Ostwald Ripening: Nanocatalyst Sintering Simulator

Supported metal nanoparticles are the workhorse of heterogeneous catalysis, but they lose activity over time through Ostwald ripening: driven by the Gibbs–Thomson effect, atoms diffuse away from small, highly-curved particles and redeposit on larger, more thermodynamically favorable ones. This simulator renders a bed of catalyst nanoparticles in 3D and evolves each one's radius under the mean-field Lifshitz–Slyozov–Wagner growth law, with an Arrhenius temperature dependence for the underlying surface diffusivity. Adjust temperature, surface energy, and starting particle density to see how quickly the bed coarsens, and watch the live particle count and total surface area — the direct proxy for remaining catalytic activity — fall as small particles vanish.