Fast surface dynamics enabled cold joining of metallic glasses
(PHYSorg.com Chemistry)

Materials scientists and engineers aim to design and develop bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) with excellent properties. The main technical challenge is to scale up their size and improve the material properties in the lab. Now writing on Science Advances, Jiang Ma and a team of interdisciplinary researchers addressed the problem by collaborating across the departments of Micro/Nano Optomechatronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computational Science Research and the Institutes of Mechanics and Physics. They demonstrated a new method to synthesize BMGs (bulk metallic glasses) and metallic glass-glass composites using metallic-glass ribbons. Using ultrasonic vibrations, they fully activated the atomic-scale stress relaxation within the ultrathin surface layer to accelerate atomic bonding between ribbons at a low temperature; far below the glass transition point. The new approach overcame the size and compositional limits associated with conventional methods to facilitate rapid bonding of metallic glasses of distinct physical properties without crystallization. The research work opens a new window to synthesize BMGs of extended composition to enable the discovery of multifunctional glass-glass composites that have hitherto remained unreported.