Glass forming ability of binary ZR-CU and ternary ZR-CU-AL alloys

Abstract

In this work, a metallographic strategy to pinpoint the optimum glass former within a binary eutectic alloy system was established. With the implementation of this strategy in the binary Cu8Zr3-Cu10Zr7 eutectic system, the optimum glass forming alloy in this system was successfully found and 2 mm Zr35.5Cu64.5 bulk metallic glass was obtained. By extending this metallographic strategy in binary systems to ternary systems, a metallographic strategy to pinpoint the optimum glass former within a ternary eutectic alloy system was also established. This metallographic strategy then was applied to three adjacent eutectic systems, t3(Zr51Cu28Al21)-t5(Zr38Cu36Al26)-ZrCu, t5-ZrCu-Cu10Zr7 and t3-Zr2Cu-ZrCu, and three optimum glass forming alloys (region) were precisely pinpointed out in these three adjacent eutectic systems respectively. In both the binary and the ternary eutectic systems we studied, the composite defined as primary phase in glass matrix was also obtained in the alloys close to the optimum glass former.