The study of indentation responses of rate-dependent (viscoplastic or creeping) solids has generally focused on the relationship between indentation hardness and an effective strain rate, which can be defined from a similarity transformation of the governing equations. The strain rate sensitivity exponent can be determined from the slope of a log-log plot of the hardness versus effective strain...

The amorphous ternary metallic alloy Zr60Al15Ni25 was oxidized in dry oxygen in the temperature range 310 ±C to 410 ±C. Rutherford backscattering (RBS) and cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies suggest that during this treatment an amorphous layer of zirconium-aluminum-oxide is formed at the surface. Nickel was depleted in the oxide and enriched in the amorphous alloy n...

Currently, the standard material used for micro end mill tooling is sintered tungsten carbide with a cobalt binder. Its brittle nature coupled with the micro-scaled cutting features of the end mills often result in rapid tool degradation. Tool life and cutting performance can be significantly improved using a thin nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) coating. The high hardness (~90 GPa), low coefficie...

In crystalline materials, plastic deformation occurs by the motion of dislocations, and the regions between individual crystallites, called grain boundaries, act as obstacles to dislocation motion. Grain boundaries are widely envisaged to be mechanically static structures, but this report outlines an experimental investigation of stress-driven grain boundary migration manifested as grain growth...

Aluminum-doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Al) [AZO] is a good candidate to be used as a transparent conducting oxide [TCO]. For solar cells having a hydrogenated amorphous silicon carbide [a-SiC:H] or hydrogenated amorphous silicon [a-Si:H] window layer, the use of the AZO as TCO results in a deterioration of fill factor [FF], so fluorine-doped tin oxide (Sn02:F) [FTO] is usually preferred as a TCO. In th...

Three different aluminum–iron alloys were produced by electron-beam deposition with the iron content in the range 1.15–1.71 at.%. These alloys did not contain any identifiable iron-bearing particles, and exhibited full density with high-angle grain boundaries in the micrometer range, and a sub-grain size typically smaller than 100 nm. The tensile deformation characteristics of the alloys were e...