Traditionally, the formation of amorphous shear bands in crystalline materials has been
undesirable, because shear bands can nucleate voids and act as precursors to fracture …

Severe plastic deformation (SPD) techniques such as laser shock peening (LSP) have been
widely adopted to modify microstructure of materials. Understanding the plastic deformation …

Among hard materials, icosahedra-based boron-rich ceramics are only second to diamond-
based structures. This class of ceramics possesses lower density, higher thermal and …

In the design of strong solids, especially hard and superhard materials, this review article
attempts to critically cover an extended field of first-principles derived mechanical properties …

The failure of superhard materials is often associated with stress-induced amorphization.
However, the underlying mechanisms of the structural evolution remain largely unknown …

The nanofiller reinforcing effect in nanocomposites is often far below the theoretically
predicted values, largely because of the poor interfacial interaction between the nanofillers …

Dislocation slip, deformation twinning, phase transformations, and fast fracture are energy
dissipation mechanisms that accommodate mechanical loading in materials. The …

The recent observation of the reverse Hall-Petch relation in nanocrystalline ceramics offers a
possible pathway to achieve enhanced ductility for traditional brittle ceramics via the …

Materials respond to shock in many ways such as plastic flow in metals and amorphization
in ceramics. It is very challenging to characterize the deformation mechanisms of ceramics …

Boron carbide has a wide range of solubility, but the effects of stoichiometry on its
microstructure and mechanical response are not well understood. In this study, detailed …