Progress on the glassy-crystal laminates: From design, microstructure to deformation and future solutions

The development of new design strategies to create innovative structural materials, refine existing ones, and achieves compatible combinations of strength and plasticity remains a worldwide goal. Promising alloys, such as shape memory alloys (SMAs), bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), high entropy alloys (HEAs), and heterogeneous pure metals such as Cu, have excellent mechanical responses, but they still fall short of meeting all the requirements of structural materials due to specific flaws, such as lack of tensile deformation for BMGs and low yielding strength for HEAs. To address these shortcomings, proposals such as integrating glassy matrices and crystallized alloys, such as HEAs/SMAs, have been suggested. However, these solutions have unresolved issues, such as the challenging control of B2 phase formation in BMG composites. Recently, glass -crystal (A/C) laminated alloys with alternating layers have been reported to exhibit improved mechanical properties and activated work -hardening behaviors, but they still face pressing issues such as bonding interfaces and unknown deformation mechanisms. This review focuses on design routes such as the selection of alloy components and processing techniques, exploration of microstructural evolution and deformation modes with an increase in strain, and future solutions to address pressing and unsolved issues. These prominent advantages include diversified deformation mechanisms, such as deformation twinning, martensitic phase transformation, and precipitation hardening, as well as tuned interactive reactions of shear bands (SBs) near the A/C interfaces. Thus, this review provides a promising pathway to design and develop structural materials in the materials field community. (c) 2023 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The editorial office of Journal of Materials Science & Technology.