Correlated Unique Variation of Electrical Resistivity to Crystallization Behavior of the Zr52.5Cu17.9Ni14.6Al10Ti5 Metallic Glass

Abstract

Due to the differences between the glass and crystalline phases, crystallization of metallic glass occurs with heat release, volume shrinkage, and electrical resistivity drastic changes. Electrical resistivity of the Zr52.5Cu17.9Ni14.6Al10Ti5 metallic glass during crystallization was investigated under both continuous heating and isothermal annealing. This amorphous alloy exhibits a continuous variation instead of sharp decline when reaches the onset crystallization temperature. This unique variation was found to be related to the formation of a few quasicrystalline phases. The slower phase transformation process of this metallic glass brings lots of grain boundaries, which results in increasing of resistivity at the last stage during isothermal annealing. These results imply that electrical resistivity measurement is a more intuitive approach to investigate structure evolution of metallic glasses.