Discovery and design of fatigue-resistant high-entropy alloys

Fatigue resistance is a crucial requirement to the novel high-entropy alloys when they come to engineering applications, as many metal structures used in practice are failed by cyclic loading. Here, a thorough analysis of the information on the low-cycle fatigue, high-cycle fatigue, crack-growth rates, and fatigue mechanisms in the high-entropy alloy literature unveils a guideline through which the discovery and design of fatigue-resistant high-entropy alloys can be facilitated. Overall, multi-phase alloys, particularly the metastable ones, are favorable to fatigue resistance over single-phase alloys. Suggestions are proposed in the end to accelerate the discovery and design of candidates for fatigue-resistant applications. (C) 2020 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.