Improving ductility of nanoporous metallic glasses

It is reported that enhanced ductility can be achieved in metallic glasses (MGs) by proper introduction of pores. To design MGs with better ductility, it is important to elucidate the pore effects on the ductility and failure mechanisms. In this paper, tensile deformation behaviors of nanoporous MGs with elliptical and circular pores are studied by large scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The influences of pore aspect ratio and porosity on the failure stains are investigated. It is found that as the aspect ratio increases the failure strain first increases to reach a maximum value and then decreases. For a given aspect ratio, the failure strain of the porous MGs increases as the porosity decreases. The corresponding mechanisms are revealed via the microstructure evolutions in the simulations. The results can be used to improve the ductility of MGs.