Local structures of glassy Al under various pressures: a molecular dynamics study

Al materials are used in the wide range of application, such as sporting goods, engine components, and aerospace parts. The rapid solidification of Al can save energy and production cost. It has been known that the properties of materials highly depend on their atomic structure. However, there is lack of structural investigation of the Al solidification under various pressures. In this research, we carried out molecular dynamics simulation to investigate the pressure effect on the formation of glassy Al from the rapid solidification process. The embedded-atom-method potential is used to describe the interatomic interaction between Al atoms. Our calculated melting point is in reasonable agreement with the experimental result, confirming the capability of the embedded-atom-method potential for use in the high-temperature simulations. From our molecular dynamics simulation of rapid solidification process, it is obvious that the high pressure shrinks the size of the supercell. We also find that the population of local structures, i.e. face-centered cubic, body-centered cubic, and icosahedral cluster, increase at higher pressure except for hexagonal close-packed cluster. The population of hexagonal close-packed local structure in the glassy Al decreases by the increasing of pressure