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Damage-tolerant Zr-Cu-Al-based bulk metallic glasses with record-breaking fracture toughness

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Abstract

Bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) exhibit high yield strength but little tensile ductility. For this class of materials, damage tolerance is a key mechanical design parameter needed for their engineering use. Recently we have discovered a correlation between the local structural characteristics in the glass and the propensity for shear transformations. Based on the dependence of glass structure on alloy composition, zirconium (Zr)-rich Zr-titanium (Ti)-copper (Cu)-aluminum (Al) compositions are predicted to be more prone to spread-out plastic deformation and hence profuse shear banding. This structural perspective has guided us to locate a Zr61Ti2Cu25Al12 (ZT1) BMG that exhibits a record-breaking fracture toughness, on par with the palladium (Pd)-based BMG recently developed at Caltech. At the same time, the new BMG consists of common metals and has robust glass-forming ability. Interestingly, the ZT1 BMG derives its high toughness from its high propensity for crack deflection and local loading-mode change (from mode I to substantially mode II) at the crack tip due to extensive shear band interactions. A crack-resistance curve (R-curve) has been obtained following American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards, employing both “single-specimen” and “multiple-specimen” techniques as well as fatigue precracked specimens. The combination of high strength and fracture toughness places ZT1 atop all engineering metallic alloys in the strength-toughness Ashby diagram, pushing the envelop accessible to a structural material in terms of its damage tolerance.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are indebted to their former Ph.D. students Qiang He, Yongqiang Cheng, Li Zhang, Zhen-dong Zhu for their contributions to this study, and to Prof. J.K Shang for assistance with the fracture mechanics analysis. This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under contract No. 2007CB613906 and National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 51171180. EM was supported at JHU by the US NSF-DMR-0904188.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Jian Xu

  2. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218, USA

    Evan Ma

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  1. Jian Xu
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  2. Evan Ma
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Correspondence to Jian Xu or Evan Ma.

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Supplementary Material

Movies

Different degree of strain localization in simulated Cu64Zr36 and (b) Cu20Zr80 MGs. The blue dots correspond to nonaffine deformation (mostly plastic strains resulting from shear transformations) induced by tensile loading. The movies record the subsequent deformation processes. While Cu64Zr36 shows an obvious shear offset associated with a dominant shear band, Cu20Zr80 exhibits spread-out shear transformations (Cu40Zr60 behaved in a similar way). This different tendency toward strain localization, due to the difference in the structural order between these two MGs, is also demonstrated in Fig. 5 using snapshots from the two movies.

The movies can be found in the supplementary material at http://dx.doi.org/jmr.2014.160.

Electronic Supplementary Material

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Xu, J., Ma, E. Damage-tolerant Zr-Cu-Al-based bulk metallic glasses with record-breaking fracture toughness. Journal of Materials Research 29, 1489–1499 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2014.160

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2014.160

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