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Towards the better: Intrinsic property amelioration in bulk metallic glasses
2016, Sarac, Baran, Zhang, Long, Kosiba, Konrad, Pauly, Simon, Stoica, Mihai, Eckert, Jürgen
Tailoring the intrinsic length-scale effects in bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) via post-heat treatment necessitates a systematic analyzing strategy. Although various achievements were made in the past years to structurally enhance the properties of different BMG alloys, the influence of short-term sub-glass transition annealing on the relaxation kinetics is still not fully covered. Here, we aim for unraveling the connection between the physical, (thermo)mechanical and structural changes as a function of selected pre-annealing temperatures and time scales with an in-house developed Cu46Zr44Al8Hf2 based BMG alloy. The controlled formation of nanocrystals below 50 nm with homogenous distribution inside the matrix phase via thermal treatment increase the material’s resistance to strain softening by almost an order of magnitude. The present work determines the design aspects of metallic glasses with enhanced mechanical properties via nanostructural modifications, while postulating a counter-argument to the intrinsic property degradation accounted for long-term annealing.
Local microstructure evolution at shear bands in metallic glasses with nanoscale phase separation
2016, He, Jie, Kaban, Ivan, Mattern, Norbert, Song, Kaikai, Sun, Baoan, Kim, Do Hyang, Eckert, Jürgen, Greer, A.Lindsay
At room temperature, plastic flow of metallic glasses (MGs) is sharply localized in shear bands, which are a key feature of the plastic deformation in MGs. Despite their clear importance and decades of study, the conditions for formation of shear bands, their structural evolution and multiplication mechanism are still under debate. In this work, we investigate the local conditions at shear bands in new phase-separated bulk MGs containing glassy nanospheres and exhibiting exceptional plasticity under compression. It is found that the glassy nanospheres within the shear band dissolve through mechanical mixing driven by the sharp strain localization there, while those nearby in the matrix coarsen by Ostwald ripening due to the increased atomic mobility. The experimental evidence demonstrates that there exists an affected zone around the shear band. This zone may arise from low-strain plastic deformation in the matrix between the bands. These results suggest that measured property changes originate not only from the shear bands themselves, but also from the affected zones in the adjacent matrix. This work sheds light on direct visualization of deformation-related effects, in particular increased atomic mobility, in the region around shear bands.