Recent advancements in high-entropy alloys (HEAs) and high-entropy materials (HEMs) show promising potential for different fields of applications. The emergence of HEAs and HEMs has gained significant interest for their exciting nature and properties. As they consist of five or more elements in considerable amounts, properties vary depending on the synergistic effect of combinations of elements. By selecting proper elements and manufacturing methods, better properties can be tuned. Although many unique behaviors of HEAs and HEMs are reported due to their mixing entropy, sluggish diffusion, severe lattice distortion, and multi-metallic cocktail effects, it is necessary to summarize the data to map their feasibility and potential. For example, the combined properties of high thermal stability, thermal fatigue, creep resistance, higher stiffness, and better corrosion resistance for elevated-temperature environments in aerospace applications are pursued. Moreover, gaining the environmental compatibility and longevity of service-life-oxidation behavior of these materials is one of the crucial aspects and, hence, has been recently explored. Therefore, this Research Update aims at summarizing the recent developments and findings in oxidation behavior and highlighting the challenges and controversies for future research perspectives, particularly, on the sustainability for different applications. Moreover, besides the bulk structure, the performance of the HEAs/HEMs coatings is also reviewed.
16 January 2024 in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation
There is a paradigm shift towards data-centric AI, where model efficacy relies on quality, unified data. The common research analytics and data lifecycle environment (CRADLE™) is an infrastructure and framework that supports a data-centric paradigm and materials data science at scale through heterogeneous data management, elastic scaling, and accessible interfaces. We demonstrate CRADLE’s capabilities through five materials science studies: phase identification in X-ray diffraction, defect segmentation in X-ray computed tomography, polymer crystallization analysis in atomic force microscopy, feature extraction from additive manufacturing, and geospatial data fusion. CRADLE catalyzes scalable, reproducible insights to transform how data is captured, stored, and analyzed. Graphical abstract
High strength and ductility, often mutually exclusive properties of a structural material, are also responsible for damage tolerance. At low temperatures, due to high surface energy, single element metallic nanowires such as Ag usually transform into a more preferred phase via nucleation and propagation of partial dislocation through the nanowire, enabling superplasticity. In high entropy alloy (HEA) CoNiCrFeMn nanowires, the motion of the partial dislocation is hindered by the friction due to difference in the lattice parameter of the constituent atoms which is responsible for the hardening and lowering the ductility. In this study, we have examined the temperature-dependent superplasticity of single component Ag and multicomponent CoNiCrFeMn HEA nanowires using molecular dynamics simulations. The results demonstrate that Ag nanowires exhibit apparent temperature-dependent superplasticity at cryogenic temperature due to (110) to (100) cross-section reorientation behavior. Interestingly, HEA nanowires can perform exceptional strength-ductility trade-offs at cryogenic temperatures. Even at high temperatures, HEA nanowires can still maintain good flow stress and ductility prior to failure. Mechanical properties of HEA nanowires are better than Ag nanowires due to synergistic interactions of deformation twinning, FCC-HCP phase transformation, and the special reorientation of the cross-section. Further examination reveals that simultaneous activation of twining induced plasticity and transformation induced plasticity are responsible for the plasticity at different stages and temperatures. These findings could be very useful for designing nanowires at different temperatures with high stability and superior mechanical properties in the semiconductor industry.