Glass forming ability of the Fe-Zr-Cu system studied by thermodynamic calculation and ion beam mixing

The glass forming ability/range (GFA/GFR) of the Fe-Zr-Cu system was studied by thermodynamic calculation based on Miedema's model and Alonso's method. It is found that when the atomic concentration of Zr is between 34% and 56%, no matter what the atomic concentrations of Fe and Cu are, amorphous phase could be obtained, thus the atomic mismatch playing a dominating role in influencing the GFA. While the atomic concentration of Zr is out of the above range, the GFA is highly influenced by the immiscibility between Fe and Cu. Experimentally, ion beam mixing was carried out to synthesize amorphous alloys in the Fe-Zr-Cu system. It turned out that in the samples with overall compositions of Fe26Zr36Cu38, Fe52Zr27Cu21 and Fe21Zr60Cu19, which are located in or at the edge of the calculated GFR, amorphous phases were indeed obtained, whereas no amorphous phase was obtained if the overall compositions were located outside of the predicted region favoring for amorphous alloy formation, showing a good agreement between the experimental results and the thermodynamic calculation.