Ultra-strong and strain-hardenable ultrafine-grained medium-entropy alloy via enhanced grain-boundary strengthening

An equiatomic VCoNi medium-entropy alloy possesses high sensitivity to grain-boundary strengthening, achieved by severe lattice distortions. Its ultrafine-grain structure enables 1.5 Gigapascal yield strength even for the fully recrystallized alloy with a single face-centered cubic structure. The high density of grain boundaries also generates high back stresses via piling up of massive dislocations, and the low cross-slip probabilities produce not only robust dislocation-mediated plasticity but also high back stress contribution to flow stress, which affords high strain-hardening capability to ultrafine-grain alloys, with 1.7 Gigapascal ultimate tensile strength with remarkable ductility. Our approach provides a new method for developing ultrastrong metallic materials.