Chemical Frustration: A Design Principle for the Discovery of New Complex Alloy and Intermetallic Phases (Final Report)
A limiting factor in the design of new metallic materials for energy applications is the inability to predict or control the crystal structures of intermetallic phases. These compounds exhibit an immense structural diversity, which continues to expand with progress in synthetic exploration. In this project, a concept has been developed through experimental and theoretical endeavors to explain and predict how complex structures can arise in these systems: chemical frustration. Competing interactions were induced synthetically through the selection of ternary combinations of elements, in which incompatibilities are anticipated to arise between the preferred bonding or packing modes of the binary subsystems. These experiments led to a variety of new compounds which were structurally characterized and interpreted in terms of the chemical frustration concept. Theoretical models based on Density Functional Theory (DFT) and semiempircal tightbinding calculations were also developed to account for new compounds encountered during these experimental investigations, as well as relevant intermetallic structures in the literature. Examples include the μ3-acidity model and the reversed approximation Molecular Orbital approach. This research has contributed to the field by proposing an approach to navigating the structural diversity of intermetallics, which has long been difficult to explain or control, and demonstrating its usefulness in the discovery of new compounds. At the same time, it has provided new tools for explaining structural phenomena in metals and forged deeper connections between the fields of materials and molecular chemistry. In terms of technical effectiveness and economic feasibility, the chemical frustration approach is promising. Several of the compounds discovered illustrate the structural features expected for frustration, and can be prepared simply from the elemental metals as thermodynamically stable phases. The future effectiveness of this approach will require criteria for reliably determining which systems will yield chemically-frustrated phases, and which will result in simple phase segregation. One outcome of the project is the refined guidelines for identifying such systems, which will be tested in future research. In addition to the scientific impacts of this research, there are also long-term benefits to the public: this project has opened routes to compounds based on intergrowths of simple intermetallics. When applied to the intergrowth of intermetallic phases with useful properties, this approach could yield new functional composites whose nanostructuring is extremely resilient as it is dictated by thermodynamics.