A Brief Review of High Entropy Alloys and Serration Behavior and Flow Units

Multicomponent alloys with high entropy of mixing, e.g., high entropy alloys (HEAs) and/or multiprincipal-element alloys (MEAs), are attracting increasing attentions, because the materials with novel properties are being developed, based on the design strategy of the equiatomic ratio, multicomponent, and high entropy of mixing in their liquid or random solution state. Recently, HEAs with the ultrahigh strength and fracture toughness, excellent magnetic properties, high fatigue, wear and corrosion resistance, great phase stability/high resistance to heat-softening behavior, sluggish diffusion effects, and potential superconductivity, etc., were developed. The HEAs can even have very high irradiation resistance and may have some self-healing effects, and can potentially be used as the first wall and nuclear fuel cladding materials. Serration behaviors and flow units are powerful methods to understand the plastic deformation or fracture of materials. The methods have been successfully used to study the plasticity of amorphous alloys (also bulk metallic glasses, BMGs). The flow units are proposed as: free volumes, shear transition zones (STZs), tension-transition zones (TTZs), liquid-like regions, soft regions or soft spots, etc. The flow units in the crystalline alloys are usually dislocations, which may interact with the solute atoms, interstitial types, or substitution types. Moreover, the flow units often change with the testing temperatures and loading strain rates, e.g., at the low temperature and high strain rate, plastic deformation will be carried out by the flow unit of twinning, and at high temperatures, the grain boundary will be the weak area, and play as the flow unit. The serration shapes are related to the types of flow units, and the serration behavior can be analyzed using the power law and modified power law.