Composition Effect on Shrinkage of Hollow Binary Alloy Nanospheres
In this paper, a hollow random binary alloy nanosphere and initially homogeneous is considered under the approximation that the radial dependence of the vacancy formation free energy can be neglected. On the basis of a theoretical description and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations it is shown that the steady-state condition for the atomic components is not achievable during its shrinkage at any composition when the ratio of the tracer diffusion coefficients is not greater than two orders of magnitude. In the theoretical description, the dependence of the collapse time of the hollow random binary alloy nanosphere on the atomic fraction of the faster diffusing species at can be estimated by using the geometric mean of the ratios of the atomic fluxes at self-diffusion and steady-state. At the ratio of the atomic fluxes approaches the self-diffusion ratio as increases.