It is of practical interest to tune the diameter and shape of porous metals in order to optimize nanoscale related optical, electromechanical, and catalytic properties.  A characteristic nanometer length scale arises from electrochemical dealloying, but larger pore sizes may be more desirable depending on the application.  The easiest way to change the length scale of a porous metal is thermal annealing and tracking thermal coarsening is by measuring the average diameter of the pores as a function of time.  This project was primarily done using our simulation code MESOSIM and several coarsening videos can be found below.

Through this research it has been shown that thermal coarsening is controlled by ligament pinc-off events and that the change in surface area response lags the change in the genus of the material.  The genus is a measure of how many handles a geometric structure has-for instance, a coffee cup and a torus are topologically equivalent with genus g = 1, as they can be deformed one into the other without cutting any ligaments. A sphere has genus g = 0.  This work has setup implications and expected results for future lab bench experiments.