Harvesting room-temperature plasticity in ceramics by mechanically seeded dislocations

Abstract

The quest for room-temperature ductile ceramics has been repeatedly fueled by hopes for large-scale applications but so far has been not successful. Recent demonstrations of enhanced functional properties in ceramics through judicious dislocation imprint, however, have been sparking renewed interest in dislocation plasticity in brittle ceramics. Here, we propose a facile approach using room-temperature mechanically seeded mobile dislocations with a density of ~10^14/m^2 to significantly improve the room-temperature plasticity of ceramics with a large plastic strain beyond ~30%. The seeded mobile dislocations trigger profuse dislocation multiplication via cross slip and motion. Hence, they offer an avenue to suppress brittle fracture and harvest plasticity in ceramics without any additional high-temperature process. We employ both in situ nano-/micromechanical deformation and ex situ bulk deformation to bridge the length scales. This finding tackles the pressing bottleneck of dislocation engineering in ceramics for achieving ductile ceramics and harvesting both versatile mechanical and functional properties.

References in corpus (2)

• Dislocation-induced thermal transport anisotropy in single-crystal group-III nitride films
• The nature of deformation-induced dislocations in SrTiO3: Insights from atomistic simulations

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Room-temperature dislocation plasticity in ceramics: Methods, Materials, and Mechanisms
• Effective reduction in thermal conductivity by high-density dislocations in SrTiO3
• Scale-bridging dislocation plasticity in MgO at room temperature
• Dislocation Engineering: A New Key to Enhancing Ceramic Performances
• Stable crack propagation in dislocation-engineered oxide visualized by double cleavage drilled compression test
• Dislocation response to electric fields in strontium titanate: A mesoscale indentation study
• Dislocation-enhanced piezoelectric catalysis of KNbO3 crystal for water splitting
• Hydrogen response to high-density dislocations in bulk perovskite oxide SrTiO3