*3.2.2 FIB/SEM tomography of porous Ni*

SEM high-voxel resolution helped in architecting the 3D structure of porous nickel, refer to paper [12] for assistance. 3D imaging revealed that around 2/3% volume of selected area was porous with totally interconnected structure. The canal internal caliber ranged from 500 to 2000 nm.

### *3.2.3 FIB/EDS tomography of squeeze cast AlSi12*

FIB uses ion beam as working source, which is a result of interaction with sample producing the secondary electrons, but when equipped with energy dispersive spectrometer, this can help in determining the elemental composition of each milled slice [29, 31]. The use of EDS with FIB resulted in finding the elemental composition of AlSi12 sample with each slice's elemental data. When dealing with complex chemical structures, this new hyphenation technique proved to be worthy to produce data with each slicing and give exact chemistry of the compound of interest. As far as sample is concerned, the EDS used 8-keV acceleration to analyze each slice with the EDX (EDS) detector.

Results can be seen in [12].
