“Self-sharpening” tungsten high-entropy alloy

By Xingfa Liu, Zhilin Tian, Xianfeng Zhang, Haihua Chen, Tian-Wei Liu, Yan Chen, Yunjiang Wang, L. Dai. 2020

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract “Self-sharpening”, a material maintaining its acute head shape during penetration, is highly desirable in a wide range of engineering applications. However, it remains a great challenge to make it occur in conventional single-principal-element alloys. Here, we develop a new chemical-disordered multi-phase tungsten high-entropy alloy that exhibits outstanding self-sharpening capability, in sharp contrast to conventional tungsten alloys only showing mushrooming. This alloy consists of a BCC dendrite phase and a rhombohedral μ phase embedded in the continuous FCC matrix, and such a unique microstructure leads to a 10–20% better penetration performance than conventional tungsten heavy alloys. We show that emergence of the self-sharpening is triggered by the ultrastrong μ phase stimulated dynamic recrystallization softening mediated shear banding. This study sheds light on the origin of self-sharpening and might open new opportunities for developing high-performance penetrator materials.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be07a6904136e5c9f651c138a0bf263f76d3e385