Annealing Effect on Mechanical and Tribological behaviour of Nanoscale Mechanics of Thin Layer Metallic Glasses for Engineering Material Applications

Abstract

Abstract A new and unique alloy formulation design strategies has been developed in order to fabricate thin layered metallic glasses (TFMG) with superior fracture resistance and low coefficient of friction (COF) during nano-scraching test. Due to the outstanding properties, TFMG could be applied for different uses uch as surface coating, biomedical, bio implant, electronic devices, spacecraft and railway, all of which need surface fracture resistance. The fabricated Zr-based metallic glass having the composition of Zr60Cu25Al5Ag5Ni5 (at.%) was annealed for 10, 30, and 60 min below the glass transition temperature. Nanoindentation and nanoscratch tests were used to investigate mechanical and nanotribological properties. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to examine the surface morphology and microstructures. The annealing effect and applied forces change over the chemical structure and stability, morphological change, elastic modulus, hardness, wear rate, and coefficient of friction of the samples were systematically investigated. The nano-indentation data indicated that the hardness and average elastic modulus of the samples increased with increasing annealing time, compared with those of the as-cast MG. More intriguingly, the coefficient of friction and wear rate decreases when the annealing time increases compared to as-cast MG. Furthermore, the continuous wear process, wear depth, wear track volume, and contact area decreases with increasing annealing time, as a result of the improvement of the mechanical and tribological properties of the thin-layered MGs. This study can be a reference to the design protocol to prepare novel a-MGs, which have outstanding mechanical and tribological behavior for engineering material applications.