The effect of bonding and bakeout thermal cycles on the properties of copper alloys irradiated at 100 C
- Pacific Northwest National Lab., Richland, WA (United States)
- Risoe National Lab., Roskilde (Denmark)
This report describes the final irradiation experiment in a series of screening experiments aimed at investigating the effects of bonding and bakeout thermal cycles on irradiated copper alloys. Tensile specimens of CuCrZr and CuNiBe alloys were given various heat treatments corresponding to solution anneal, prime-ageing and bonding thermal treatment. The post-irradiation tests at 100 C revealed the greatest loss of ductility occurred in the CuCrZr alloys, irrespective of the pre-irradiation heat treatment, with the uniform elongation dropping to levels of less than 1.5%. The yield and ultimate strengths for all of the individual heat treated samples increased substantially after irradiation. The same trend was observed for the CuNiBe alloys, which overall exhibited a factor of 3 higher uniform elongation after irradiation with almost double the strength. In both alloys irradiation-induced precipitation lead to a large increase in the strength of the solution annealed specimens with a noticeable decrease in uniform elongation. The Al25 alloy also experienced an increase in the overall strength of the alloy after irradiation, accompanied by approximately a 50% decrease in the uniform and total elongation. The additional bakeout treatments given to the CuCrZr and CuNiBe before irradiation served to increase the strength, but in terms of the ductility no improvement or degradation resulted from the additional thermal exposure. The results of this experiment confirm that the al25 possesses the most resistant microstructure to thermal and irradiation-induced changes, while the competing effects of ballistic dissolution and reprecipitation lead to important changes in the two precipitation strengthened alloys. This study and others have repeatedly shown that these materials can only be used if the very low uniform elongation (1% or less) can be accounted for in the design since pre-irradiation thermal processing cannot mitigate the irradiation embrittlement.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC06-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 335394
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/ER-0313/23; ON: DE98004697; TRN: 99:005184
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: Mar 1998; Related Information: Is Part Of Fusion materials semiannual progress report for the period ending December 31, 1997; Burn, G. [ed.] [comp.]; PB: 390 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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