Micromechanical investigation of the role of percolation on ductility enhancement in metallic glass composites

In contrast to the catastrophic failure arising from the unconstrained shear band propagation in monolithic bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), the introduction of second phases in BMG composites (BMGCs) provides an extrinsic way of reducing the magnitude of strain localization, and thus may significantly improve the ductility. For this mechanism to be effective, a multitude of experiments have found that the volume fraction should reach a rather high threshold of about 30–40%, corresponding to the percolation limit with variations depending on the second phase morphology. However, we demonstrate here that an enhanced ductility can be realized in a BMGC made from crystalline Ni foam (completely percolated even with a volume fraction of about 11%), suggesting the resistance in the second phase to the impinging shear-force dipole from neighboring shear bands be the dominant factor for such a ductility improvement. The shortcomings of percolation approach, as well as the synergistic effects of microstructure and mismatches in mechanical properties, are investigated here in a thermo-mechanical finite element method based on the free volume model and plasticity-induced heating. The effectiveness of ductility improvement will be demonstrated by calculating the probability distributions of the shear-band effective strain.