Enhancing the strain-hardening rate and uniform tensile ductility of lightweight refractory high-entropy alloys by tailoring multi-scale heterostructure strategy

During the deformation of body-centered cubic (BCC) structured lightweight refractory high-entropy alloys (LRHEAs), strain localization caused by a low strain-hardening rate (SHR) induces premature alloy necking, resulting in poor uniform tensile ductility (UTD) and restricts their processability and applicability. In this study, we improved the SHR of the alloys from negative to 1.5 GPa by tailoring multi-scale heterostructures, including the microscopic bimodal grain distribution, submicron spherical C14 Laves phase, nanoscale local chemical fluctuations (LCFs), and atomic clusters less than 1nm. The strength of the alloy was raised by 13.8 %, and the UTD increased by 710 % compared with the initial homogenized sample, and overall performance was superior to most LRHEAs. Bimodal grain interfaces can effectively coordinate the strain distribution between the two during deformation, accelerating the generation and storage of geometrically necessary dislocations (GNDs), and the back stress accumulates and increases with strain, stabilizing the hardening ability. Meanwhile, the meticulously dispersed C14 Laves phase plays a role in precipitation strengthening without compromising plasticity. The matrix's LCFs and Al-Zr atomic clusters can further regulate the morphology and distribution of statistically stored dislocations (SSDs). On the one hand, they could effectively pin dislocations and cause them to bend, increasing the migration resistance of SSDs; on the other hand, dislocation tangles resulting from microbands blocking and the interaction of multi-slip systems activate new dislocation sources, which lead to the rapid expansion of secondary microbands in a reticular manner. Those significantly increase the synchronous dislocation multiplication rate and dynamic dislocation density during plastic deformation, maintaining high and sustained SHR of alloys. Therefore, the SHR of LRHEA can be effectively improved by introducing multi-scale heterogeneous structures to optimize the coordination of GND and SSD density and distribution, thus achieving an excellent match between strength and UTD.