Thermal Tuning of Thermophysical Properties of Single Cu-Ni Alloy

The great majority of metallic materials in use are not single crystals but disordered. We model such a material specimen as being composed of nanoclusters, each cluster being a small mutually interacting cluster of atoms. In this modeling, a material specimen is then treated as a mixture of nanocrystalline and glassy-state atoms. If we define the degree of crystallinity of the object by the probability that an atom is a member of a crystallite existing within the specimen, the probability would be smaller than unity. Structural disorder in such metallic alloys affects thermophysical properties of the alloy specimen in myriad ways. Transport properties in turn impact material utilization in significant ways to the extent that the specimen could behave as possessing completely different alloy properties. This approach to changing alloy properties can serve useful purposes. We show how one might approach such modification of alloy properties without changing alloy composition with a sample of copper-nickel alloy