From the production of tougher, more durable smart phones
and other electronic devices, to a wider variety of longer lasting biomedical implants, bulk metallic glasses are poised to be mainstay materials for the 21st Century. Featuring a non-crystalline amorphous structure, bulk metallic glasses can be as strong or even stronger than steel, as malleable as plastics, conduct electricity and resist corrosion.
These materials would seem to have it all save for one problem: they are often brittle, with a poor and uneven resistance to fatigue that makes their reliability questionable. The creation of multicomponent bulk-metallic glass composites is addressing this issue but the problem remains for monolithic metallic glasses, which are major components of bulk metallic composites.
A new study by a collaboration of Berkeley Lab and Caltech researchers may point the way to improving the fatigue resistance of monolithic bulk glasses. The collaboration found that a bulk metallic glass based on palladium displayed a fatigue strength as good as the best composite bulk metallic glasses and comparable to regular polycrystalline structural alloys, such as steel, aluminum and titanium. This study was led by Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and Caltech’s William Johnson, one of the pioneers in the field of bulk metallic glass fabrication.
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