Nanohardness measurements of heavy ion irradiated coarse- and nanocrystalline-grained tungsten at room and high temperature

O. El-Atwani, J. S. Weaver, E. Esquivel, M. Efe, M. R. Chancey, Y. Q. Wang, S. A. Maloy, N. Mara

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18 Scopus citations

Abstract

Heavy ion irradiation was performed on coarse and nanocrystalline-grained tungsten (CGW and NGW, respectively) at room temperature (RT) and 1050 K from 0.25 to 4 dpa to simulate radiation damage for fusion energy applications. TEM and nanohardness measurements of irradiated samples were made to quantify the radiation tolerance of these two candidate materials. In this case, TEM is used to quantify the defect morphology at low dpa values and determine the barrier strength coefficients of the different defects using the dispersed barrier hardening (DBH) model. Nanohardness measurements and the determined barrier strength coefficients are then used to estimate the defect morphologies at higher dpa values where quantification with TEM is not reliable. Quantification of the damage at low dpa (0.25 dpa) showed different loop (at RT and 1050 K) and void (at 1050 K) densities and sizes for the two grain sizes. Nanohardness measurements performed on the samples showed a very small change in hardness for RT ion irradiation and a higher but more scattered increase in hardness for 1050 K ion irradiation. Using the Dispersed barrier hardening (DBH) model and the average loop/void density and size, the dislocation barrier (α values) values were shown to be very small (0.003 and 0.03 for the CGW and NCW respectively) for loop damage and of weak to moderate strength (0.13 for NCW and CGW) for void damage. The small barrier strength values for fine grained materials and the limitations of using nanohardness measurements with the DBH model to characterize irradiation damage are discussed.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)276-284
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Nuclear Materials
Volume509
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2018

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. Los Alamos National Laboratory, an affirmative action equal opportunity employer, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC52-06NA25396 . Research presented in this article was also supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of Los Alamos National Laboratory under project number 20160674PRD3 . We gratefully acknowledge the support of the U.S. Department of Energy through the LANL/LDRD Program and the G. T. Seaborg Institute for this work.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018

Keywords

  • Dislocation loops
  • Electron microscopy
  • Fusion reactor materials
  • Nanoindentation
  • Voids

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