Enhancing radiation tolerance by controlling defect mobility and migration pathways in multicomponent single-phase alloys

By Chenyang Lu, Liangliang Niu, Nanjun Chen, K. Jin, Tai-ni Yang, Pengyuan Xiu, Yanwen Zhang, Fei Gao, Hongbin Bei, Shi Shi and 4 more. Nature Communications, 2016

735 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A grand challenge in material science is to understand the correlation between intrinsic properties and defect dynamics. Radiation tolerant materials are in great demand for safe operation and advancement of nuclear and aerospace systems. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on microstructural and nanoscale features to mitigate radiation damage, this study demonstrates enhancement of radiation tolerance with the suppression of void formation by two orders magnitude at elevated temperatures in equiatomic single-phase concentrated solid solution alloys, and more importantly, reveals its controlling mechanism through a detailed analysis of the depth distribution of defect clusters and an atomistic computer simulation. The enhanced swelling resistance is attributed to the tailored interstitial defect cluster motion in the alloys from a long-range one-dimensional mode to a short-range three-dimensional mode, which leads to enhanced point defect recombination. The results suggest design criteria for next generation radiation tolerant structural alloys. Radiation tolerance is a property determined both by materials structure and defect dynamics. Here authors demonstrate enhancement of radiation tolerance at elevated temperatures in equiatomic single-phase concentrated solid solution alloys and propose an underlying mechanism.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d75ef65798df2ccc624c5caba2c1933ac0259c5

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In Materials Chemistry

1. R. Ritchie
2. Jun Ding
3. Mark Asta
4. Qin Yu
5. Axel van de Walle

In Mechanical Engineering

1. R. Ritchie
2. Jun Ding
3. Mark Asta

Citations in the corpus

• Tunable stacking fault energies by tailoring local chemical order in CrCoNi medium-entropy alloys (2018, background): “Strong variations in these defect energies will likely affect not only strength, ductility and toughness, but also resistance to high-temperature creep and even irradiation damage (36-38).”