Symposium F.SF02—Bulk Metallic Glasses
The ability to create a bulk metallic material lacking long-range order and related grain boundaries has attracted significant attention in both the academic and commercial communities. These materials, called bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) exhibit unique properties and processing advantages. For instance, they have many novel properties, including high strength, high elastic strain limit, improved corrosion resistance, and attractive magnetic properties. BMGs now exhibit a very broad range of material properties and processing opportunities. They have established themselves as a new class of material with exciting opportunities in fundamental science and broad commercial potentials. The continuation of rapid growth in the field of BMGs can be attributed to advancement in fundamental understanding of their structure and deformation, their ability to represent the liquid state, and the development of BMG forming alloys based on elements essentially covering all transition metals.
The unique crystallization behavior of BMGs allows them to be processed similarly to plastics. Various plastic processing and fabrication techniques have been adapted and tailored to the specific characteristics of BMGs. The sluggish crystallization kinetics, coupled with the absence of an intrinsic feature size limitation enables one to use BMGs over a wide range of length scales. Novel insights into processing has also been explored for improving and tailoring properties of BMGs.
From a fundamental point of view, recent progress has involved microscopic models for structure and properties of BMGs, their correlation with each other and how this correlation can be affected by processing. Their deformation mode, which drastically changes with temperature, has been also one of the focal points of research.