The effect of cryogenic thermal cycling on aging, rejuvenation, and mechanical properties of metallic glasses

Abstract

The structural relaxation, potential energy states, and mechanical properties of a model glass subjected to thermal cycling are investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We study a non-additive binary mixture which is annealed with different cooling rates from the liquid phase to a low temperature well below the glass transition. The thermal treatment is applied by repeatedly heating and cooling the system at constant pressure, thus temporarily inducing internal stresses upon thermal expansion. We find that poorly annealed glasses are relocated to progressively lower levels of potential energy over consecutive cycles, whereas well annealed glasses can be rejuvenated at sufficiently large amplitudes of thermal cycling. Moreover, the lowest levels of potential energy after one hundred cycles are detected at a certain temperature amplitude for all cooling rates. The structural transition to different energy states is accompanied by collective nonaffine displacements of atoms that are organized into clusters, whose typical size becomes larger with increasing cooling rate or temperature amplitude. We show that the elastic modulus and the peak value of the stress overshoot exhibit distinct maxima at the cycling amplitude, which corresponds to the minimum of the potential energy. The simulation results indicate that the yielding peak as a function of the cycling amplitude for quickly annealed glasses represents a lower bound for the maximum stress in glasses prepared with lower cooling rates.

26 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Softening and Yielding of Soft Glassy Materials
• The effects of cooling rate on particle rearrangement statistics: Rapidly cooled glasses are more ductile and less reversible
• Collective nonaffine displacements in amorphous materials during large-amplitude oscillatory shear
• Mechanical annealing of model glasses: Effects of strain amplitude and temperature
• Annealing glasses by cyclic shear deformation
• The yielding transition in periodically sheared binary glasses at finite temperature
• Nonaffine rearrangements of atoms in deformed and quiescent binary glasses
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Cited by in corpus (20)

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• Accelerated relaxation in disordered solids under cyclic loading with alternating shear orientation
• The influence of complex thermal treatment on mechanical properties of amorphous materials
• The effect of thermal history on the atomic structure and mechanical properties of amorphous alloys
• Atomistic modeling of heat treatment processes for tuning the mechanical properties of disordered solids
• Shear band formation in amorphous materials under oscillatory shear deformation
• The potential energy states and mechanical properties of thermally cycled binary glasses
• Spatiotemporal analysis of nonaffine displacements in disordered solids sheared across the yielding point
• Accelerated rejuvenation in metallic glasses subjected to elastostatic compression along alternating directions
• Structural relaxation in amorphous materials under cyclic tension-compression loading
• Alternating shear orientation during cyclic loading facilitates yielding in amorphous materials
• Accessing a broader range of energy states in metallic glasses by variable-amplitude oscillatory shear
• A delayed yielding transition in mechanically annealed binary glasses at finite temperature
• Cooling under applied stress rejuvenates amorphous alloys and enhances their ductility
• Rejuvenation and memory effects in active glasses induced by thermal and active cycling
• Overaging with stress in polymer glasses? Faster segmental dynamics despite larger yield stress!
• Relaxation dynamics in amorphous alloys under asymmetric cyclic shear deformation
• Shear band healing in amorphous materials by small-amplitude oscillatory shear deformation