Glass Fatigue Crack (IMAGE)

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Glass Fatigue Crack

Caption

Cracks propagate through metallic glass by following shear bands, which in this micrograph look like wrinkles in cloth. The featureless blobs in the picture are a second, crystalline phase of the metal, but if these barriers are not properly spaced to halt crack propagation, the metal can fail disastrously.

Credit

William Johnson, Caltech; Robert Ritchie, Berkeley Lab

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