Hydrogen-enhanceddislocationactivityandvacancy.PDFVIP

PHYSICAL REVIEW B 80, 094113 2009 Hydrogen-enhanced dislocation activity and vacancy formation during nanoindentation of nickel M. Wen,* L. Zhang, B. An, S. Fukuyama, and K. Yokogawa National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), AIST Tsukuba Central 5-2, East 1-1-1, Tsukuba 305-8568, Japan Received 18 August 2009; published 28 September 2009 The effect of hydrogen on dislocation activities during the nanoindentation of Ni110 is studied by molecular-dynamics simulation at 300 K. The results reveal that the critical event for the first dislocation nucleation during nanoindentation is due to the thermally activated formation of a small cluster with an atom’s relative displacement larger than half the magnitude of the Burgers vector of partial dislocations. Hydrogen only enhances homogenous dislocation nucleation slightly; however it promotes dislocation emission, induces slip planarity, and localizes dislocation activity significantly, leading to locally enhanced vacancy formation from dislocations. The present results, thus, prove hydrogen-enhanced localized dislocation activity and va- cancy formation to be the main reason of hydrogen embrittlement in metals and alloys. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.80.094113 PACS numbers: 61.72.y, 68.37. d I. INTRODUCTION shows that H shields the interaction between dislocations and obstacles, lead