A team led by Professor Wang Limin from the Advanced Structural Materials Center of the State Key Laboratory of Metastable Materials Science and Technology at YSU, in collaboration with Hebei University of Technology, the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other institutions, efficiently and accurately developed a rhenium (Re)-based bulk metallic glass that combines ultra-high strength, high toughness, and high thermal stability, utilizing an entropy-modulation design strategy. The research findings were published in the journal Nature on April 22 under the title "Ceramic-like Strength and Metallic Toughness in a Bulk Metallic Glass".
Ashby Plot of Material Strength-Toughness Relationship
As one of the fundamental states of matter, amorphous materials exhibit unparalleled physical and chemical properties compared to their crystalline counterparts, owing to their unique atomic disordered structures. Currently, the development of novel amorphous materials - such as metallic glasses and oxide glasses - primarily relies on the qualitative guidance combining the multi-component confusion principle and the deep eutectic principle, making it difficult to escape the inefficient trial-and-error approach to composition design. Breaking through the bottlenecks of traditional paradigms to achieve the targeted design of amorphous compositions has always been the core scientific challenge hindering the development of the metallic glass field, and this need is even more urgent for the development of high-temperature metallic glasses with special application value.
The breakthrough of this study lies in proposing an entropy-modulation design strategy for amorphous compositions. By selecting refractory elements characterized by high elastic modulus, high valence electron concentration, and strong covalent bonds (Rhenium/Re, Cobalt/Co, Tantalum/Ta, Boron/B), and utilizing components with low melting entropy in the Re-B, Co-B, and Co-Ta binary systems for phase competition integration, the team successfully developed a new type of high-performance Re-based bulk metallic glass. This material breaks the traditional strength-toughness trade-off between metals and ceramics, achieving an ultra-high strength of approximately 6.43 GPa while maintaining a fracture toughness of about 30 MPa·m1/2. This value sets a new record for the strength of both metallic glasses and crystalline metals reported to date. While approaching the strength of advanced ceramics, it exhibits a fracture toughness far surpassing that of ceramics. Moreover, the alloy demonstrates exceptional high-temperature stability and environmental tolerance: it retains a strength of approximately 4.4 GPa even at 900 K, while maintaining stable performance in oxidative and corrosive conditions.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Key Research and Development Program of China. Cai Zhengqing, Feng Shidong, and Song Zhenqiang are the co-first authors of the paper.
