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A quantitative link between microplastic instability and macroscopic deformation behaviors in metallic glasses
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This theoretical study linked the microscale instability of atomic-level deformation zones in metallic glasses to their bulk mechanical behavior. The model explains how statistical distributions of local deformation sites govern whether a metallic glass deforms gradually or catastrophically.
Based on mechanical instability of individual shear transformation zones (STZs), a quantitative link between the microplastic instability and macroscopic deformation behavior of metallic glasses was proposed. Our analysis confirms that macroscopic metallic glasses comprise a statistical distribution of STZ embryos with distributed values of activation energy, and the microplastic instability of all the individual STZs dictates the macroscopic deformation behavior of amorphous solids. The statistical model presented in this paper can successfully reproduce the macroscopic stress-strain curves determined experimentally and readily be used to predict strain-rate effects on the macroscopic responses with the availability of the material parameters at a certain strain rate, which offer new insights into understanding the actual deformation mechanism in amorphous solids.
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