Abstract
The perspective of melt spinning–rapid quenching of a melt to produce nanocrystalline intermetallic clathrates is discussed, using main-group and transition-metal clathrates as examples. While melt spinning was originally developed for production of amorphous materials, our first experiments on melt spinning of clathrates revealed a surprisingly large grain growth rate, resulting in grain sizes of at least 1 μm. However, using the “confusion effect,” i.e., complicating the chemical composition of the material by increasing the number of constituent elements, we have succeeded in reducing the grain size to 200 nm. We present our scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and transport property investigations and discuss the effect of composition on grain size, as well as thermodynamic and kinetic aspects of clathrate crystallization.
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