The effect of cold drawing on the structure, tensile fracture strength and reliability of CuZrAl amorphous microwires

Here, cold-drawing was applied to melt-extracted Cu47.5Zr47.5Al5 amorphous alloy (AA) microwires. The struc-tural observations and tensile deformation behaviors were studied before and after cold-drawing. The drawn wire still possesses amorphous structure. Less surface defects, higher local order degree, and greater compressive residual stress induced by cold-drawing lead to a higher tensile fracture strength and a higher reliability of the drawn wires than those of melt-extracted one. The results obtained in this paper demonstrate that the cold -drawing processing is an effective method to improve the mechanical performance of the AA wires.