Recent Review Paper from Advances in Mechanics——Irradiation hardening for metallic materials

Journal Tittle: Advances in Mechanics

Article Tittle: Irradiation hardening for metallic materials

Author: Xiazi XIAO 1,2, Dingkun SONG 1, Haijian CHU 3,4, Jianming XUE 2,5, Huiling DUAN 1,2

Affiliation: 

1 State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex System, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking Universitity, Beijing 100871, China;
2 HEDPS, Center for Applied Physics and Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;
3 Shanghai Institute of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, Shanghai 200444, China;
4 Department of Mechanics, College of Sciences, Shanghai 200444, China;
5 Physics School of Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Abstract:

Investigations on irradiation hardening of metallic materials have much sig- nificance for the design of anti-irradiation materials and engineering applications. Both irradiation-induced defects and gaseous impurities produced by nuclear reactions have dra- matic irradiation effects on the mechanical properties of materials, which include irradiation hardening, irradiation embrittlement and irradiation creep, etc. In this paper we are con- cerned with irradiation hardening, i.e., the strength of materials increases with irradiation, under low irradiation doses and low temperatures of T < 0.3 Tm with Tm the melting temper- ature. Besides, other factors such as the grain size, the grain boundary and the temperature affect mechanical behaviors of irradiated polycrystalline materials. The study of irradia- tion hardening of metallic materials is a multi-scale problem, for which the macroscopic mechanical behaviors of irradiated materials are determined by both the change of interior structures with irradiation at micro-scale and the interactions among irradiated grains at meso-scale. This paper reviews experimental results, numerical simulations and theoretical models for irradiation hardening of metallic materials. Some scientific problems for future study are also presented.

Keywords: metallic materials, irradiation hardening, temperature effect, size effect, mechanical behaviors