Design of High-Entropy Alloy: A Perspective from Nonideal Mixing

Since the advent in 2004, high-entropy alloys (HEAs) have been attracting a great deal of research interest worldwide. Being deemed as a major paradigmatic shift, the design of HEAs without base elements poses challenges to the existing thermodynamic models and theories that were long established for traditional alloys, one of which is related to the thermodynamic mechanisms for the formation of random solid solution in a concentrated multicomponent alloy. In this article, we discuss the design of HEAs from the perspective of correlated mixing (nonideal mixing of atoms with interatomic correlations). In a quantitative manner, we can show that the formation of a random solid solution in HEAs depends not only on the number of constituent elements but also on the alloy's melting/processing temperature and on various interatomic correlations. Through the correlated mixing rule, we further demonstrate a strategy to screen out equiatomic alloys with the thermodynamic characteristics close to those of random solid solutions from an expanded library of 20 candidate elements.