Weakened Flexural Strength of Nanocrystalline Nanoporous Gold by Grain Refinement

High density of grain boundaries in solid materials generally leads to high strength because grain boundaries act as strong obstacles to dislocation activity. We find that the flexural strength of nanoporous gold of grain size 206 nm is 33.6% lower than that of grain size 238 μm. We prepared three gold-silver precursor alloys, well-annealed, prestrained, and high-energy ball-milled, from which nanoporous gold samples were obtained by the same free-corrosion dealloying process. Ligaments of the same size are formed regardless of precursor alloys, and microstructural aspects of precursor alloys such as crystallographic orientation and grain size is preserved in the dealloying process. While the nanoindentation hardness of three nanoporous golds is independent of microstructural variation, flexural strength of nanocrystalline nanoporous gold is significantly lower than that of nanoporous golds with much larger grain size. We investigate weakening mechanisms of grain boundaries in nanocrystalline nanoporous gold, leading to weakening of flexural strength.