Dealloying is one of the most fascinating synthesis methods for assembling several quintillions of nanoscale objects into a macroscopic body (10¹⁸ for 1 cm³ of material with a 10 nm structure size) in a very efficient way. There are four main types of dealloying methods, namely, electrochemical, liquid metal, solid-state , and vapor phase dealloying. These dealloying methods are complementary to each other and enable researchers to design porous materials of nearly any chemical composition from reactive materials such as magnesium to noble ones such as gold and modern one such as high-entropy alloys.
In this talk, we will discuss about liquid metal dealloying, since this method is of particular technological interest due to its scalability. Liquid metal dealloying is always compared with electrochemical dealloying, but unlike the latter one, this utilizes the difference in enthalpies of mixing between each element of the precursor alloy with the metallic melt and is several orders of magnitude faster. The metallic melt may consist of one or more elements and acts as corrosive medium. The sacrificial element dissolves out from the precursor alloy when this is immersed in the metallic melt due to a positive enthalpy of mixing between the elements.
Since the discovery of liquid metal dealloying, many new functional porous materials have been synthesized by this method, including nanoporous high-entropy alloys, steels, titanium, niobium, magnesium, silicon, to list a few. Liquid metal dealloyed porous metals and composites  combine moderate strength with low elastic modulus suggesting their application in biomedical implant devices for bone fixation. Moreover, the outstanding functional properties of these materials due to the high surface area envision many opportunities for their application for energy storage as capacitors and batteries as well as for catalysis.