Glassy NiTi produced with different cooling times: Structural investigation using molecular dynamics simulations

Abstract

In this research we investigate the structure of glassy NiTi using molecular dynamics simulations. The final configurations are obtained by decreasing the temperature of liquid NiTi rapidly from 2500 K to 300 K, with various cooling times from 0.1 ns to 2.0 ns. We found that the height of the peak values for structural factors slightly increases with an increase in cooling time. From the analysis of local atomic packing using the bond-angle method, we also find that the count of hexagonal close packed (HCP)-like structure drops at the longer cooling time, a finding which is contrary to the trend for body-centered cubic (BCC)-like and icosahedral short-range order (ISRO) structures. It is also observed that face-centered cubic (FCC)-like structure is insensitive to change in cooling time. Keywords: Molecular dynamics, Structure, Glassy NiTi, Cooling time, Local atomic packing