Fracture Toughness of Metallic Glasses: Ductile-to-Brittle Transition?

Chris H. Rycroft; Eran Bouchbinder

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arXiv · 1207.4216

Fracture Toughness of Metallic Glasses: Ductile-to-Brittle Transition?

Chris H. Rycroft·Eran Bouchbinder

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Abstract

Quantitative understanding of the fracture toughness of metallic glasses, including the associated ductile-to-brittle transitions, is not yet available. Here we use a simple model of plastic deformation in glasses, coupled to an advanced Eulerian level set formulation for solving complex free boundary problems, to calculate the fracture toughness of metallic glasses as a function of the degree of structural relaxation corresponding to different annealing times near the glass temperature. Our main result indicates the existence of an elasto-plastic crack tip instability for sufficiently relaxed glasses, resulting in a marked drop in the toughness, which we interpret as a ductile-to-brittle transition similar to experimental observations.

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Chris H. Rycroft, Eran Bouchbinder. 2012-07-17. Fracture Toughness of Metallic Glasses: Ductile-to-Brittle Transition?. https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.4216

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