Journal article

Avalanching strain dynamics during the hydriding phase transformation in individual palladium nanoparticles

A Ulvestad, MJ Welland, SSE Collins, R Harder, E Maxey, J Wingert, A Singer, S Hy, P Mulvaney, P Zapol, OG Shpyrko

Nature Communications | Published : 2015

Open access

Abstract

Phase transitions in reactive environments are crucially important in energy and information storage, catalysis and sensors. Nanostructuring active particles can yield faster charging/discharging kinetics, increased lifespan and record catalytic activities. However, establishing the causal link between structure and function is challenging for nanoparticles, as ensemble measurements convolve intrinsic single-particle properties with sample diversity. Here we study the hydriding phase transformation in individual palladium nanocubes in situ using coherent X-ray diffractive imaging. The phase transformation dynamics, which involve the nucleation and propagation of a hydrogen-rich region, are d..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by U.S. Department of Energy


Funding Acknowledgements

This work was supported by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract DE-SC0001805. A.U. thanks the UCSD Inamori Fellowship. M.J.W. and P.Z. gratefully acknowledge the computing resources provided on the Blues high-performance computing cluster operated by the Laboratory Computing Resource Center at Argonne National Laboratory and support of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Science and Engineering under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. P.M. thanks the ARC for support through LF100100117. This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. We thank the staff at Argonne National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source for their support.