High Strength Bulk Amorphous Alloys with Low Critical Cooling Rates (Overview)

This paper aims to review our recent research results on new amorphous alloys. The main topics consist of the following five parts; (1) the finding of new amorphous alloys with extremely large glass-forming ability in a number of alloy systems, (2) the mechanism for the achievement of the large glass-forming ability, (3) the clarification of fundamental properties of the new amorphous alloys, (4) the successful examples of producing bulk amorphous alloys by four different techniques of water quenching, metallic mold casting, arc melting and unidirectional zone melting, and (5) the high tensile strength of the bulk amorphous alloys. These new results enable the elimination of the limitation of sample shape which has prevented the development of amorphous alloys as engineering materials and are expected to give rise to the revisit age to amorphous alloys.