5 Werkstofftechnik
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- Plasticity (4)
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- Shape-memory alloys (2)
- Shear bands (2)
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Atomistic deformation simulations in the nominally elastic regime are performed for a model binary glass with strain rates as low as 10 4 /s (corresponding to 0.01 shear strain per 1 μs). A strain rate dependent elastic softening due to a micro-plasticity is observed, which is mediated by thermally-activated localized structural transformations (LSEs). A closer inspection of the atomic-scale structure indicates the material response is distinctly different for two types of local atomic environments. A system spanning iscosahe- drally coordinated substructure responds purely elastically, whereas the remaining substructure admits both elastic and microplastic evolution. This leads to a heterogeneous internal stress distribution which, upon unloading, results in negative creep and complete residual-strain recovery. A detailed structural analysis in terms of local stress, atomic displacement, and SU(2) local bonding topology shows such mi- croscopic processes can result in large changes in local stress and are more likely to occur in geomet- rically frustrated regions characterized by higher free volume and softer elastic stiffness. The thermally- activated LSE activity also mediates structural relaxation, and in this way should be distinguished from stress-driven shear transformation activity which only rejuvenates glass structure. The frequency of LSE activity, and therefore the amount of micro-plasticity, is found to be related to the degree to which the glassy state is relaxed. These insights shed atomistic light onto the structural origins that may govern re- cent experimental observations of significant structural evolution in response to elastic loading protocols.
We present an easy-to-apply method to predict structural trends in the internal nucleation tendency of oxide glasses. The approach is based on calculated crystal fracture surface energies derived from easily accessible diatomic bond energy and crystal lattice data. The applicability of the method is demonstrated on literature nucleation data for isochemically crystallizing oxide glasses.
The typical experimental conditions inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM), such as ultra-high vacuum, high-energy electron irradiation, and surface effects of ultrathin TEM specimens, can be the origin of unexpected microstructural changes compared with that of bulk material during in situ thermal-annealing experiments. In this paper, we report on the microstructural changes of a Fe–15%Si alloy during in situ TEM annealing, where, in its bulk form, it exhibits an ordering transformation from D03 to B2 at 650 °C. Using a heating-pot type double tilt holder with a proportional–integral–differential control system, we observed the precipitation of α-Fe both at the sample surface and inside the sample. Surface precipitates formed via surface diffusion are markedly large, several tens of nm, whereas precipitates inside the specimen, which are surrounded by Fe-poor regions, reach a maximum size of 20 nm. This unexpected microstructural evolution could be attributed to vacancies on Si sites, which are induced due to high-energy electron irradiation before heating, as well as enhanced thermal diffusion of Fe atoms.
Plastic deformation in crystals is mediated by the motion of line defects known as dislocations.
For decades, dislocation activity has been treated as a homogeneous, smooth continuous process. However, it is now recognized that plasticity can be determined by longrange correlated and intermittent collective dislocation processes, known as avalanches. Here we demonstrate in body-centered cubic Nb how the long-range and scale-free dynamics at room temperature are progressively quenched out with decreasing temperature, eventually revealing intermittency with a characteristic length scale that approaches the Burgers Vector itself. Plasticity is shown to be bimodal across the studied temperature regime, with conventional thermally-activated smooth plastic flow (‘mild’) coexisting with sporadic Bursts (‘wild’) controlled by athermal screw dislocation activity, thereby violating the classical Notion of temperature-dependent screw dislocation motion at low temperatures. An abrupt increase of the athermal avalanche component is identified at the critical temperature of the material.
Our results indicate that plasticity at any scale can be understood in terms of the coexistence of these mild and wild modes of deformation, which could help design better alloys by suppressing one of the two modes in desired temperature Windows.
We demonstrate the gradual shift from scale-free intermittent microplasticity to a scale-dependent behavior via the introduction of a variety of microstructural features within the Al-Cu binary alloy system. As long as the obstacles to dislocation motion remain shearable, the statistics of intermittent microplasticity has fat-tailed contributions. The introduction of incoherent precipitates leads to a complete transition from scale-free powerlaw scaling to an exponential and scale-dependent distribution. These results demonstrate how non-Gaussian interactions survive across different microstructures and further suggest that characteristic microstructural length scales and obstacle pinning-strengths are of secondary importance for the intermittency statistics, as long as dislocations can shear their local environment.
