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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Melting is well understood in terms of the Lindemann criterion, which
essentially states that crystalline materials melt when the thermal vibrationsof their atoms become so vigorous that they shake themselves free of the binding forces. This picture does not necessarily have to hold for glasses, where the nature of the solid–liquid cross-over is highly debated. The Lindemann criterion implies that the thermal expansion coefficients of crystals are inversely proportional to their melting temperatures. Here we find that, in contrast, the thermal expansion coefficient of glasses decreases more strongly with increasing glass temperature, which marks the liquid–solid cross-over in this material class. However, this proportionality returns when the thermal expansion coefficient is scaled by the fragility, a measure of particle cooperativity. Therefore, for a glass to become liquid, it is not sufficient to simply overcome the interparticle binding energies.
Instead, more energy must be invested to break up the typical cooperative particle network that is common to glassy materials. The thermal expansion coefficient of the liquid phase reveals similar anomalous behaviour and is universally enhanced by a constant factor of approximately 3. These universalities allow the estimation of glass temperatures from thermal expansion and vice versa.
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.
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.
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.
Predicting nonlinear physical aging of glasses from equilibrium relaxation via the material time
(2022)
The noncrystalline glassy state of matter plays a role in virtually all fields of materials science and offers complementary properties to those of the crystalline counterpart. The caveat of the glassy state is that it is out of equilibrium and therefore exhibits physical aging, i.e., material properties change over time. For half a century, the physical aging of glasses has been known to be described well by the material-time concept, although the existence of a material time has never been directly validated. We do this here by successfully predicting the aging of the molecular glass 4-vinyl-1,3-dioxolan-2-one from its linear relaxation behavior. This establishes the defining property of the material time. Via the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, our results imply that physical aging can be predicted from thermal-equilibrium fluctuation data, which is confirmed by computer simulations of a binary liquid mixture.