Plate impact experiments have been carried out to examine the influence of grain boundary characteristics on the dynamic tensile response of Cu samples with grain sizes of 30, 60, 100, and 200 lm. The peak compressive stress is $1.50 GPa for all experiments, low enough to cause an early stage of incipient spall damage that is correlated to the surrounding microstructure in metallographic analysis. The experimental configuration used in this work permits real-time measurements of the sample free surface velocity histories, soft-recovery, and postimpact examination of the damaged microstructure. The resulting tensile damage in the recovered samples is examined using optical and electron microscopy along with micro x-ray tomography. The free surface velocity measurements are used to calculate spall strength values and show no significant effect of the grain size. However, differences are observed in the free surface velocity behavior after the pull-back minima, when reacceleration occurs. The magnitude of the spall peak and its acceleration rate are dependent upon the grain size. The quantitative, postimpact, metallographic analyses of recovered samples show that for the materials with grain sizes larger than 30 lm, the void volume fraction and the average void size increase with increasing grain size. In the 30 and 200 lm samples, void coalescence is observed to dominate the void growth behavior, whereas in 60 and 100 lm samples, void growth is dominated by the growth of isolated voids. Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) observations show that voids preferentially nucleate and grow at grain boundaries with high angle misorientation. However, special boundaries corresponding to Rl (low angle, < 5) and R3 ($60 <111> misorientation) types are more resistant to void formation. Finally, micro x-ray tomography results show three dimensional (3D) views of the damage fields consistent with the two dimensional (2D) surface observations. Based on these findings, mechanisms for the void growth and coalescence are proposed. V

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Plate impact experiments were conducted to examine the dynamic tensile response of Zr-based bulk amorphous alloys (BAAs) having a nominal composition of Zr56.7Cu15.3Ni12.5Nb5.0Al10.0Y0.5. The experimental configuration used in our work permitted soft recovery of the samples to allow a careful examination of the fractured samples along with real-time measurements of the sample free-surface velocity (FSV) histories. Tensile loading was preceded by elastic compressive loading to peak stresses in the 3.6 to 6.0 GPa range. Tensile damage in the recovered samples was examined using optical and electron microscopy. The microscopy results showed that the BAA samples exhibit a brittle behavior (as a glass) at the macroscopic level and a ductile behavior (as a metal) at the microscopic level; in addition, corrugations and bumps are observed at the nanoscale. The observed fracture morphologies are related to three key features present in our spall experiments: preceding compressive stress (3.6–6.0 GPa), high tensile loading rate (∼106/s), high mean tensile stress (∼2.3 GPa); and are intrinsically related to the amorphous glassy structure of the BAAs (free volume content). We propose that the compressive stress depletes the free volume content. With increasing compressive stress, the available free volume decreases causing a suppression of shear stresses during tension. Thus, the mean tensile component becomes more dominant at higher stresses. Consequently, the observed surface morphology results from brittle cleavage, causing an increased damage localization in the recovered samples spalled at higher stresses. These observations support the inferences made from measurements of FSV histories. The high tensile loading rate is proposed to be responsible for cracking by multiple shear band propagation and interception, rendering the observed serrated surface morphology. Finally, we proposed that the corrugations are created due to a succession of arrest and propagation of mode I cracks. A subsequent dilatation, due to the effect of the tensile mean stress, caused the corrugations to evolve to bump-type features with sizes in the range of 10–100 nm. Our proposed mechanisms, although qualitative, constitute a systematic attempt to provide an explanation for the fracture morphologies observed in spalled BAA samples.

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