Abstract: Metallic glasses are a kind of novel metastable metallic materials with a series of excellent physical, chemical and mechanical properties. However, long-term use under high temperature or even at room temperature, metallic glasses are easy to transform into crystalline materials with a more stable and lower energy state, which is one of the bottlenecks limiting its wide applications. It is of great significance to investigate the influence of annealing of metallic glasses on its structure and mechanical properties. We reviewed the effects of conventional annealing and mechanical-annealing on the structure and mechanical properties of bulk metallic glass. It has been found that the density, shear wave velocity, longitudinal wave velocity and elastic modulus increased
with annealing time below the glass transition temperature due to atomic rearrangement at a certain degree. While under mechanical annealing, bulk metallic glass had a tendency of density increase at a constant stress below the yield strength. After aging treatment at room temperature for more than 30 days, both the yield strength and fracture strength decreased, and the amplitude of the serrated plastic flow increased during the plastic phase. This result may have some guiding role in understanding the structure and plastic deformation of bulk metallic glasses.

Key words: metallic glass, annealing, mechanical property, serrated plastic flow