Engineering Science and Materials Commons^™

Atomistic Simulation Studies Of Grain-Boundary Segregation And Strengthening Mechanisms In Nanocrystalline Nanotwinned Silver-Copper Alloys, Xing Ke

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Silver (Ag) is a precious metal with a low stacking fault energy that is known to form copious nanoscale coherent twin boundaries during magnetron sputtering synthesis. Nanotwinned Ag metals are potentially attractive for creating new interface-dominated nanomaterials with unprecedented mechanical and physical properties. Grain-boundary segregation of solute elements has been found to increase the stability of interfaces and hardness of nanocrystalline metals. However, heavily alloying inevitably complicates the underlying deformation mechanisms due to the hardening effects of solutes, or a change of stacking fault energies in Ag caused by alloying. For the above reasons, we developed a microalloying (or doping) …