Exceptional damage-tolerance of a medium-entropy alloy CrCoNi at cryogenic temperatures

By B. Gludovatz, A. Hohenwarter, Keli V. S. Thurston, Hongbin Bei, Zhenggang Wu, Easo P. George, R. Ritchie. Nature Communications, 2016

1,699 citations recorded by the source corpus.

High-entropy alloys are an intriguing new class of metallic materials that derive their properties from being multi-element systems that can crystallize as a single phase, despite containing high concentrations of five or more elements with different crystal structures. Here we examine an equiatomic medium-entropy alloy containing only three elements, CrCoNi, as a single-phase face-centred cubic solid solution, which displays strength-toughness properties that exceed those of all high-entropy alloys and most multi-phase alloys. At room temperature, the alloy shows tensile strengths of almost 1 GPa, failure strains of ∼70% and KJIc fracture-toughness values above 200 MPa m1/2; at cryogenic temperatures strength, ductility and toughness of the CrCoNi alloy improve to strength levels above 1.3 GPa, failure strains up to 90% and KJIc values of 275 MPa m1/2. Such properties appear to result from continuous steady strain hardening, which acts to suppress plastic instability, resulting from pronounced dislocation activity and deformation-induced nano-twinning. High-entropy alloys derive their properties from being multi-element systems that can crystallize as a single phase. Here, the authors examine a medium-entropy alloy, CrCoNi, which displays strength-toughness properties exceeding those of high-entropy alloys and resulting from steady strain hardening.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e6c8ba071980b9dbec0c99de085ddac059730a72

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. Shiteng Zhao
2. M. Meyers
3. Zezhou Li
4. M. Ghazisaeidi
5. Zongrui Pei
6. Xianglin Liu
7. Jiaxin Zhang
8. C. Varvenne

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Shiteng Zhao
2. M. Meyers
3. Zezhou Li
4. M. Ghazisaeidi
5. M. Shih
6. Carlyn R. LaRosa
7. Andrew J. Wright
8. Zongrui Pei

Citations in the corpus

• Mechanical properties of high-entropy alloys with emphasis on face-centered cubic alloys (2019, methodology): “EBSD-IPF (Electron backscatter diffraction-Inverse pole figure) images showing annealing twins in (a) CrCoNi alloy [145] and (b)”