Correlative imaging of crosstalk between single entities in metal alloys (OCTAWA)
As of July 2022, I am a recipient of ANR JCJC grant with the start from January 2023. ANR JCJC is a grant provided by the National Agency for Research in France for young researcher at the start of their independent research career.
Project description
The urgent need of increased energy efficiency and durability of materials is pushing forward the development of novel metal materials with improved specific strength, light density, recyclability, and biodegradability for a wide scope of practical applications ranging from space and automobile industries, energy sector and biomedicine. These novel materials are often nanostructured and are composed of multiple micro and nanoparticles, impurities, crystallographic grains and grain boundaries (or single entities) of varying chemical composition and structure, embedded in an electrically conductive matrix. The modern experimental strategies to assess these materials are focused mainly on the measurements of reactivity of isolated single entities and then, the bulk properties of the material are merely deduced from the sum of its individual parts. However, numerous experimental evidence show that it is not the case for contemporary nanostructured interfaces used in corrosion. Under operating conditions, the single entities of modern materials form a complex network of interactions called a crosstalk that defines the bulk material performance and that is difficult to anticipate solely based on the properties of isolated single entities. The screening of these systems is a challenging experimental task, first because, unless under forced corrosion, no current is exchanged with an external device, and therefore wide field highly resolved electrochemical measurements are required to follow both, reactivity at single entities down to the nm scale and their crosstalk up to the μm scale, simultaneously. The theoretical analysis of emerging properties is not a trivial task either since the elaboration of both, mechanisms at the single entity level and their consequences on reaction of surrounding neighbors are required. The combination of experiment and theory should provide intelligent design of the desired crosstalk communication. Developing strategies to access the fundamental electrochemical properties of the crosstalk, rationalize and utilize it for intelligent material design are complex and important issues that I aspire to solve in this project.
The OCTAWA project will develop a new state-of-the-art approach able to measure and to control the crosstalk activity of nanostructured electrode materials. The new approach will combine the unique advantages of optical and nanopipet electrochemical imaging methods, providing in situ and in real time essential descriptors, which are necessary for data-driven machine learning predictions of the crosstalk communication. The predictive power will introduce a new conceptual framework of intelligent design of nanostructured materials. This ground-breaking approach, applicable to any nanostructured materials and electrochemical situations, will be demonstrated for the corrosion of aluminum alloys due to their high technological importance, abundance of incorporated single entities and the vast number of processes, which they can provoke.