Gaining new insights into nanoporous gold by mining and analysis of published images

Abstract

One way of expediting materials development is to decrease the need for new experiments by making greater use of published literature. Here, we use data mining and automated image analysis to gather new insights on nanoporous gold (NPG) without conducting additional experiments or simulations. NPG is a three-dimensional porous network that has found applications in catalysis, sensing, and actuation. We assemble and analyze published images from among thousands of publications on NPG. These images allow us to infer a quantitative description of NPG coarsening as a function of time and temperature, including the coarsening exponent and activation energy. They also demonstrate that relative density and ligament size in NPG are not correlated, indicating that these microstructure features are independently tunable. Our investigation leads us to propose improved reporting guidelines that will enhance the utility of future publications in the field of dealloyed materials.

Study of the Coarsening of Nanoporous Gold Nanowires by In Situ Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy During Annealing

“…During annealing, a network restructuring of NPG is observed caused by the collapse of neighboring ligaments onto each other resulting in a net reduction of a free surface area due to the formation of thicker ligaments and the vanishing of nanopore . Values reported for the ligament size for both samples with respect to the annealing temperature are in good agreement with the one reported previously by data mining in the literature for NPG . Moreover, the slight discrepancy might originate from the annealing environment …”

Computation of Thickness and Mechanical Properties of Interconnected Structures: Accuracy, Deviations, and Approaches for Correction

“…With the lowest resolution of 60 voxels per unit cell edge length, this results in only three voxels making up the ligament radius. With the resolution of 100 voxels shown in Figure 6B, the proposed minimum quality of 10 voxels per ligament diameter proposed by McCue et al (2018) is met. The unsatisfying quality of the 60 voxels resolution leads to steps in the beam diameters and an uneven replication of the ligament profile, as visible in Figure 6A.…”

“…The average diameter and diameter distribution of the morphologies in each phase is calculated using a medial axis transform and a distance transform. McCue et al (2018) use AQUAMI to data-mine NPG 2D images of 28 published manuscripts, regarding mean ligament diameter, length, and solid phase fraction. They point out the difficulty and resulting systematic discrepancies when comparing results gained by different measuring approaches, ranging from manually measuring the thinnest part of the ligament, to computational estimations.…”

“…In summary, two algorithms are found to be dominantly used in literature to estimate the ligament size distribution: The Thickness algorithm, which is able to analyze 3D volumes and the Euclidean distance transformation (EDT), which is applied for analyzing 2D SEM images by Badwe et al (2017), Stuckner et al (2017), andMcCue et al (2018). It calculates at each point of the structure the distance to the nearest background point.…”

The Effect of Microstructure Morphology on Indentation Response of Ta/Ti Nanocomposite Thin Films

“…The greater scatter in the dependence of composite features size on time may be due to variations in microstructure connectivity, which are thought to affect coarsening exponents. [28,29]…”