BAM! This issue of Advanced Engineering Materials celebrates 150 years of scientific and technical research at the interface between academia, industry and politics. Rooted in 1871 at the birth of the German Empire and at that time located in simple basements and barracks, the institutional development began around mechanical metallurgy of iron and steel and represents today a diverse portfolio of fore-front research that orients itself along tomorrow's societal challenges and long-term research horizons.
Using the creation relaxation algorithm developed for the atomistic modeling of the high-dose irradiation limit of crystalline systems, we explore the limits of the structural rejuvenation of a highly excited model binary glass. This high-energy athermal amorphous structure exhibits a direct transition to homogeneous plastic flow and a microstructure that is largely insensitive to this flow, being characterized by a porous system-spanning network of minimally frustrated structural motifs. The observed homogeneous plasticity is mediated by the same string-like structural excitations, which mediate structural relaxation and microplasticity at finite temperature in more relaxed structures. This highly rejuvenated structural asymptote is not far from the structural state of regions, which have experienced athermal shear localization in more relaxed samples, suggesting an optimally rejuvenated glassy structure will always be limited by that produced by shear localization.
Metallic glasses are known to have a remarkably robust yield strength, admitting Weibull moduli as high as for crystalline engineering alloys. However, their postyielding behavior is strongly varying, with large scatter in both flow stress levels and strains at failure. Using x-ray tomography, we reveal how a strain-dependent internal evolution of shear-band cavities underlies this unpredictable postyielding response.We demonstrate how macroscopic strain softening coincides with the first detection of internal shear-band cavitation. Cavity growth during plastic flow is found to follow a power law, which yields a fractal dimension and a roughness exponent in excellent agreement with self-similar surface properties obtained after fracture. These findings demonstrate how internal microcracking coexists with shear-band plasticity along the plastic part of a stress-strain curve, rationalizing the large variability of plastic flow behavior seen for metallic glasses.
Advanced experimental and numerical approaches are being developed to
capture the localization of plasticity at the nanometer scale as a function of the multiscale and heterogeneous microstructure present in metallic materials.
These innovative approaches promise new avenues to understand microstructural effects on mechanical properties, accelerate alloy design, and enable more accurate mechanical property prediction. This article provides an overview of emerging approaches with a focus on the localization of plasticity by crystallographic slip. New insights into the mechanisms and mechanics of strain localization are addressed. The consequences of the localization of plasticity by deformation slip for mechanical properties of metallic materials are also detailed.
Magnetic shape memory alloys have been examined intensively due to their multifunctionality and multitude of physical phenomena. For both areas, epitaxial films are promising since the absence of grain boundaries is beneficial for applications in microsystems and they also allow to understand the influence of a reduced dimension on the physical effects. Despite many efforts on epitaxial films, two particular aspects remain open.
First, it is not clear how to keep epitaxial growth up to high film thickness, which is required for most microsystems.
Second, it is unknown how the microstructure of premartensite, a precursor state during the martensitic transformation, manifests in films and differs from that in bulk.
Here, we focus on micrometer-thick austenitic Ni-Mn-Ga films and explain two distinct microstructural features by combining high-resolution electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction methods. First, we identify pyramid-shaped defects, which originate from {1 1 1} growth twinning and cause the breakdown of epitaxial growth. We show that a sufficiently thick Cr buffer layer prevents this breakdown and allows epitaxial growth up to a thickness of at least 4 μm. Second, premartensite exhibits a hierarchical microstructure in epitaxial films. The reduced dimension of films results in variant selection and regions with distinct premartensite variants, unlike its microstructure in bulk.
Ni-Mn-Ga shape-memory alloys are promising candidates for large strain actuation and magnetocaloric cooling devices. In view of potential small-scale applications, we probe here nanomechanically the stress-induced austenite–martensite transition in single crystalline austenitic thin films as a function of temperature. In 0.5 μm thin films, a marked incipient phase transformation to martensite is observed during nanoindentation, leaving behind pockets of residual martensite after unloading. These nanomechanical instabilities occur irrespective of deformation rate and temperature, are Weibull distributed, and reveal large spatial variations in transformation stress. In contrast, at a larger film thickness of 2 μm fully reversible transformations occur, and mechanical loading remains entirely smooth. Ab-initio simulations demonstrate how an in-plane constraint can considerably increase the martensitic transformation stress, explaining the thickness-dependent nanomechanical behavior. These findings for a shape-memory Heusler alloy give insights into how reduced dimensions and constraints can lead to unexpectedly large transformation stresses that need to be considered in small-scale actuation design.
