High-Performance Heterogeneous Nanostructured Materials

Dear Colleagues,

A variety of key fields (including aerospace, advanced manufacturing, new energy, deep-sea technology, and transportation, etc.,) have created an urgent need for the design, fabrication, and service evaluation of new high-performance metallic structural materials. Uniformly reducing the grain size to the nanometer scale has been well recognized to substantially improve the strength of metals. However, the strengthened homogeneous nanograined metals will inevitably sacrifice other properties to a significant extent, such as ductility and thermal stability. In recent years, a new class of nanomaterials called heterogeneous nanostructured materials possessing the soft and hard mixed regions have been designed to a unique architecture, e.g., gradient phases/composition/grain size/twin spacing/lamellar, hierarchically structural grains/twins, and nanoprecipitates/second phases, from the nanometer scale to the macroscale in bulk specimens. Owing to the particular cooperative effects of strain/stress partitioning between different domains, heterogeneous structures can harvest the high strength from the hard domains and the high ductility from the soft domains, thus leading to the high strength–ductility synergy. Since some pioneering works (such as from Lu’s, Zhu’s, and Wu’s groups) reported in Nature and Science, heterogeneous nanostructured materials have been proven to effectively achieve high-performance mechanical properties, e.g., strength–ductility synergy, excellent strain hardening, enhanced resistance of fatigue, creep, and wear, and remarkable mechanical and thermal stabilities. In addition to the unprecedented mechanical properties, the heterogamous nanostructuring strategy is also beneficial for developing various multifunctional materials.

The current Special Issue aims to summarize the state of the art of research progress of various high-performance heterogeneous nanostructured metals and alloys, including (i) mechanical properties (e.g., strength, ductility, fatigue, creep, phase transformation, and wear behaviors), (ii) advanced fabrication methods (e.g., severe plastic deformation techniques, laser treatment/additive manufacturing, machining technology, etc.), and (iii) microstructure characterizations responsible for the formation and underlying plastic deformation mechanisms. Research papers related to experiments, computational simulations/high-throughput computing, and theoretical modeling are all welcomed.

Dr. Xusheng Yang
Prof. Dr. Honghui Wu
Prof. Dr. Jiaming Zhu
Guest Editors

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