Suppression of Catastrophic Failure in Metallic Glass–Polyisoprene Nanolaminate Containing Nanopillars

Abstract

One considerable concern in metallic glass is enhancing ductility by suppressing catastrophic failure by the instantaneous propagation of shear bands. Compressed nanopillars with alternating CuZr metallic glass and polyisoprene nanolaminates exhibit >30% enhancement in plastic flow, as compared with monolithic glass, without sacrifice of strength. A suppression of stochastic strain burst signature in these metallic glass‐polymer composites is reported, which is an undesirable characteristic ubiquitously present in monolithic metallic glass and in metallic glass‐metal composites. The intermittent stochastic signature is quantified in each metallic glass‐containing nanolaminate system by constructing histograms of burst size distributions and provide theoretical foundation for each behavior. The exceptional mechanical properties emergent in these MG‐polymer nanolaminate composites are attributed to the combination of nanometer size‐induced shear band suppression in metallic glasses and the damping capability of the polyisoprene layers.

Manipulation of free volumes in a metallic glass through Xe-ion irradiation

“…The elastic coupling between the shear-deformed weak spots generates a shear-avalanche, or a strain burst [68]. Once the shear deformation of the weak spots occurs, its localized shear stress is eventually weakened until the strain burst is completed [72,75,76]. This weakening effect leads to the formation of shear bands [76], indicating that the critical avalanche value is determined by the total stress drop per weak spot.…”

Crackling Noise in Disordered Materials

“…The resulting slip avalanche size distributions, energy distributions, slip velocity distributions, duration distributions, and power spectra are reviewed in recent papers (7,15,37,38). The model showing elastic weakening has been shown to agree with brittle amorphous materials (8,40). Extensions of the simple model have been applied to slip avalanches in densely packed and slowly sheared granular materials (2,41,42).…”

Probing failure susceptibilities of earthquake faults using small-quake tidal correlations

“…The assumption that the rate of small event activity increases with increasing stress emerges naturally from this simple model and has been observed in earthquake faults 5 , deformation experiments 27,28 and other models 4,20-24 . (As mentioned above, however, transient effects from the surrounding region or other fault sections obscure the observed increase of event rates, rendering observed rates alone insufficient to predict the onset of impeding large earthquakes 7,8 ).…”

“…The underlying microscopic model predicts the universal (that is, detail-independent) statistical features of many sheared stickslip systems, including earthquake size distributions 4,[20][21][22]29 and size distributions of slip-avalanches in sheared nanosized crystals 27 , amorphous materials 28 and granular matter 23,24 . The microscopic model and its probabilistic formulation capture the basic features, rather than the fine details of each earthquake fault and hence may only yield qualitative predictions of some statistical observations.…”