Effects of pre-stress on the mechanical properties and microstructure of neutron-irradiated high-purity aluminum

Although structural materials in nuclear reactors are usually serviced under pre-stressed conditions, the irradiated mechanical properties and microstructures for prestressed metals have not been well understood due to the experimental challenges. In this study, the annealed high-purity aluminum was subjected to a low temperature (313 K) neutron irradiation under a stress of 1.5 MPa, which was ten percent of its unirradiated yield strength. Post-irradiation tensile tests were carried out at 300 K with a strain rate of 1.1 × 10 ⁻³ s ⁻¹ . A strong radiation-induced hardening as well as a loss of uniform ductility was observed on all the specimens, and the pre-stress could defer irradiation hardening and embrittlement and decrease plastic instability stress, which was involved with a possible asymmetry distribution of voids induced by the pre-stress. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was conducted on the samples to quantify the void size and density as a function of pre-stress and dose. It was shown that the pre-stress could accelerate the void nucleation, increase the density but decrease the size of voids. Although previous studies have reported that the dislocation channel could be probably attributed to the micro-mechanism for irradiation embrittlement, none of dislocation channels were discovered in the deformed irradiated high-purity aluminum samples, which implied that the dislocation channel is unnecessary for irradiation embrittlement. In addition, a neutron irradiation embrittlement model for metals, which had been built on the basis of Johnson-Cook constitutive model, was found applicable to metals irradiated with pre-stress. The stimulated results also well agreed with the experimental data.