NANOSTRUCTURE CHARACTERIZATION OF MECHANICAL ALLOYED AND CONSOLIDATEDIRON-ALLOYS

High-energy ball milling (which is readily adoptable to commercial app lication) was used to develop sufficient quantities of nanostructured material to produce compacts capable of being measured for macroscopic properties. Characterization of the ball-milled powders show that gra in boundary properties play a significant role in the overall properti es of the milled powder. Nearly full-dense compacts were produced by h ot-pressing. Characterization of the strength properties of these comp acts show that there was little influence of hardness, density, or all oy composition on the failure properties. The range of failure stress was large and when fitted to a Weibull distribution suggest that failu re was the result of flaws or cracks resulting from the hot-pressing. Hardness data, commonly used to evaluate the strength of nanostructure d materials: showed no correlation to tensile strength, but correlated highly to compression maximum stress. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science S.A.