Metallic glasses (MGs) are known to be structurally heterogeneous at the nanometer (nm) scale. In addition, elastic property mapping has indicated the presence of at least an order-of-magnitude larger length scales, of which the origin continues to remain unknown. Here we demonstrate the existence of an elastic decorrelation length of the order of 100 nm in a Zr-based bulk MG using spatially resolved elastic property mapping via nanoindentation. Since compositional modulations sufficiently large to account for this elastic microstructure were not resolved by analytical scanning-transmission electron microscopy, chemical phase separation such as spinodal decomposition cannot explain their occurrence as previously suggested. Instead, we argue that the revealed long-range elastic modulations stem from structural variations affecting the local density. These emerge during solidification and are strongly influenced by the cooling constraints imposed on bulk MGs during the casting process.
Extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) conducted on an equiatomic MoNbTaW bcc medium-entropy alloy that was annealed at 2273 K reveals unexpectedly small 1st and 2nd shell element-specific lattice distortions. An experimental size-mismatch parameter, δexp, is determined to be ca. 50% lower than the corresponding calculated value. Around W, short-range order (SRO) preferring 4d elements in the 1st and 2nd shells persists. A Nb-W ordering is found, which is reminiscent of ordering emerging at lower temperatures in the B2(Mo,W;Ta,Nb)- and B32(Nb,W)-phases. With high-temperature ordering preferences in fcc also foreshadowing low-temperature phase, these findings suggest a general feature of high-temperature SRO.
Functional fatigue of shape-memory alloys is a considerable threat to the reliable service of actuation devices. Here, we demonstrate the essentially degradation-free cyclic phase-transformation behavior of Ni-Mn-Ga microcrystals up to one million stress-driven superelastic cycles. Cyclic dissipation amounts to about 1/5 of the bulk counterpart and remains unaffected during cycling, even after the introduction of dislocation structures via plastic straining. Plastic yielding and the transformation stress largely exceed the known bulk values. However, the transformation-stress is found to depend on plastic pre-straining, which suggests that the size-affected transformation stress is sensitive to the initial defect structure and that it can be tuned by a targeted introduction of dislocations. These findings demonstrate the high suitability of Ni-Mn-Ga as a robust shape-memory alloy in small-scale functional device engineering.
In the past two decades, numerous relaxation or physical aging experiments of metallic glasses have revealed signatures of intermittent atomic-scale processes. Revealed via intensity cross-correlations from coherent scattering using X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS), the observed abrupt changes in the time-domain of atomic motion does not fit the picture of gradual slowing down of relaxation times and their origin continues to remain unclear. Using a binary Lennard-Jones model glass subjected to microsecond-long isotherms, we show here that temporally and spatially heterogeneous atomic-cluster activity at different length-scales drive the emergence of highly non-monotonous intensity cross-correlations. The simulated XPCS experiments reveal a variety of time-dependent intensity-cross correlations that, depending on both the structural evolution and the 𝑞-space sampling, give detailed insights into the possible structural origins of intermittent aging measured with XPCS.
Advancements in bulk metallic glass thermoplastic forming unleash the potential to fabricate microscale metallic features with unparalleled precision and durability, i.e. microspine gripping structures for mobility platforms on planetary or in-space robots. Four designs of grippers were fabricated and rigorously tested. Coefficient of friction on four test surfaces were measured and compared to SiC paper and Velcro. The hardness and elasticity of the bulk metallic glasses make them a game-changer in the field, offering a superior alternative to conventional nonmetallic grippers.
AbstractTwo‐photon polymerization (2PP) additive manufacturing (AM) utilizes feedstocks of ceramic nanoparticles of a few nanometers in diameter, enabling the fabrication of highly accurate technical ceramic design with structural details as small as 500 nm. The performance of these materials is expected to differ from conventional AM ceramics, as nanoparticles and three‐dimensional printing at high resolution introduce new microstructural aspects. This study applies 2PP‐AM of yttria‐stabilized zirconia to investigate the mechanical response behavior under compressive load, probing the influence of smallest structural units induced by the line packing during the printing process, design of sintered microblocks, and sintering temperature and thereby microstructure. We find a dissipative mechanical response enhanced by sintering at lower temperatures than conventional. The pursued 2PP‐AM approach yields a microstructured material with an increased number of grain boundaries that proposedly play a major role in facilitating energy dissipation within the here printed ceramic material. This microplastic response is further triggered by the filigree structures induced by hollow line packing at the order of the critical defect size of ceramics. Together, these unique aspects made accessible by the 2PP‐AM approach contribute to a heterogeneous nano‐ and microstructure, and hint toward opportunities for tailoring the mechanical response in future ceramic applications.