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Mechanical performance and corrosion behaviour of Zr-based bulk metallic glass produced by selective laser melting
Nearly fully dense, glassy Zr52.5Cu17.9Ni14.6Al10Ti5 bulk specimens were fabricated by selective laser melting (SLM) and their behaviour during compressive loading, during wear testing and in a corrosive medium was investigated. Their performance was compared with as-cast material of the same composition. The additively manufactured samples exhibit a yield strength around 1700 MPa combined with a plastic strain of about 0.5% after yielding despite the residual porosity of 1.3%, which is distributed uniformly in the samples. The propagation of shear bands in the bulk metallic glass prepared by SLM was studied. The specific wear rate and the worn surfaces demonstrated that similar wear mechanisms are active in the SLM and the as-cast samples. Hence, manufacturing the glass in layers does not adversely affect the wear properties. The same holds for the corrosion tests, which were carried out in 0.01 M Na2SO4 and 0.1 M NaCl electrolyte. The anodic polarization curves of SLM samples and as-cast samples revealed a similar corrosion behaviour. However, the SLM samples have a slightly reduced susceptibility to pitting corrosion and exhibit an improved surface healing ability, which might be attributed to an improved homogeneity of the additively manufactured glass.
Phase formation of a biocompatible Ti-based alloy under kinetic constraints studied via in-situ high-energy X-ray diffraction
The biocompatible Ti40Cu34Pd14Zr10Sn2 bulk metallic glass was rapidly heated, also known as flash-annealed, at varying heating rates up to 1579 K/s. Thereby, the phase formation was characterized via advanced in-situ high-energy X-ray diffraction. It has been found that the evolving kinetic constraints can be used as a tool to deliberately alter the crystalline phase formation. This novel processing route permits to select phases to crystallize to a predefined fraction and, thus, to potentially design the microstructure of materials according to a specified property-profile. Consequently, flash-annealing poses a unique synthesis route to design materials with, for instance, good biomechanical compatibility.