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Updated: Feb 11, 2026
Ligand-Mediated Nucleation and Growth of Palladium Metal Nanoparticles
Published on: June 25, 2018
Crystal nucleation in metallic alloys using x-ray radiography and machine learning
Enzo Liotti1, Carlos Arteta2, Andrew Zisserman2
1Department of Materials, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PH, UK.
Abstract:
The crystallization of solidifying Al-Cu alloys over a wide range of conditions was studied in situ by synchrotron x-ray radiography, and the data were analyzed using a computer vision algorithm trained using machine learning. The effect of cooling rate and solute concentration on nucleation undercooling, crystal formation rate, and crystal growth rate was measured automatically for thousands of separate crystals, which was impossible to achieve manually. Nucleation undercooling distributions confirmed the efficiency of extrinsic grain refiners and gave support to the widely assumed free growth model of heterogeneous nucleation. We show that crystallization occurred in temporal and spatial bursts associated with a solute-suppressed nucleation zone.
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