Tensile and flexural properties of multilayered metal/intermetallics composites

The tensile and flexural properties of sintered Ti/Ti-Al intermetallics multilayered composites were investigated and compared with those of multilayered Ti3Al/TiAl composites and homogeneous Ti-Al intermetallics alloys in this paper. The experimental results indicate that the Ti/Ti-Al composites exhibit superior tensile and flexural strengths because of the unique metal/intermetallics multilayered microstructure. The multilayered Ti/Ti-Al composites also show a high level of damage-tolerant capacity at room temperature. It was found that the multilayered composites with remaining ductile metal layers (Ti layers) behave much stronger under flexural loading compared with tensile loading. The positive effect of metal/intermetallics multilayered structure on the remarkable improvement of bending deflection was interpreted by a simple theoretical model.