Structural amorphous steels.
Recent advancement in bulk metallic glasses, whose properties are usually superior to their crystalline counterparts, has stimulated great interest in fabricating bulk amorphous steels. While a great deal of effort has been devoted to this field, the fabrication of structural amorphous steels with large cross sections has remained an alchemist's dream because of the limited glass-forming ability (GFA) of these materials. Here we report the discovery of structural amorphous steels that can be cast into glasses with large cross-section sizes using conventional drop-casting methods. These new steels showed interesting physical, magnetic, and mechanical properties, along with high thermal stability. The underlying mechanisms for the superior GFA of these materials are discussed.
Lu
Z P
ZP
Metals and Ceramics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831-6115, USA. luzp@ornl.gov
Liu
C T
CT
Thompson
J R
JR
Porter
W D
WD