Wednesday  |  Phipps  |  10:00 AM–10:20 AM

#13909, A Variable Extensometer Technique to Measure Ductility at Elevated Temperatures

Understanding how irradiated materials deteriorate is increasingly important as nuclear facilities age. Due to the expense of handling and testing irradiated materials, there is significant interest in developing new methods to characterize these materials using miniaturized specimens, which require less radiation dosage to accumulate the same level of damage. One important phenomenon to understand in irradiated structural materials is ductility. However, due to localization in the form of necking, ductile failure is heterogeneous and also varies depending on the size of the test specimen. Therefore, ductility measurements require scaling laws to isolate true material behavior from geometry-dependent behavior. Traditionally, this required testing many specimens of varying length and cross-sectional area, which becomes prohibitively expensive when applied to post-irradiation evaluation. As an alternative approach, our variable extensometer technique uses Digital Image Correlation to down-select many shorter gauge lengths simultaneously from the same specimen, thereby obtaining thousands of overlapping measurements from each specimen. This work has previously been presented at room temperature, and this presentation extends that work to elevated temperature.

Hannah Maxwell   Utah State University
Adam Smith   Utah State University
Hadi Mirmohammad   University of Utah
Owen Kingstedt   University of Utah
Raushan Singh   Utah State University
Ryan Berke   Utah State University