Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
1600231 Intermetallics 2014 7 Pages PDF
Abstract
The Zr48Cu45Al7 amorphous alloy samples quenched under cooling rates of about 2 × 106 K/s and 1 × 102 K/s were prepared by melt spinning and copper-mold suction casting, respectively. Synchrotron-radiation based experiments, combined with a series of calculations, were performed to study the microstructures in both samples. It was found that although the short-range orderings are similar in Zr-centered clusters for both samples, the atom arrangements and distributions in Cu- and Al-centered clusters are very different in terms of atomic-packing efficiencies and regularity of clusters in these two samples. A quantitative analysis revealed that the lower cooling rate leads to the higher packing efficiency and the higher regularity of clusters. This revealed how the cooling rate during quenching fine-tunes the atomic- and cluster-level microstructures in amorphous alloys with the same composition, which may be the structural basis to address the issue why macroscopic properties change with the cooling rate.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Materials Science Metals and Alloys
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