Increasing the friction stress decreases the size dependence of strength in a family of face-centered cubic high- and medium-entropy alloy micropillars

Size effects (‘smaller is stronger’) are important aspects of the mechanical behavior of materials. Experimentally, they are usually probed by performing compression tests on micropillars of different sizes (cross-sectional areas). To overcome limitations associated with comparing different crystal structures and to better handle the influence of melting points in different metals, single crystal face centered cubic (fcc) micropillars of equiatomic binary, ternary, and quaternary medium-entropy alloy (MEA) subsystems of the quinary CrMnFeCoNi high-entropy alloy (HEA) were tested. All eight alloys investigated were single-phase solid solutions having the fcc crystal structure. Their melting temperatures varied only over a narrow range (1189-1462 °C). They exhibit a size-dependent critical resolved shear stress (CRSS ∝ d-n, where d is the pillar diameter, n is a power law exponent). The results show that, all else being equal, size effects scale inversely with friction stress. In contrast, there is no systematic dependence on configurational entropy, contrary to speculations in some earlier papers that solid solution strengthening would increase as the number of alloying elements increases. ‘Bulk’ CRSS values were estimated by extrapolating the measured CRSS values of pillars with diameters of approximately 1-8 μm to larger pillar sizes of 30 μm. Good agreement was found with available CRSS values of bulk single crystals. It is concluded that it is possible to obtain bulk CRSS values more reliably from micropillar tests than from the Taylor factor corrected yield strengths of bulk polycrystals.