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Fracture and toughening mechanisms in nanotwinned and nanolayered materials

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Abstract

Hierarchical nanotwinned and nanolayered structures, which are specially designed by introducing multiple interfaces, have exhibited superior resistance to fracture and failure. In this article, some recent advances in computational and experimental studies aimed to understand the fracture behavior and toughening mechanisms in these materials are reviewed. New stratagems on manipulating both microstructure (such as the size of nanotwin bundles) and mechanics (mainly related to loading orientation with respect to twin boundaries) to mediate the deformation and toughening modes provide promising paths to further optimize the properties of nanotwinned and nanolayered materials.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Z.S. You for inspirational discussion. L.L. acknowledges support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, Grant Nos. 51931010 and 92163202), the Key Research Program of Frontier Science and International partnership program (Grant No. GJHZ2029), CAS, and the LiaoNing Revitalization Talents Program (Grant No. XLYC1802026). H.G. acknowledges a research startup grant (002479-00001) from Nanyang Technological University and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore.

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  1. These authors have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

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

    Huaizhi Zhao & Lei Lu

  2. Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR, Singapore, Singapore

    Zhi Li & Huajian Gao

  3. School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Huajian Gao

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  1. Huaizhi Zhao
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Correspondence to Huajian Gao or Lei Lu.

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Zhao, H., Li, Z., Gao, H. et al. Fracture and toughening mechanisms in nanotwinned and nanolayered materials. MRS Bulletin 47, 839–847 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-022-00376-5

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