Author(s):
Yang, Yitong ; Pang, Jingyu ; Zhang, Hongwei ; Shen, Jiajia ; Xing, Zhenqiang ; Sun, Yuan ; Wang, Aimin ; Oliveira, J. P. ; Wang, Wei ; Jiao, Zengbao
Date: 2025
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/187699
Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
Project/scholarship:
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/FCT/Concurso para Atribuição do Estatuto e Financiamento de Laboratórios Associados (LA)/LA%2FP%2F0037%2F2020/PT;
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/FCT/Concurso de avaliação no âmbito do Programa Plurianual de Financiamento de Unidades de I&D (2017%2F2018) - Financiamento Programático/UIDP%2F50025%2F2020/PT;
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/FCT/Concurso de avaliação no âmbito do Programa Plurianual de Financiamento de Unidades de I&D (2017%2F2018) - Financiamento Base/UIDB%2F50025%2F2020/PT;
Subject(s): heterostructure; high entropy alloy; mechanical property; work hardening; Medicine (miscellaneous); Chemical Engineering(all); Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (miscellaneous); Materials Science(all); Engineering(all); Physics and Astronomy(all)
Description
Funding Information: Y.Y. and J.P. contributed equally to this work. This work was supported bythe National Natural Science Foundation of China (52171162, 52404370,52271122), the Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province (2023-BS-012), the IMR Innovation Fund (2023-PY16), and the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong (15227121, 15202824, and C5002-24Y). J.S. and J.P.O. acknowledge funding by national funds from FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., in the scope of the projects LA/P/0037/2020, UIDP/50025/2020, and UIDB/50025/2020 of the Associate Laboratory In-stitute of Nanostructures, Nanomodelling and Nanofabrication – i3N. Theauthors are indebted to Dr. Ting Xiong for the assistance in analyzing HR-STEM results. Publisher Copyright: © 2025 The Author(s). Advanced Science published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.
Yield strength and work hardening are two critical mechanical properties of metallic structural materials. However, increasing yield strength through conventional strengthening mechanisms often restricts further dislocation multiplications and interactions, which significantly reduces work hardening and poses a challenge to achieving an optimal balance between these properties in material design. Here, an innovative approach to simultaneously enhance both yield strength and work hardening in a heterostructured, nanoprecipitation-strengthened alloy is reported. This alloy exhibits an exceptional combination of a yield strength exceeding 1.5 GPa and an ultrahigh work hardening rate of 6 GPa, resulting in an extremely high tensile strength of 2.2 GPa and a uniform ductility of 20%. The ultrahigh yield strength primarily stems from nanoprecipitates and ultrafine grains, while the exceptional work hardening mainly originates from hetero-interface-mediated twinning. The hetero-deformation between the coarse-grained and ultrafine-grained regions results in dislocation pile-ups and strain gradients near the interfaces, which provides the ultrahigh stress necessary to activate mechanical twinning, thereby substantially improving the work hardening and plastic deformation stability of the alloy. The hetero-interface architecting strategy can potentially be applied to numerous other alloys, paving the way for designing novel materials with unprecedented mechanical properties for technological applications.
