Super-plasticity of Zr64.80Cu14.85Ni10.35Al10 bulk metallic glass at room temperature

Abstract

Generally, bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) exhibit a very limited plastic deformation under a compression load at room temperature, often less than 2% before fracturing. In this letter, through an appropriate choice of BMGs’ composition, an amorphous rod of Zr64.80Cu14.85Ni10.35Al10 with a diameter of 2 mm was prepared by using copper mold suction casting. X-ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimetry were utilized to determine its structure and thermal stability, and the uniaxial compression test was adopted to study its plastic deformation behavior at room temperature simultaneously. The results showed that the glass transition temperature and onset temperature of the exothermic reaction of the amorphous rod were 646 and 750 K, respectively, and its micro-hardness was 594.7 Hv. During compression, when the engineering strain and engineering stress arrived at 9.05% and 1732 MPa, respectively, i.e., the true strain and true stress reached 9.42% and 1560 MPa, respectively, the amorphous rod started to yield. After yielding, with the increase of load, the strain increased and the glass rod ultimately were compressed into flake-like form. Although the maximum engineering strain was larger than 70%, i.e., the maximum true strain exceeded by 120%, the amorphous specimen was not fractured, indicating that it has super-plasticity at room temperature. Through the appropriate choice of composition and optimization of the technological process, flexible BMG with super-plasticity at room temperature could be produced.