Abstract
Historically, alloy development with better radiation performance has been focused on traditional alloys with one or two principal element(s) and minor alloying elements, where enhanced radiation resistance depends on microstructural or nanoscale features to mitigate displacement damage. In sharp contrast to traditional alloys, recent advances of single-phase concentrated solid solution alloys (SP-CSAs) have opened up new frontiers in materials research. In these alloys, a random arrangement of multiple elemental species on a crystalline lattice results in disordered local chemical environments and unique site-to-site lattice distortions. Based on closely integrated computational and experimental studies using a novel set of SP-CSAs in a face-centered cubic structure, we have explicitly demonstrated that increasing chemical disorder can lead to a substantial reduction in electron mean free paths, as well as electrical and thermal conductivity, which results in slower heat dissipation in SP-CSAs. The chemical disorder also has a significant impact on defect evolution under ion irradiation. Considerable improvement in radiation resistance is observed with increasing chemical disorder at electronic and atomic levels. The insights into defect dynamics may provide a basis for understanding elemental effects on evolution of radiation damage in irradiated materials and may inspire new design principles of radiation-tolerant structural alloys for advanced energy systems.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2363-2375 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Journal of Materials Research |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 16 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 29 2016 |
Funding
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work was supported as part of the Energy Dissipation to Defect Evolution (EDDE), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences. Ion beam work was performed at the University of Tennessee- Oak Ridge National Laboratory Ion Beam Materials Laboratory (IBML) located at the campus of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. This simulation used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, supported by the Office of Science, US Department of Energy, under Contract No. DEAC02- 05CH11231. LKB acknowledgs additional support from a fellowship awarded by the Fonds Québéecois de recherche Nature et Technologies. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-publicaccess- plan).
Keywords
- alloy
- ion-solid interactions
- radiation effects