Superhard bulk high-entropy carbides with enhanced toughness via metastable in-situ particles

Despite the extremely high hardness of recently proposed high-entropy carbides (HECs), the low fracture toughness limits their applications in harsh mechanical environment. Here, we introduce a metastability engineering strategy to achieve superhard HECs with enhanced toughness via in-situ metastable particles. This is realized by developing a (WTaNbZrTi)C HEC showing a solid solution matrix with uniformly dispersed in-situ tetragonal and monoclinic ZrO2 particles. Apart from a high hardness of 21.0 GPa, the HEC can obtain an enhanced fracture toughness of 5.89 MPa·m1/2, significantly exceeding the value predicted by rule of mixture and that of other reported HECs. The toughening effect is primarily attributed to the transformation of the metastable tetragonal ZrO2 particles under mechanical loading, which promotes crack tip shielding mechanisms including crack deflection, crack bridging and crack branching. The work demonstrates the concept of using in-situ metastable particles for toughening bulk high-entropy ceramics by taking advantage of their compositional flexibility.