For millennia, alloying has been the greatest gift from metallurgy to humankind: a process of mixing elements, propelling our society from the Bronze Age to the Space Age. Dealloying, by contrast, acts like a penalty: a corrosive counteracting process of selectively removing elements from alloys or compounds, degrading their structural integrity over time. We show that when these two opposite metallurgical processes meet in a reactive vapor environment, profound sustainable alloy design opportunities become accessible, enabling bulk nanostructured porous alloys directly from oxides, with zero carbon footprint. We introduce thermodynamically well-grounded treasure maps that turn the intuitive opposition between alloying and dealloying into harmony, facilitating a quantitative approach to navigate synthesis in such an immense design space. We demonstrate this alloy design paradigm by synthesizing nanostructured Fe-Ni-N porous martensitic alloys fully from oxides in a single solid-state process step and substantiating the critical kinetic processes responsible for the desired microstructure.

中文翻译：

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反应性气相脱合金将氧化物转化为可持续的块状纳米结构多孔合金


几千年来，合金化一直是冶金学送给人类的最大礼物：一个混合元素的过程，将我们的社会从青铜时代推向太空时代。相比之下，脱合金就像一种惩罚：一种腐蚀性的抵消过程，选择性地从合金或化合物中去除元素，随着时间的推移，它们的结构完整性会降低。我们表明，当这两个相反的冶金过程在反应蒸汽环境中相遇时，深刻的可持续合金设计机会变得触手可及，从而能够直接从氧化物中产生块状纳米结构多孔合金，实现零碳足迹。我们引入了热力学上扎实的藏宝图，将合金化和脱合金之间的直观对立转化为和谐，促进了在如此巨大的设计空间中导航合成的定量方法。我们通过在单个固态工艺步骤中完全从氧化物合成纳米结构的 Fe-Ni-N 多孔马氏体合金来证明这种合金设计范式，并证实负责所需微观结构的关键动力学过程。