High performance of amorphous nanocrystalline composite structure materials

During last two decades, grain refinement and amorphization are the main way of high-performance material research and development, which already show enormously successful in material science, especially super steel engineering. However, the further improvement of material performance by the traditional methods seem to reach its limitation. A novel method is urgent for scientists to break through the limitation. At present, it is difficult to prepare different nanoscale microstructures in the same material system for performance comparison. In this paper, coatings with different microstructure (nanocrystalline, amorphous-nanocrystalline composite and amorphous) have been successfully prepared by electrodeposition method in the same material system (Ni–P alloy). The results show that the amorphous-nanocrystalline Ni–P alloy had higher hardness and better wear resistance. The wear resistance of the amorphous-nanocrystalline Ni–P alloy was 7.4 times of that of the amorphous Ni–P alloy and 3.1 times of that of the nanocrystalline Ni–P alloy. Therefore, the composite of different microphase structures at nanoscale is a new method to obtain high-performance materials.