Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

METALLIC GLASSES

Uncovering the flow of metallic glass

Nature Materials volume 21, pages 388–389 (2022)Cite this article

Subjects

Plastic yielding of metallic glasses is mediated by strain softening, which promotes localized failure and impairs engineering predictability. Unravelling the mechanisms associated with this plastic flow behaviour lays the groundwork for reliable engineering design of this elusive material.

Attempts to develop constitutive laws of metallic glasses date back to the late 1970s. Inspired by the flow of granular solids controlled by the creation of ‘free volume, Spaepen proposed5 that plastic deformation in the metallic glass is likewise accommodated by flow-induced dilatation, and derived a constitutive model that utilizes free volume as an effective ‘order parameter’ for flow. Shortly thereafter, Argon expanded6 on Spaepen’s concept by proposing that plastic deformation is accommodated by cooperative atom rearrangements within zones involving several atoms, termed shear transformation zones (STZs). Argon further recognized that the STZs are not free but confined within a broader elastic medium, which promotes reversible elastic energy storage in the STZ–matrix system consistent with Eshelby’s prominent theory of elastic confinement7. In the early 2000s, Langer and co-workers introduced8 a constitutive description based on free volume to describe the crossover from thermally activated Newtonian flow to shear transformation dominated non-Newtonian flow by assuming rates of production and annihilation of STZs. Shortly afterwards, Johnson and colleagues introduced9,10 an alternative description to capture the yielding and flow of metallic glass by employing the iso-configurational shear modulus of the metallic glass as a thermodynamic state variable for flow rather than free volume. More recently, Egami and co-workers proposed11 that the crossover from Arrhenius to hyper-Arrhenius rheology is triggered by a transition from single-atom activation to cooperative shear transformation, initiating when the activation energy is insufficiently low to support relaxation by single-atom activation.

This is a preview of subscription content

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Fig. 1: Effects of shear localization on the yielding and flow of metallic glasses.

References

  1. Ashby, M. F. & Greer, A. L. Scr. Mater. 54, 321–326 (2006).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Demetriou, M. D. et al. Nat. Mater. 10, 123–128 (2011).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Demetriou, M. D., Johnson, W. L. & Samwer, K. Appl. Phys. Lett. 94, 191905 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Song, S., Zhu, F. & Cheng, M. Nat. Mater. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01185-y (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Spaepen, F. Acta Metall. 25, 407–415 (1977).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Argon, A. S. Acta Metall. 27, 47–58 (1979).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Eshelby, J. D. Proc. R. Soc. A 241, 376–396 (1957).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Falk, M. L., Langer, J. S. & Pechenik, L. Phys. Rev. E 70, 011507 (2004).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Johnson, W. L. & Samwer, K. Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 195501 (2005).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Demetriou, M. D. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 065502 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Jaiswal, A. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 205701 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Lu, J., Ravichandran, G. & Johnson, W. L. Acta Mater. 51, 3429–3443 (2003).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Glassimetal Technology, Inc., Pasadena, CA, USA

    Marios D. Demetriou

Authors
  1. Marios D. Demetriou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marios D. Demetriou.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

M.D.D. is co-founder and chief executive officer of Glassimetal Technology, Inc.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Demetriou, M.D. Uncovering the flow of metallic glass. Nat. Mater. 21, 388–389 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01215-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01215-3

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing