Ion-irradiation induced damage in Fe-Cr alloys characterized by nanoindentation

Self-ion irradiation in combination with nanoindentation offers the possibility to characterize irradiation damage in a broad range of irradiation temperature and fluence. Nanoindentation results are reported for Fe-2.5at%Cr, Fe-9at%Cr and Fe-12.5at%Cr irradiated at room temperature, 300°C and 500°C. Special features of this work are roughly rectangular damage profiles and exploitation of the full load dependence of hardness. The effects of Cr content, fluence and irradiation temperature are discussed. Hardening features were characterized by means of transmission electron microscopy. A tentative multi-feature hardening model was applied, to this end APT data published for the same alloys ion-irradiated under the same nominal conditions are taken into account.