Nucleation thermodynamics of oxide during metal oxidation

The classical theory of nucleation has been extended to describe oxide nucleation during the oxidation of metals. It is found that the localized reaction of oxygen with an underlying metal substrate exerts a very strong influence on the free energy barrier of three-dimensional oxide nucleation, which can be characterized by an interfacial correlation function. Our results show that the nucleation barrier increases with the steepening of the contact angle between the nucleating phase and the substrate. This model is expected to find applicability in other reaction-induced heterogeneous nucleation systems.