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Magnesium‐based alloys are excellent materials for temporary medical implants, but understanding and controlling their corrosion performance is crucial. Most nanoscale corrosion studies focus on the surface, providing only 2D information. In contrast, macro‐ and microscale X‐ray tomography offers representative volume information, which is, however, comparatively low in resolution and rather qualitative. Here a new mesoscale approach overcomes these drawbacks and bridges the scale gap by combining 3D measurements using ptychographic X‐ray computed tomography (PXCT) with electron microscopy. This combination allows to observe the corrosion progress non‐destructively in 3D and provides high‐resolution chemical information on the corrosion products. A medical Mg–Zn–Ca alloy is used and compared the same sample in the pristine and corroded states. With PXCT an isotropic resolution of 85 and 123 nm is achieved for the pristine and corroded states respectively, which enables to distinguish nanoscale Mg2Ca precipitates from the matrix. The corroded state in best approximation to the in situ conditions is imaged and reveals the complexity of corrosion products. The results illustrate that the corrosion‐layer is dense and defect‐free, and the corrosion of the material is grain‐orientation sensitive. The developed workflow can advance research on bioactive materials and corrosion‐sensitive functional materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The characteristic microstructure of Sm (Co , Fe , Cu , Zr) z (z = 6.7 – 9.1) alloys with SmCo 5 cell walls in Sm 2 Co 17 cells, all intersected by Zr-rich platelets, makes them some of the best performing high-temperature permanent magnets. Plentiful research has been performed to tailor their microstructure at the nanoscale; but due to its complexity, many questions remain unanswered about the effect of the individual phases on the magnetic performance at different temperatures. Here, we explore this effect for three different Sm (Co , Fe , Cu , Zr) z alloys by deploying high-resolution magnetic imaging via in situ transmission electron microscopy and three-dimensional chemical analysis via atom probe tomography. We show that their microstructures differ in terms of SmCo 5 cell-wall and Z-phase size and density as well as the Cu concentration in the cell walls and demonstrate how these features influence the magnetic domain size and density, thus forming different micromagnetic spin structures. Moreover, we illustrate that the dominant coercivity mechanism at room temperature is domain-wall pinning and show that magnets with a denser cell-wall network, a steeper Cu gradient across the cell-wall boundary, and thinner Z-phase platelets have a higher coercivity. We also show that the coercivity mechanism at high temperatures is domain-wall nucleation at the cell walls. Increasing the Cu concentration inside the cell walls decreases the temperature of transition between pinning and nucleation, significantly decreasing the coercivity with increasing temperature. We, therefore, provide a detailed explanation of how the microstructure on the atomic to nanoscale directly affects the magnetic performance and provide detailed guidelines for an improved design of Sm (Co , Fe , Cu , Zr) z magnets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]