Abstract:

Over past decades, large efforts have been devoted to understand the properties of bulk metallic glass (BMG) forming supercooled metallic liquids at atomic level, which is of technological and fundamental importance for the development of advanced engineering metallic material. In this paper, we summarize the previous studies on the structural evolutions of atomic clusters with thermal annealing or minor element addition, which strongly affect the thermal stability, crystallization behavior and glass forming ability of supercooled metallic liquids. The focus is centered on two kinds of atomic clusters, i.e., icosahedral-like and crystal- like atomic clusters. The coexistence of these different atomic clusters is found to be a very important factor for both high thermal stability and nanocrystallization of BMG-forming supercooled liquids. Moreover, through minor element addition, one could tailor the structure and volume fraction of atomic clusters in BMG-forming liquids, furthering their development for practical engineering and/ or functional applications.

Key words: bulk metallic glass forming supercooled liquid, thermal ability, glass forming ability, atomic-scale mechanism