Precursors to plastic failure in a numerical simulation of CuZr metallic glass

Abstract

We deform, in pure shear, a thin sample of Cu${}_{50}$Zr${}_{50}$ metallic glass using a molecular dynamics simulation up to, and including, failure. The experiment is repeated ten times in order to have average values and standard deviations. Although failure occurs at the same value of the externally imposed strain for the ten samples, there is significant sample-to-sample variation in the specific microscopic material behavior. Failure can occur along one, two, or three planes, located at the boundaries of previously formed shear bands. These shear bands form shortly before failure. However, well before their formation and at external strains where plastic deformation just begins to be significant, non-affine displacement organizes itself along localized bands. The shear bands subsequently form at the edges of these non-affine-displacement-bands, and present an alternating rotation-quadrupole structure, as found previously by Şopu et al. (2017) in the case of a notched sample loaded in tension. The thickness of shear bands is roughly determined by the available plastic energy. The onset of shear banding is accompanied by a sharp increase in the rate of change of the rotation angle localization, the strain localization, and the non-affine square displacement.

arXiv comment17 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Dynamics of Viscoplastic Deformation in Amorphous Solids
• Irreversible reorganization in a supercooled liquid originates from localised soft modes
• Continuum limit of amorphous elastic bodies: A finite-size study of low frequency harmonic vibrations
• Plastic Response of a 2D Lennard-Jones amorphous solid: Detailed analysis of the local rearrangements at very slow strain-rate

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Shear deformation in CuZr metallic glass: A statistical and complex network analysis