Strength, plasticity and brittleness of bulk metallic glasses under compression: statistical and geometric effects

To investigate the flaw sensitivity and reliability of bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), compressive testing was performed on a statistically significant number of specimens. Despite the fact that BMGs exhibit little or no macroscopic plasticity before failure (similar to other brittle materials), we observe surprisingly high uniformity in compressive strength. Weibull analysis was employed to study the statistical dispersion in strength, giving very high Weibull moduli of about 25 for an intrinsically brittle glass, and near 75 for an intrinsically malleable one. This high uniformity is encouraging for the use of BMGs in structural applications. Furthermore, we illustrate that subtle imperfections in the test geometry (i.e. miscut or deviations from orthogonality) dramatically affect the compression response. In brittle glasses these act as failure-critical flaws, whereas in malleable glasses they constrain shear bands, lead to tilting and bending during testing, and give rise to misleading macroscopic measurements of plastic deformation.