Effect of Pt addition to Ag-Au bimetallic nanoclusters: A molecular dynamics study of Ag-Au-Pt ternary system

In this work addition of Pt atoms to Ag0.5Au0.5 nanoclusters and formation of Ag0.5-chi Au0.5-chi Pt2 chi (with chi - 0.1, 0.17, 0.2, 0.25, 0.3, and 0.4) and total number of atoms equal to 1415 and 2057 ternary nanoclusters is studied by molecular dynamics simulation. The results indicated that at low concentrations of Pt, nanoclusters exhibit a local-ordered structure in such a way that (Pt-Ag-n-Au-2n) cores are surrounded by extra Ag atoms. By increase of Pt concentration total order of the nanocluster also increases. For nanoclusters with 0.0 < chi(Pt) < 0.4 total order of the system is decreased due to lower concentration of Ag-Pt and Au-Pt interactions. For chi(Pt) - 0.4 system, total order of the nanocluster again increases considerably which represents a Pt-rich nanocluster with some Ag and Au impurity. Also, all nanoclusters with chi(Pt) > 0.0 exhibit an icosahedral-fcc phase transition before melting and temperature of this phase transition is decreased by increase of Pt concentration. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.