Enhancing the Self-Healing Efficiency of TiAlC MAX Phase via Irradiation.

Self-healing materials are highly desirable in the nuclear industry to ensure nuclear security. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to developing self-healing materials in the past half century, very limited successes have been reported for ceramics or metals. Here, we report an intrinsic self-healing material of TiAlC MAX phase, which exhibits both ceramic and metallic properties, and a strategy for further enhancing the self-healing via irradiation is proposed.

Enhanced Long-Term Corrosion Resistance of 316L Stainless Steel by Multilayer Amorphous Carbon Coatings.

Diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings are effective in protecting the key components of marine equipment and can greatly improve their short-term performance (1.5~4.5 h).

Picometer-Scale Atomic Shifts Governing Subdisordered Structures in Diamond.

Diamond is considered the most promising next-generation semiconductor material due to its excellent physical characteristics. It has been more than three decades since the discovery of a special structure named n-diamond. However, despite extensive efforts, its crystallographic structure and properties are still unclear.

Ultra-Large Compressive Plasticity of E-GaO Thin Films at the Submicron Scale.

Gallium oxide (GaO) usually fractures in the brittle form, and achieving large plastic deformability to avoid catastrophic failure is in high demand. Here, ε-GaO thin films with columnar crystals and partial unoccupied Ga sites are synthesized, and it is demonstrated that the ε-GaO at the submicron scale can be compressed to an ultra-large plastic strain of 48.5% without cracking.

Enhanced Tribocorrosion Performance of Cr/GLC Multilayered Films for Marine Protective Application.

The corrosion and tribology are all closely related to the interface/surface of materials, which are extremely important for the mechanical components used in harsh marine environments. In this work, we fabricated Cr/graphite-like carbon (GLC) multilayered films with different modulation periods on the 316L stainless steels by direct current magnetron sputtering. Tribocorrosion tests in artificial seawater show that the tribocorrosion resistance of the Cr/GLC films is improved as the modulation period decreases from 1000 to 333 nm and then drastically drops with further decreasing to 250 nm.

Ab Initio Investigation on Cu/Cr Codoped Amorphous Carbon Nanocomposite Films with Giant Residual Stress Reduction.

Amorphous carbon films (a-C) codoped by two metal elements exhibit the desirable combination of tribological and mechanical properties for widely potential applications, but are also prone to catastrophic failure due to the inevitable residual compressive stress. Thus far, the residual stress reduction mechanism remains unclear due to the insufficient understanding of the structure from the atomic and electronic scale. In this paper, using ab initio calculations, we first designed a novel Cu/Cr codoped a-C film and demonstrated that compared with pure and Cu/Cr monodoped cases, the residual stress in Cu/Cr codoped a-C films could be reduced by 93.