Structural properties of Al and TiAl3 metallic glasses — An embedded atom method study

In this paper, we investigated the structural properties of metallic glasses (MGs). We emphasized our study on monatomic Al and binary TiAl₃ systems. The calculations are performed by using the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation based on semi-empirical many-body potentials derived from the embedded atom method. The structure is analyzed using the radial distribution function (RDF), the common neighbor analysis (CNA) and the coordination numbers (CNs). Our results demonstrated that it is possible to form MGs in both systems upon fast cooling from the liquid state. This is confirmed by the fact that the system energy and/or volume during the cooling stage decrease continuously with a slight change and by atomic scale analysis using the RDF, CNA and CN analyzing techniques. Furthermore, this specific study shows that under the same conditions, the icosahedral structures appeared in TiAl₃ are more abundant than in pure Al. Implications of these findings are discussed.