Tensile strain-induced softening of iron at high temperature

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that uniaxial tensile strain can destabilize magnetic order in iron at temperatures below its Curie point, leading to significant softening of its mechanical strength, with implications for alloying strategies to enhance high-temperature performance.

Contribution

It reveals a strain-induced magnetic transition in iron that causes mechanical softening at high temperatures, supported by first-principles calculations.

Findings

Strain destabilizes magnetic order in iron below Curie temperature.

Magnetic softening correlates with a drop in strength around 300-500 K.

Alloying can partially restore magnetic order and enhance high-temperature strength.

Abstract

In weakly ferromagnetic materials, already small changes in the atomic configuration triggered by temperature or chemistry can alter the magnetic interactions responsible for the non-random atomic-spin orientation. Different magnetic states, in turn, can give rise to substantially different macroscopic properties. A classical example is iron, which exhibits a great variety of properties as one gradually removes the magnetic long-range order by raising the temperature towards and beyond its Curie point of $T_{\text{C}}^{0}=1043$\,K. Using first-principles theory, here we demonstrate that uniaxial tensile strain can also destabilize the magnetic order in iron and eventually lead to a ferromagnetic to paramagnetic transition at temperatures far below $T_{\text{C}}^{0}$. In consequence, the intrinsic strength of the ideal single-crystal body-centered cubic iron dramatically weakens above a critical temperature of $\sim 500$\,K. The discovered strain-induced magneto-mechanical softening provides a plausible atomic-level mechanism behind the observed drop of the measured strength of Fe whiskers around $300-500$\,K. Alloying additions which have the capability to partially restore the magnetic order in the strained Fe lattice, push the critical temperature for the strength-softening scenario towards the magnetic transition temperature of the undeformed lattice. This can result in a surprisingly large alloying-driven strengthening effect at high temperature as illustrated here in the case of Fe-Co alloy.