AUTHOR=Liu Meidan , Nie Junfeng , Lin Pandong 

TITLE=Irradiation Effect on F321 Austenitic Stainless-Steel: Nanoindentation and Modeling With the Crystal Plasticity Method

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Materials

VOLUME=Volume 9 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/materials/articles/10.3389/fmats.2022.823539

DOI=10.3389/fmats.2022.823539

ISSN=2296-8016

ABSTRACT=In this study, 3.5 MeV Fe-ion irradiation experiments were conducted on F321 austenitic stainless-steel at different temperatures and doses. The hardness of the unirradiated and irradiated samples was characterized by performing nanoindentation experiments. Irradiation softening and hardening were clearly observed at 20, 100 and 300 °C. However, at 300 °C, after irradiation softening, the hardness first increased and then decreased, as opposed to the hardness at 20 and 100 °C, which increased as the dose increased. In addition, a crystal plasticity model for a face-centered cubic (FCC) single-crystal while considering irradiation-induced hardening has been proposed and numerically implemented in the user-material subroutine UMAT of ABAQUS. This was done to simulate the load-depth data of the nanoindentation experiment. The simulated results of the non-irradiated and irradiated F321 austenitic stainless-steel were compared with the experimental data. A good agreement was observed, which demonstrates the effectiveness and accuracy of the model.