Abstract
High-entropy alloys (HEAs) in which interesting physical, chemical, and structural properties are being continuously revealed have recently attracted extensive attention. Body-centered cubic (bcc) HEAs, particularly those based on refractory elements are promising for high-temperature application but generally fail by early cracking with limited plasticity at room temperature, which limits their malleability and widespread uses. Here, the “metastability-engineering” strategy is exploited in brittle bcc HEAs via tailoring the stability of the constituent phases, and transformation-induced ductility and work-hardening capability are successfully achieved. This not only sheds new insights on the development of HEAs with excellent combination of strength and ductility, but also has great implications on overcoming the long-standing strength–ductility tradeoff of metallic materials in general.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1701678 |
| Journal | Advanced Materials |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue number | 30 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 11 2017 |
Funding
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51531001, 51671018, 51422101, and 51371003), the 111 Project (No. B07003), the International S&T Cooperation Program of China (No. 2015DFG52600), and the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (No. IRT_14R05). Y.W. acknowledges the financial support from the Top-Notch Young Talents Program and Fundamental Research Fund for the Central Universities (No. FRF-TP-15-004C1). A portion of this research used resources at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The authors thank Matt Frost for the technical support of neutron experiment. This manuscript has been coauthored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Keywords
- ductilization
- high-entropy alloys
- metastability engineering
- phase transformations