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  • Accepted Manuscript: Liquid-Like, Self-Healing Aluminum Oxide during Deformation at Room Temperature

This content will become publicly available on February 28, 2019

Title: Liquid-Like, Self-Healing Aluminum Oxide during Deformation at Room Temperature

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 O 2 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.
Authors:
ORCiD logo [1] ;  [2] ; ORCiD logo [3] ; ORCiD logo [4] ; ORCiD logo [5]
+ Show Author Affiliations
  1. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States). Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States). Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN)
  5. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States). Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering
Publication Date:
Report Number(s):
BNL-203374-2018-JAAM
Journal ID: ISSN 1530-6984
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0012704; DMR-1410636
Type:
Accepted Manuscript
Journal Name:
Nano Letters
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Name: Nano Letters; Journal ID: ISSN 1530-6984
Publisher:
American Chemical Society
Research Org:
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Org:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES) (SC-22); 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)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE; 77 NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY; 75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY; aluminum oxide; glass surface; in situ TEM; self-healing; stress-corrosion cracking; Superplasticity
OSTI Identifier:
1430854