How to make boring copper special (or even more exciting)?

Due to the fact that the Chalcolithic, also known as Aeneolithic (Eneolithic) or Copper Age has been early developed since the past 7,000 years, the metallurgy of copper providing key foundations for the rise of human civilization during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age is undoubtedly regarded as the oldest domain in the field of materials science and engineering.  Regardless of its prior prominence, the current research focused on copper is usually considered old-fashioned or even boring when it comes to its microstructure characterization using an optical microscope.  In this talk,we employed state-of-the-arts (atomistic simulations, mathematical modeling, as well as electron microscopies) to investigate the relationships between the energies of copper grain boundaries and the grain boundary character distributions (GBCDs) in the coarse-grained copper produced by using a typical thermomechanical process and the nanocrystalline copper synthesized via an electrodeposition coating.  Because the desired properties (i.e. corrosion resistance, mechanical strength, and electrical conductivity) are correlated with low-energy grain boundaries, larger fractions of low-energy boundaries in the electrodeposited copper than the ones in the coarse-grained copper suggested that the electrodeposition can be used to engineer the grain boundary structure or the properties of the copper films (S.Ratanaphan, et al., Journal of Materials Science, 52, 4070-4085, 2017).  It was also recently found that high densities of CuO nanowires commonly used in chemical sensing, catalysis, or energy storage devices can be synthesized at a low-temperature thermal oxidation via microstructure engineering of the crystallographic textures and grain boundaries in the electrodeposited copper film (C. Kongvarhodom, N. Nammahachak, W. Tippomuang, S. Fongchaiya, C. Turner, and S. Ratanaphan, Corrosion Science, accepted: 15 October 2021).