Atomistic understanding of diffusion kinetics in nanocrystals from molecular dynamics simulations

Understanding the grain size effect on diffusion in nanocrystals has been hampered by the difficulty of measuring diffusion directly in experiments. Here large-scale atomistic modeling is applied to understand the diffusion kinetics in nanocrystals. Enhanced short-circuit diffusivity is revealed to be controlled by the rule of mixtures for grain-boundary diffusion and lattice diffusion, which can be accurately described by the Maxwell-Garnett equation instead of the commonly thought Hart equation, and the thermodynamics of pure grain-boundary self-diffusion is not remarkably affected by varying grain size. Experimentally comparable Arrhenius parameters with atomic detail validate our results. We also propose a free-volume diffusion mechanism considering negative activation entropy and small activation volume. These help provide a fundamental understanding of how the activation parameters depend on size and the structure-property relationship of nanostructured materials from a physical viewpoint.