Enhancement of strength-ductility trade-off in a high-entropy alloy through a heterogeneous structure

By S. W. Wu, G. Wang, Qi Wang, Y. Jia, J. Yi, Qijie Zhai, Jiabin Liu, B. Sun, Haijian Chu, Jun Shen and 3 more. Acta Materialia, 2019

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Abstract The improvement in strength is usually accompanied by ductility loss in structural materials, which is a long-standing conflict referred as the strength-ductility trade-off. Here we present a heterogeneous-structures-architecting strategy, in which we design bulk high-entropy alloys with the largely-enhanced strength-ductility trade-off, possessing a yield strength of 711 MPa, a tensile strength of 928 MPa, and a uniform elongation of 30.3%. Such an enhancement of the strength-ductility trade-off is due to the microstructure comprised with a combination of the non-recrystallized and recrystallized grains arranged in complex heterogeneous structures with a characteristic dimension spanning from the submicron scale to the coarse-sized scale. The heterogeneous structures in the high-entropy alloy are produced by cold-rolling, followed by intermediate-temperature-annealing. Our results demonstrate that heterogeneous designs can be accomplished effectively by simple thermal treatments, which offer a design strategy towards a new generation of high-strength and high-ductility high-entropy alloys.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea6bbe23907c50d2af22ef799180d025ab16643d