Yuan-Yun Zhao

Composition Effect on Intrinsic Plasticity or Brittleness in Metallic Glasses

The high plasticity of metallic glasses is highly desirable for a wide range of novel engineering applications. However, the physical origin of the ductile/brittle behaviour of metallic glasses with various compositions and thermal histories has not been fully clarified. Here we have found that metallic glasses with compositions at or near intermetallic compounds, in contrast to the ones at or near eutectics, are extremely ductile and also insensitive to annealing-induced embrittlement. We have also proposed a close correlation between the element distribution features and the plasticity of metallic glasses by tracing the evolutions of the element distribution rearrangement and the corresponding potential energy change within the sliding shear band. These novel results provide useful and universal guidelines to search for new ductile metallic glasses at or near the intermetallic compound compositions in a number of glass-forming alloy systems.

Interactions of Shear Bands in a Ductile Metallic Glass

Shear bands play a key role in the plastic deformation of metallic glasses (MGs). Even though there are extensive studies on the initiation and propagation of shear bands, the interactions among them have not been systematically studied yet. The interactions between the primary shear bands (PSBs) and secondary shear bands (SSBs) in a ductile Zr-based MG were studied. The residual stress near PSBs can deflect the propagation direction and reduce the propagation velocity of SSBs, which contributes to the plasticity and toughness of the MG. It was demonstrated that the probability and strength of the interactions between PSBs and SSBs would become stronger for MGs with larger Young s modulus and smaller shear modulus, i. e., larger Poisson s ratio. These results are valuable in understanding the plastic deformation of MGs and may be helpful in designing new MGs with desirable mechanical properties.