Aerosol Synthesis of High Entropy Alloy Nanoparticles

Homogeneously mixing multiple metal elements within a single particle may offer new material property functionalities. High entropy alloys (HEAs), nominally defined as structures containing five or more well-mixed metal elements, are being explored at the nanoscale, but the scale-up to enable their industrial application is an extremely challenging problem. Here, we report an aerosol droplet-mediated technique toward scalable synthesis of HEA nanoparticles with atomic-level mixing of immiscible metal elements. An aqueous solution of metal salts is nebulized to generate ∼1 μm aerosol droplets, which when subjected to fast heating/quenching result in decomposition of the precursors and freezing-in of the zero-valent metal atoms. Atomic-level resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy analysis reveals that all metal elements in the nanoparticles are homogeneously mixed at the atomic level. We believe that this approach offers a facile and flexible aerosol droplet-mediated synthesis technique that will ultimately enable bulk processing starting from a particulate HEA.