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INTRODUCTIONDue to the lack of crystalline structure, bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) may achieve interesting properties, including high strength and high hardness, excellent corrosion resistance, high wear resistance, very good soft magnetic properties, and, depending on composition, biocompatibility.1,2 The high strength of BMGs is sometimes accompanied by plastic deformation and their deformation and fracture mechanisms are quite different from crystalline materials. [3][4][5][6][7] Bulk metallic glasses have strengths approaching the theoretical limit, 8 but their plasticity at room temperature is typically very low. In uniaxial tension, the plastic strain is almost zero. 9 For most of the known BMGs, plastic strain at room temperature is limited, less than 2%, even under compression, resulting from pronounced shear localization and work softening. The lack of plasticity makes BMGs prone to catastrophic failure in
Mechanical Response of Metallic Glasses: Insights from In-situ High Energy X-ray DiffractionMihai Stoica, Jayanta Das, Jozef Bednarčik, Gang Wang, Gavin Vaughan, Wei Hua Wang, Jürgen Eckert load-bearing conditions and restricts their application. This also hinders the precise study of some fundamental issues in glasses, such as the deformation mechanism and the dynamics of plastic deformation, in which large plasticity is needed for detailed analysis.9 Plastic deformation of metallic glasses at room temperature occurs through the formation and evolution of shear bands and is localized in thin shear bands.10 Therefore, brittleness is regarded as an intrinsic defect of metallic glasses.Many methods have been developed and employed to rule out the deformation mechanisms characteristic to BMGs.11 Recently, characterization of amorphous materials by diffraction methods for the purpose of strain scanning was established.12 Several glasses were investigated since then, using different synchrotron sources: HASYLAB at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) Hamburg, Germany; European Synchrotron Radiation Facilities (ESRF) Grenoble, France; or Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory, USA. Monochromatic hard x-rays with energies at 80-100 keV were used for these experiments.Ex-situ compression tests are usually performed to study the mechanical behavior of BMGs. This method is relatively simple and suitable for small samples. Tensile tests have technical limitations. First, for such tests a dog-bone shaped plate or rod sample is necessary, with a length of a few centimeters. This requires a BMG sample with quite large geometrical dimensions, which cannot be achieved by a poor glass former. The sample should be homogeneous, but in practice some small voids (as pores or oxides inclusions) may be present upon casting. Another limitation comes from the device used for tests-it is quite diffi cult to create a proper clamping system. Due to the difference in hardness between BMGs and the hardened steel used for tools, the BMG sample tends to slide from the grips.See the sidebar for ...