Abstract
Metallic glasses (MGs) are gaining immense technological significance due to their unique structure-property relationship with renewed interest in diverse field of applications including biomedical implants, commercial products, machinery parts, and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Various processing routes have been adopted to fabricate MGs with short-range ordering which is believed to be the genesis of unique structure. Understanding the structure of these unique materials is a long-standing unsolved mystery. Unlike crystalline counterpart, the outstanding properties of metallic glasses owing to the absence of grain boundaries is reported to exhibit high hardness, excellent strength, high elastic strain, and anti-corrosion properties. The combination of these remarkable properties would significantly contribute to improvement of performance and reliability of these materials when incorporated as bio-implants. The nucleation and growth of metallic glasses is driven by thermodynamics and kinetics in non-equilibrium conditions. This comprehensive review article discusses the various attributes of metallic glasses with an aim to understand the fundamentals of relationship process-structure-property existing in such unique class of material.
Highlights
Metallic Glasses (MG) are a class of materials which has caught the eye of many researchers since Klement et al’s [1] first work on Au-Si alloys in early 1960’s
Intense research in Metallic glasses (MGs) has led to the discovery of thin film metallic glasses (TFMGs) since the glass forming ability (GFA) can be further improved and wider composition ranges for amorphization can be obtained
While exploring new TFMGs it is critical to achieve the right combination of elements which would lead to amorphous state and the process is considered as a surmount bottleneck for mechanical systems (MEMS)/Bio-MEMS device fabrication
Summary
Metallic Glasses (MG) are a class of materials which has caught the eye of many researchers since Klement et al’s [1] first work on Au-Si alloys in early 1960’s. Intense research in MGs has led to the discovery of thin film metallic glasses (TFMGs) since the GFA can be further improved and wider composition ranges for amorphization can be obtained. In case of Zr-Cu binary TFMG, Zr-rich composition showed a good corrosion resistance whereas the one with Cu-rich composition showed poor corrosion resistance depicting that the properties varies with composition [22] It is only when they are annealed in super cooled liquid range, properties such as resistivity, strength, and elasticity was found to be improved. This can lead to a new class of materials which could find promising application in switches and actuators in MEMS devices [7].
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