Microstructure and mechanical properties of proton irradiated zirconium carbide

Understanding the Irradiation Behavior of Zirconium Carbide

“…Previous results of irradiation performed at higher temperature showed that no amorphization was seen for ZrC (Yang, 2008;Snead, 2010;Gan, 2006;Gosset, 2008). Thus we can say that ZrC is very resistant to amorphization, likely because chemical disordering is very difficult to introduce.…”

“…The micrograph is centered on a pre-existing dislocation, indicated by an arrow. There is no apparent defect denuded zone surrounding the dislocation, such as observed near grain boundaries in literature (Yang, 2008). The microstructure of ZrC 0.9 after irradiation to 10 dpa at 50 K is shown in Figure 4.4.…”

“…A number of references published have reported the effects of ion irradiation on microstructure evolution in ZrC (Yang, 2008;Keilholtz, 1968;Dyslin, 1969;Gan, 2009;Gosset, 2008). The most typical irradiation-defect microstructures contain black dots or dislocation networks at room temperature implantations.…”

“…The majority of the research to date has focused on the radiation damage phenomena at higher temperatures (>450°C), where many fundamental aspects of defect production and kinetics cannot be easily distinguished. Little is known of the basics of defect formation, clustering and evolution of ZrC under irradiation, although some atomistic simulation (Van Brutzel, 2007) and phenomenological studies have been performed (Yang, 2008;Snead, 2010;Gan, 2006). Such detailed information is needed to construct a model describing the microstructural evolution of ZrC under fast neutron irradiation.…”

Radiation stability of ZrN under 2.6MeV proton irradiation

“…5 shows that the irradiated microstructure is very different from that previously studied in proton irradiated ZrC. The diffraction pattern of the irradiated ZrN at a 2-beam condition with g ¼ 311 near the [0 1 1] zone axis does not reveal any rel-rod streaks, which are often used to image the faulted dislocation loops lying on the four {1 1 1} planes in materials with an fcc structure [16,17]. Therefore for the irradiated ZrN, there are much lower densities of faulted dislocation loops than in ZrC.…”