On the Enhanced Deformability of Brittle Intermetallics Through the Design of Heterogeneous Multi-layered Structure

Industrial manufacturing, forming, and application of brittle materials such as Ti3Al intermetallic compounds are influenced by their poor plastic deformability. For evading such a dilemma, we propose a heterogeneous design strategy and fabricated macroscopically multi-layered composites with microscopically compositional gradients. In situ tension and in situ tracking of local strain evolution demonstrate that extremely brittle Ti3Al after being embedded into heterogeneous laminated composites can plastically deform at room temperature, even approaching 27.5 pct at 600 degrees C.