Fabrication and mechanical characterization of zirconium and gadolinium hydrides

Abstract We prepared three kinds of metal hydrides: Zr hydrides, Gd hydrides, and the hydrides of Zr–Gd alloys (Zr:Gd = 10:1, 8:1, 6:1), and characterized their mechanical properties. It was confirmed that the hydrides of Zr–Gd alloys were composed of Zr hydrides and Gd hydrides mixtures. We evaluated the Vickers hardness and the Young’s modulus of the hydrides. We succeeded in proposing empirical equations describing the density, Vickers hardness, and Young’s modulus of the hydrides of Zr–Gd alloys, as functions of the hydrogen content and the Gd content.