Design of a V-Ti-Ni alloy with superelastic nano-precipitates

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel alloy design using superelastic nano-precipitates in a V-Ti-Ni alloy to enable reversible martensitic transformations, enhancing mechanical properties without the brittleness associated with traditional TRIP steels.

Contribution

It introduces a new alloy design strategy with superelastic nano-precipitates that undergo reverse transformation, avoiding martensite retention and improving ductility and toughness.

Findings

Nano-precipitates enable reversible martensitic transformations.

Alloy exhibits enhanced ductility and toughness.

Transformation pathways are characterized and discussed.

Abstract

Stress-induced martensitic transformations enable metastable alloys to exhibit enhanced strain hardening capacity, leading to improved formability and toughness. As is well-known from transformation-induced plasticity (TRIP) steels, however, the resulting martensite can limit ductility and fatigue life due to its intrinsic brittleness. In this work, we explore an alloy design strategy that utilizes stress-induced martensitic transformations but does not retain the martensite phase. This strategy is based on the introduction of superelastic nano-precipitates, which exhibit reverse transformation after initial stress-induced forward transformation. To this end, utilizing ab-initio simulations and thermodynamic calculations we designed and produced a V45Ti30Ni25 (at%) alloy. In this alloy, TiNi is present as nano-precipitates uniformly distributed within a ductile V-rich base-centered cubic (bcc) beta matrix, as well as being present as a larger matrix phase. We characterized the microstructure of the produced alloy using various scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) methods. The bulk mechanical properties of the alloy are demonstrated through tensile tests, and the reversible transformation in each of the TiNi morphologies were confirmed by in-situ TEM micro-pillar compression experiments, in-situ high-energy diffraction synchrotron cyclic tensile tests, indentation experiments, and differential scanning calorimetry experiments. The observed transformation pathways and variables impacting phase stability are critically discussed