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Atomic-level mechanism of spallation microvoid nucleation in medium entropy alloys under shock loading

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Abstract

Spallation, rupture under impulsive tensile loading, is a dynamic failure process involving the collective evolution and accumulation of enormous microdamage in solids. In contrast to traditional alloys, the spallation mechanism in medium entropy alloys, the recently emerged multiprinciple and chemically disordered alloys, is poorly understood. Here we conduct molecular dynamics simulations and first principle calculations to investigate the effects of impact velocities and the local chemical order on spallation microvoid nucleation in a CrCoNi medium entropy alloy under shock wave loading. As the impact velocity increases, the microvoid nucleation site exhibits a transition from the grain boundaries to the grains to release redundant imposed energy. During the intragranular nucleation process, microvoids nucleate in the poor-Cr region with a large local nonaffine deformation, which is attributed to the weak metallic bonds in this position with sparse free electrons. For intergranular nucleation, a Franke-like dislocation source forms through the dislocation reaction, leading to enormous dislocations piling up in a narrow twin stripe, which markedly increases the local stored energy and promotes microvoid nucleation. These results shed light on the mechanism of spallation in chemically complexed medium entropy alloys.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    ZhouCan Xie, Yan Chen, HaiYing Wang & LanHong Dai

  2. School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 101408, China

    ZhouCan Xie, Yan Chen, HaiYing Wang & LanHong Dai

  3. State Key Laboratory of Explosion Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    LanHong Dai

Authors
  1. ZhouCan Xie
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  2. Yan Chen
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  3. HaiYing Wang
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  4. LanHong Dai
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yan Chen or LanHong Dai.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFB0702003), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant Nos. 11790292, 11972346 and 11672316), the NSFC Basic Science Center Program for “Multiscale Problems in Nonlinear Mechanics” (Grant No. 11988102), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant Nos. XDB22040302 and XDB22040303), the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. QYZDJSSW-JSC011), and the Science Challenge Project (Grant No. TZ2018001).

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Xie, Z., Chen, Y., Wang, H. et al. Atomic-level mechanism of spallation microvoid nucleation in medium entropy alloys under shock loading. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 64, 1360–1370 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-021-1814-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-021-1814-y

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