A Review of Liquid Metal Embrittlement: Cracking Open the Disparate Mechanisms

Liquid metal embrittlement (LME) is the term for a collection of phenomena by which the action of a liquid metal in contact with the surface of a solid metal results in the weakening, loss of ductility, or otherwise mechanical degradation of the solid metal. Despite upwards of 100 years of study on this topic (Johnson, Proc R Soc Lond 23(156–163):168–179, 1874 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspl.1874.0024 ), the ability to predict the occurrence or severity of embrittlement in any given liquid–solid metal pair has eluded the community, in no small part due to the lack of an agreed upon mechanism or mechanisms that explain the observed phenomenology. This review will describe the various ways in which metals can fail by LME, the experimentally observed dependencies on environmental and metallurgical factors (Section III), and will briefly cover the various mechanisms that have been proposed to explain behavior.