Designing a thermodynamically stable and intrinsically ductile refractory alloy

Developing ductile refractory alloys have remained a challenge. Decreasing the valence electron concentration of has been widely suggested for improving their ductility. However, Re used to ductilize W, which goes against low valency suggestion. The thermodynamic stability never considered while suggesting alloying elements improve Here we use first-principles density functional theory simulations unravel role enthalpy formation in intrinsic ductility alloys. is assessed using D-parameter, ratio surface energy and unstable stacking fault energy. We studied 25 equiatomic binary found that positive improves small could be compensated by sufficiently large entropy; hence alloy expected single phase. Our present work explains high-valency low-valency These findings provide path design thermodynamically stable intrinsically high-temperature