Mechanisms of compressive deformation and failure of porous bulk metallic glasses

Bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) are a new class of engineering materials having strengths as high as 10 times that of conventional steels, but show no significant plastic strain at fracture. By introducing pores, their strain to failure has been shown to improve under uniaxial compression. In this work, three-dimensional finite element simulations of uniaxial compression are carried out on Pd-based porous BMGs having a wide range of pore volume fraction (1.9%–60%) with emphasis on understanding the underlying deformation and failure mechanisms. The resulting stress–strain curves agree reasonably well with existing experimental results. The simulations clearly bring out different failure mechanisms in low porosity BMGs and high porosity BMG foams. For low porosity BMGs (below 20%), the deformation and failure involves nucleation of shear bands around the pore diameter, linking of the shear bands with adjacent pores finally leading to initiation of ductile cracking within the shear bands. For high porosity BMG foams, the mechanism of deformation involves reduction in porosity of the material, self-contact of the pores, and their collapse on themselves causing densification of the material leading to apparent hardening in the stress strain behavior. The effect of pore geometry is also studied by considering ellipsoidal pores of volume fraction 3% and 11%. For ellipsoidal pores, the failure mechanisms are found to differ significantly when the orientation of the major axis of the pore vis-a-vis the loading axis is changed.