Yongjiang Huang

Temperature dependent dynamics transition of intermittent plastic flow in a metallic glass. II. Dynamics analysis

By reducing the testing temperatures down to the temperature well below the glassy transition temperature, the serrated flow behaviour during plastic deformation of a Zr-based metallic glass was experimentally investigated and the results were presented in Part I of the present paper. It shows that the yield strength, the plastic deformation ability, the density of shear bands of the metallic glass increase with decreasing temperature. In order to understand the mechanisms for the changes of the mechanical behaviour at low temperatures, in Part II of this study, the stress-time sequence in the plastic strain regime is characterized by a comprehensive dynamical and statistical analysis. The stress-time sequence is found to exhibit a chaotic state at high temperatures (>203 K), whereas a self-organized critical state is obtained at low temperatures (<= 203 K) due to the freezing effect. The reasons for the transition between these two distinct spatio-temporal dynamical states are elucidated by investigating the effect of temperature on the deformation units (shear transformation zones) and the elastic interactions between neighbouring shear bands. The results demonstrate that the low temperatures results in an enhancement of the interactions between the elastic strain fields initiated by neighbouring shear bands, which is primarily responsible for the enhanced plasticity of the metallic glass and a dynamics transition.

First-principle calculations for electronic structure and bonding properties in layered Na2Ti3O7

The Airy transform is an ideally suited tool to treat problem in classical and quantum optics. Even though the relevant mathematical aspects have been thoroughly investigated, the possibility it offers are wide and some aspects, as the link with special functions and polynomials, still contains unexplored aspects. In this note we will show that the so called Airy polynomials are essentially the third order Hermite polynomials. We will also prove that this identification opens the possibility of developing new conjectures on the properties of this family of polynomials.First-principles calculations of Na2Ti3O7 have been carried out with density-functional theory (DFT) and ultrasoft pseudopotentials. The electronic structure and bonding properties in layered Na2Ti3O7 have been studied through calculating band structure, density of states, electron density, electron density difference and Mulliken bond populations. The calculated results reveal that Na2Ti3O7 is a semiconductor with an indirect gap and exhibits both ionic and covalent characters. The stability of the (Ti3O7)2− layers is attributed to the covalent bonding of strong interactions between O 2p and Ti 3d orbitals. Furthermore, the O atoms located in the innerlayers interact more strongly with the neighboring Ti atoms than those in the interlayer regions. The ion-exchange property is due to the ionic bonding between the Na+ and (Ti3O7)2− layers, which can stabilize the interlayers of layered Na2Ti3O7 structure.

Influence of the Crystalline Phase on Strain-Rate Sensitivity of a Zr-Cu-Ni-Al Bulk Metallic Glass at Room Temperature

In this work, Zr53Cu18.7Ni12Al16.3 alloy has been cast into rod samples with different diameters. Glassy composites with various volume fractions of quenched-in crystalline are obtained. Their mechanical behaviors and fracture mechanisms have been investigated upon both quasistatic and dynamic loading. As the volume fraction of crystalline phase increases, the increase in the strain-rate sensitivity exponent could be attributed to the combination of the reduction of the shear band-related deformability and the enhancement of the dislocation-related deformability. These results may shed more insight on optimizing the microstructure and performance of bulk metallic glass composites in the future.