Effect of Heavy Ion Irradiation Dosage on the Hardness of SA508-IV Reactor Pressure Vessel Steel Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 2017 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Specimens of the SA508-IV reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steel, containing 3.26 wt. % Ni and just 0.041 wt. % Cu, were irradiated at 290 C to different displacement per atom (dpa) with 3.5 MeV Fe ions (Fe2+). Microstructure observation and nano-indentation hardness measurements were carried out. The Continuous Stiffness Measurement (CSM) of nano-indentation was used to obtain the indentation depth profile of nano-hardness. The curves showed a maximum nano-hardness and a plateau damage near the surface of the irradiated samples, attributed to different hardening mechanisms. The Nix-Gao model was employed to analyze the nano-indentation test results. It was found that the curves of nano-hardness versus the reciprocal of indentation depth are bilinear. The nano-hardness value corresponding to the inflection point of the bilinear curve may be used as a parameter to describe the ion irradiation effect. The obvious entanglement of the dislocations was observed in the 30 dpa sample. The maximum nano-hardness values show a good linear relationship with the square root of the dpa.

published proceedings

  • METALS

altmetric score

  • 1.75

author list (cited authors)

  • Bai, X., Wu, S., Liaw, P. K., Shao, L., & Gigax, J.

citation count

  • 15

complete list of authors

  • Bai, Xue||Wu, Sujun||Liaw, Peter K||Shao, Lin||Gigax, Jonathan

publication date

  • January 2017

publisher

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