Formation and Thermal Properties of Amorphous Ti40Cu40Ni10Al10 Alloy by Mechanical Alloying
The amorphization process and the thermal properties of amorphous TiCuNiAl powder during milling by mechanical alloying were examined by X-ray diffractometry (XRD), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The chemical composition of the samples was examined by an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDX) facility attached to the scanning electron microscope (SEM). The as-milled powders showed a broad peak (2 = 42.4) with crystalline size of about 5.0 nm in the XRD patterns. The entire milling process could be divided into three different stages: agglomeration (0 < t 3 h), disintegration (3 h < t 20 h), and homogenization (20 h < t 40 h) (t: milling time). In the DSC experiment, the peak temperature T and crystallization temperature T were 466.9 and 444.3, respectively, and the values of T, and T increased with a heating rate (HR). The activation energies of crystallization for the as-milled powder was 291.5 kJ/mol for T.