Super Ductility of Nanoglass Aluminium Nitride

Ceramics have been widely used in many fields because of their distinctive properties, however, brittle fracture usually limits their application. To solve this problem, nanoglass ceramics were developed. In this article, we numerically investigated the mechanical properties of nanoglass aluminium nitride (ng-AlN) with different glassy grain sizes under tension using molecular dynamics simulations. It was found that ng-AlN exhibits super ductility and tends to deform uniformly without the formation of voids as the glassy grain size decreases to about 1 nm, which was attributed to a large number of uniformly distributed shear transformation zones (STZs). We further investigated the effects of temperature and strain rate on ng-AlN_{d = 1 nm}, which showed that temperature insignificantly influences the elastic modulus, while the dependence of the ultimate strength on temperature follows the T^2/3 scaling law. Meanwhile, the ultimate strength of ng-AlN_{d = 1 nm} is positively correlated with the strain rate, following a power function relationship.