Investigation of mechanical properties of ε-zirconium hydride using micro- and nano-indentation techniques

Properties of Bulk Zirconium Hydrides

“…Using a Vickers diamond indenter, their room temperature microhardness results show an oscillatory behavior as a function of hydrogen composition, giving an average value of 1.67 GPa with a maximum of 1.72 GPa at r ¼ 1:94 and minimum of 1.47 GPa at just below r $ 1:9. These hardness values are much lower than the average value of 3.31 GPa obtained by Xu and Shi [30] for a composition of ZrH 1.83 . E determined by Syasin et al ranges from 80 to 85 GPa for r ¼ 1:66 to just below r ' 1:9, respectively, then drops abruptly at r ¼ 1:9 to *75 GPa.…”

“…Other microhardness measurements were carried out by Syasin et al [27], Yamanaka et al [31][32][33], Xu and Shi [30] and Puls et al [23]. In addition, all of these authors determined the elastic moduli of the hydrides studied, either through microhardness measurement techniques [23,30] or using other methods, such as sound velocity [27,[31][32][33] and resonant oscillator technique [22]. The latter two sets of authors also measured the internal friction of the solid hydride specimens.…”

“…Xu and Shi [30] used a nano-indentation technique for hardness measurements from which they derived values of elastic modulus and yield strength while the fracture toughness was determined using a microhardness indenter. Only bulk hydrogenated material of a single composition, ZrH 1.83 , consisting mostly of the single e-hydride phase, was investigated.…”

Hydrogen-induced microstructure, texture and mechanical property evolutions in a high-pressure torsion processed zirconium alloy

“…Such indentation crack development is driven by the residual stress field in the material, and the crack extending length is related to the material crack propagation resistance [19]. The fracture toughness K IC of e-hydride can be estimated following the indentation microfracture method and using the expression [19,20]:…”

Formation and characterization of hydride blisters in Zircaloy-4 cladding tubes

“…First, the crystallographic Figure 11: (a) Nanohardness measurements with a 10mN load on two profiles on a 217 µm deep blister on the radial circumferential plane, (b) evolution of the hardness of the hydrided zirconium as a function of the hydrogen content from [31,66,67,68,69,70], (c) elastic modulus measured from the nanohardness measurements considering a ν=0.3 Poisson ratio and (d) evolution of the elastic modulus of the hydrided zirconium as a function of the hydrogen content from [31,65,68,71,72,73,74].…”