Wang Chao, Hossain Bhuiyan Md Emran, Moreno Salvador, Minary-Jolandan Majid
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080, United States.
ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2020 Apr 22;12(16):18683-18691. doi: 10.1021/acsami.0c01100. Epub 2020 Apr 9.
Although various processes for metal printing at the micro- and mesoscale have been demonstrated, printing functional devices such as thermocouples, thermopiles, and heat flux sensors that function based on interfaces between an alloy and another alloy/metal demands processes for printing alloys. Furthermore, a high-quality and crystalline alloy is required for acceptable function of these devices. This article reports for the first time co-electrodeposition-based printing of single-phase solid solution nanocrystalline copper/nickel (Cu/Ni) alloy with various controllable compositions (Cu100Ni0 to Cu19Ni81) from a single electrolyte. The printed alloy is nanocrystalline (<35 nm), continuous, and dense with no apparent porosity, with remarkable mechanical and magnetic properties, without any postprocessing annealing such as heat treatment. In addition, a functional thermocouple fabricated using this process is demonstrated. Such a process can not only be used for fabrication of functional devices, it may also facilitate fundamental studies on alloys by printing a continuous library of alloy composition for material characterization.
尽管已经展示了多种用于微尺度和介观尺度金属印刷的工艺，但印刷诸如基于合金与另一种合金/金属之间的界面起作用的热电偶、热电堆和热通量传感器等功能器件需要合金印刷工艺。此外，这些器件要实现可接受的功能需要高质量的晶体合金。本文首次报道了从单一电解质中基于共电沉积印刷具有各种可控成分（Cu100Ni0至Cu19Ni81）的单相固溶体纳米晶铜/镍（Cu/Ni）合金。印刷的合金是纳米晶（<35纳米）、连续且致密的，没有明显的孔隙率，具有显著的机械和磁性，无需任何诸如热处理等后处理退火。此外，展示了使用该工艺制造的功能热电偶。这样的工艺不仅可用于制造功能器件，还可以通过印刷用于材料表征的连续合金成分库来促进对合金的基础研究。
