any glass–glass interface or surface grooves, indicating greatly accelerated glass kinetics at the surface compared to the bulk.
- Research Organization:
- Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES); Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States); Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States); Xi’an Jiaotong Univ. (China); Southeast Univ., Nanjing (China)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0012704; DMR-1410636
- OSTI ID:
- 1430854
- Report Number(s):
- BNL-203374-2018-JAAM
- Journal Information:
- Nano Letters, Vol. 18, Issue 4; ISSN 1530-6984
- Publisher:
- American Chemical SocietyCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Web of Science
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