2008 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 119-125
At room temperature, plastic deformation of amorphous metals is localized in narrow bands, so called shear bands (SBs), which is a key issue of their brittle/ductile deformations. The extremely disordered structure and the abrupt fracture obtained in the experiments hinder us from making clear the nature and dynamics of SBs. In this study, atomistic modeling to produce the multiple shear bands (MSBs), not single shear band, was proposed, and the evolution process of MSBs including their coalescence and stationary was investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We prepared a plate of Cu-Zr binary amorphous alloy model by the melt-quench process, and then performed uniaxial tensile and compressive tests under plane stress condition. During the loading, the deformation was suddenly localized in narrow bands shortly after the onset of yielding. The propagation of SBs was accompanied with drastic stress drop and significant local heating caused by the friction of atoms. Also, critical stresses of SB nucleation considerably differed between under tension and compression. This result indicates that Tresca or von Mises criterion, commonly used as a yield condition in the crystalline metals, is not appropriate to describe the yielding of the amorphous metals. The SB angles to the loading axis are observed to be 45∼57° under tension, while 40∼46° under compression. These angles agree well with the fracture angles observed in the experiments with multi-component metallic glasses. It is concluded that the critical stress state of SB nucleation is dependent on not only the shear stress but also the stress normal to the SB, and it can be described by Mohr-Coulomb criterion.
