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Acta Metall Sin  2025, Vol. 61 Issue (7): 953-960    DOI: 10.11900/0412.1961.2025.00153
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Negative Mixing Enthalpy Alloying to Promote the Development of Alloys with High Strength and Ductility
HAN Xiaodong1,2(), AN Zibing1, MAO Shengcheng2, LONG Haibo2, YANG Luyan2, ZHANG Ze3
1 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China
2 Beijing Key Lab of Microstructure and Property of Advanced Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China
3 School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
Cite this article: 

HAN Xiaodong, AN Zibing, MAO Shengcheng, LONG Haibo, YANG Luyan, ZHANG Ze. Negative Mixing Enthalpy Alloying to Promote the Development of Alloys with High Strength and Ductility. Acta Metall Sin, 2025, 61(7): 953-960.

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Abstract  

Achieving a synergistic improvement in the strength and ductility of metallic materials has long been a central challenge in materials science. Dislocation mobility limits both properties, making it difficult to strike a balance between them. The advent of multi-principal element alloys (also known as high-entropy alloys) offers a promising solution to this issue. Compared with conventional solid solution strengthened alloys, multi-principal element alloys exhibit greater lattice distortion. Consequently, dislocation movement must overcome higher and more frequent energy fluctuations, which consumes more energy. This increase in flow stress with increasing strain allows certain alloys to achieve enhanced work hardening capacity, leading to simultaneous improvements in both strength and ductility. However, two critical scientific questions in this area warrant further investigation: (1) Are multi-principal element alloys purely ideal random mixed structures, or is standardizing their local or multi-level microstructures necessary to achieve optimal performance? (2) How can we effectively standardize and regulate the microstructures of multi-principal element alloys? This study addresses these questions by proposing the concept of using negative mixing enthalpy (negative-enthalpy) alloying to standardize and regulate the microstructure of multi-principal element alloys. This study systematically explores how negative-enthalpy alloying can synergistically enhance strength and ductility while revealing new mechanisms of strengthening and toughening. Negative-enthalpy alloying affects the microstructure of metallic materials through three main effects: bond energy and slow diffusion, local chemical ordering, and interface and size effects. This approach provides a novel framework for designing and processing the microstructures of high-strength, high-ductility metallic materials at the atomic scale.

Key words:  structural metallic material      strength      ductility      negative mixing enthalpy      strengthening and toughening      negative mixing enthalpy alloying     
Received:  03 June 2025     
ZTFLH:  TG142  
Fund: National Key Research and Development of China(2021YFA1200201)

URL: 

https://www.ams.org.cn/EN/10.11900/0412.1961.2025.00153     OR     https://www.ams.org.cn/EN/Y2025/V61/I7/953

Fig.1  Mixing enthalpies of common elements in fcc-structured (a) and bcc-structured refractory (b) multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs)
Fig.2  Mechanical properties of bcc-structured refractory MPEAs and fcc-structured MPEAs
(a) comparisons of yield strength and uniform elongation of bcc-structured refractory MPEAs (Compared with traditional refractory MPEAs[11], negative enthalpy alloys[11,25,27] exhibit excellent mechanical properties)
(b) comparisons of yield strength and product of strength and elongation of fcc-structured MPEAs (Compared with traditional MPEAs[29], negative enthalpy alloys[29-32] exhibit excellent mechanical properties)
Fig.3  Correlation between the mixing enthalpy and microstructure characteristics of alloys[11,12,15,27] (With the decrease of the mixing enthalpy of alloy, at least three effects are presented, including the bond energy and slow diffusion effect, the local chemical ordering effect, and the interface and the size effect; where -n represents the negative mixing enthalpy; band b1 represent the Burgers vectors of dislocation)
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