On the Enhanced Deformability of Brittle Intermetallics Through the Design of Heterogeneous Multi-layered Structure

Industrial manufacturing, forming, and application of brittle materials such as Ti₃Al intermetallic compounds are influenced by their poor plastic deformability. For evading such a dilemma, we propose a heterogeneous design strategy and fabricated macroscopically multi-layered composites with microscopically compositional gradients. In situ tension and in situ tracking of local strain evolution demonstrate that extremely brittle Ti₃Al after being embedded into heterogeneous laminated composites can plastically deform at room temperature, even approaching 27.5 pct at 600 °C.