Abstract Scope |
Building on seminal work by researchers like Mott, who in 1948 provided a theoretical description of grain boundary sliding as a thermally-activated process, we present a general predictive model – with no fitting parameters – for the strength of metals. A physics-based description of the stress, temperature, and shear-rate dependent activated process of interfacial amorphization, i.e., the transformation of a partially-ordered structured to a highly-disordered or amorphous one, is shown to accurately describe the grain size dependent shear strength of pure metals and alloys in the ultra-nanocrystalline regime. More recent and ongoing work on the extension of this method to more complex metallic systems, including metallic glasses, high-entropy/multi-principal element alloys, and intermetallic compounds, will also be discussed. |