Modulating the rejuvenation in a Al75Mg25 metallic glass by multiple recovery annealing treatment

Rejuvenation presents a promising way to improve the plasticity of metallic glasses. How modulating the degree of rejuvenation of metallic glasses remains a challenging issue. Here, based on the molecular dynamics simulation, we investigate the evolution of the structural and mechanical properties of a binary Al75Mg25 metallic glass and successfully realized the rejuvenation modulation through the multiple recovery annealing treatment. A range of samples with different degrees of rejuvenation were obtained by successive multiple recovery annealing process. According to our calculations, we found that the degree of rejuvenation is highly correlated with the Al-centered clusters. Microstructural analyses show that a higher degree of rejuvenation is concomitant with less 1551 index of Honeycutt-Andersen indices and a lower content of in terms of Voronoi Tessellation analysis. Moreover, our calculated results demonstrate that the samples with the aging initial state show a higher degree of rejuvenation as compared to the samples with the rejuvenated initial state. This can be attributed to that there are more icosahedral clusters, which are more likely to change to other types of clusters with low local fivefold symmetry in the aged samples during the subsequent high-temperature annealing process. Our work confirms that proper multiple (no more than three times) recovery annealing treatment can increase the degree of rejuvenation of metallic glasses and can offer a better understanding of the effect of rejuvenation on the microstructures and mechanical properties of metallic glasses. •This work used multiple recovery annealing treatment to regulate the degree of rejuvenation in Al–Mg metallic glass.•The degree of rejuvenation is highly correlated with the Al-centered clusters.•The samples with the aging initial state show a higher degree of rejuvenation as compared to the samples with the rejuvenated initial state.