Study of the crystallization kinetics of Zr60Al15Ni25 bulk glassy alloy by differential scanning calorimetry

Abstract

This paper investigates the crystallization kinetics of Zr60A15Ni25 bulk glassy alloy under isothermal annealing by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The results show that the incubation time is very small even at low annealing temperature (743 K) and increases slightly with the annealing temperature decreasing, which suggests a growth-controlled crystallization process. However, the exothermic peak width, reflecting the time for the actual crystallization process, increases greatly when annealing temperature decreases. The Avrami exponents indicate that the crystallization mechanism changes at different annealing temperatures. The change of the crystallization mechanism is attributed to the great difference of the mobility ability of atoms at different temperatures.