The Effect of Oxygen Additions on the Properties of Amorphous Transition Metal Alloys

Oxygen contamination is a potential problem in the study of amorphous metals because of the highly reactive nature of some of the constituent elements of metallic glasses and because of the processing techniques which are used to produce this metastable state. Oxygen is frequently present already in the starting materials, e.g., rare earth elements or early transition metals; further, oxygen present as an impurity in the gaseous atmosphere may be incorporated during alloy preparation (e.g., arc melting) or during the quench process (especially during thermal evaporation or sputtering or during splat quenching using the gun technique). Since these materials are generally studied as thin foils, further heat treating of the amorphous metal can also lead to a significant oxygen contamination. In this study, oxygen has been added to three binary inter-transition metal alloys already known to form a glass upon rapid liquid quenching. The effect of oxygen upon the glass forming ability, the glass transition behavior, the ductility of the glasses and their crystallization products has been characterized.