Producing laminated NiAl with bimodal distribution of grain size by solid-liquid reaction treatment

The prospect of combining laminated structure design and grain size tailoring to toughen brittle materials is examined. Laminated NiAl consisting of coarse-grained layers and fine-grained layers was fabricated by solid-liquid reaction treatment of stacking Ni and Al foils. The fracture toughness at ambient temperature has been improved 2-3 times. It is of great potential to extend this approach to other binary alloys, such as Ti-Al, Fe-Al, Nb-Al, etc., where solid-liquid reaction occurs readily at high temperature.