Electrochemical stability of biodegradable Zn–Cu alloys through machine-learning accelerated high-throughput discovery

Abstract

Zn–Cu alloys have attracted great attention as biodegradable alloys owing to their excellent mechanical properties and biocompatibility, with corrosion characteristics being crucial for their suitability for biomedical applications. However, the unresolved identification of intermetallic compounds in Zn–Cu alloys affecting corrosion and the complexity of the application environment hamper the understanding of their electrochemical behavior. Utilizing high-throughput first-principles calculations and machine-learning accelerated evolutionary algorithms for screening the most stable compounds in Zn–Cu systems, a dataset encompassing the formation energy of 2033 compounds is generated. It reveals that most of the experimentally reported Zn–Cu compounds can be replicated, especially the structure of R32 CuZn₅ is first discovered which possesses the lowest formation energy of −0.050 eV per atom. Furthermore, the simulated X-ray diffraction pattern matches perfectly with the experimental ones. By formulating 342 potential electrochemical reactions based on the binary compounds, the Pourbaix diagrams for Zn–Cu alloys are constructed to clarify the fundamental competition between different phases and ions. The calculated equilibrium potential of CuZn₅ is higher than that of Zn through the forward reaction Zn + CuZn₅ ⇌ CuZn₅ + Zn²⁺ + 2e⁻, resulting in microcell formation owing to the stronger charge density localization in Zn compared to CuZn₅. The presence of chlorine accelerates the corrosion of Zn through the reaction Zn + CuZn₅ + 6Cl⁻ + 6H₂O ⇌ Cu + 6ZnOHCl + 6H⁺ + 12e⁻, where the formation of ZnOHCl disrupts the ZnO passive film and expands the corrosion pH range from 9.2 to 8.8. Our findings reveal an accurate quantitative corrosion mechanism for Zn–Cu alloys, providing an effective pathway to investigate the corrosion resistance of biodegradable alloys.