Mechanisms of Failure in Nanoscale Metallic Glass
Abstract
The emergence of size-dependent mechanical strength in nanosized materials is now well-established, but no fundamental understanding of fracture toughness or flaw sensitivity in nanostructures exists. We report the fabrication and in situ fracture testing of ∼70 nm diameter Ni–P metallic glass samples with a structural flaw. Failure occurs at the structural flaw in all cases, and the failure strength of flawed samples was reduced by 40% compared to unflawed samples. We explore deformation and failure mechanisms in a similar nanometallic glass via molecular dynamics simulations, which corroborate sensitivity to flaws and reveal that the structural flaw shifts the failure mechanism from shear banding to cavitation. We find that failure strength and deformation in amorphous nanosolids depend critically on the presence of flaws.
Additional Information
© 2014 American Chemical Society. Received: July 22, 2014; Revised: September 3, 2014; Publication Date (Web): September 8, 2014. X.W.G. thanks the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and D.Z.C. thanks the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for financial support. J.R.G. acknowledges the National Science Foundation (DMR-1204864). The authors are very grateful to the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech for the availability of critical cleanroom facilities, Carol Garland for TEM assistance, Rachel Liontas for electroplating templates, and Boyu Fan and Timothy Tsang for help with electroplating. M.J.Z., Z.X.W., and Y.W.Z. gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore and the use of computing resources at the A*STAR Computational Resource Centre, Singapore.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - nl5027869_si_001.pdf
Supplemental Material - nl5027869_si_002.avi
Supplemental Material - nl5027869_si_003.avi
Supplemental Material - nl5027869_si_004.avi
Supplemental Material - nl5027869_si_005.avi
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 49685
- DOI
- 10.1021/nl5027869
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20140915-083240514
- National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- NSF
- DMR-1204864
- Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
- Created
-
2014-09-15Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Kavli Nanoscience Institute