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Abstract
A repetitive low-pressure die casting technique has been developed for casting high quality Mg6SCU2SY10 bulk metallic glass (BMG) samples. Using these as-cast samples, the thermal and mechanical behaviour of the BMG in the supercooled liquid (SCL) region was investigated principally by uniaxial tensile testing, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM).
Using the die casting facility, charge temperature, injection pressure and injection velocity were found to be important parameters for controlling the length, porosity and degree of crystallinity in the as-cast samples. A processing map was generated which showed that a melt temperature and casting pressure in the range 560-580°C and 0.4-0.5 bar, respectively, generated the highest quality samples.
The static crystallization behaviour of the as-cast BMG was investigated in detail. It was found that the kinetics of both anisothermal and isothermal crystallization were adequately represented by a number of transformation models. Using the Johnson-Mehl-Avrami-Kolmogorov (JMAK) relation in conjunction with isothermal DSC, the Avrami exponent was found to vary from 2.2 to 2.5 with increasing annealing temperature which implies that, at high annealing temperatures, nucleation occurs at a constant rate accompanied by diffusion-controlled growth of spherical grains. A comparable Avrami exponent of 2.34 was also calculated by anisothermal DSC using the Ozawa method.
The tensile flow behaviour of the BMG was investigated over a range of strain rates (10.3to 10.1S•1) and deformation temperatures (150 to 170 QC) in the SCL region using standardized tensile test samples. It was found that, the flow stress increased rapidly to a maximum value followed by a decrease to a very low steady-state value. In the SCL region, the relationship between peak flow stress, strain rate and absolute deformation temperature was described adequately by the classic Sellars-Tegart constitutive relationship. There was also a good correlation between the
Zener-Hollomon parameter, Z, and the flow characteristics of the BMG such as the transition from Newtonian to non-Newtonian flow at Z>1 031 S•1 and optimum superplasticity for Z-values in the range 5 x 1030 to 5 x 1031 S•1 where tensile elongations in excess of 1400% were achieved.