High temperature materials, such as superalloys and high temperature steels, are often employed in extreme conditions where they experience a combination of severe mechanical loads at elevated temperatures in the presence of a corrosive environment. To operate under such conditions these materials rely on the formation and integrity of a thin protective oxide scale, typically less than a micrometer in thickness.
Anand H S Iyer, Krystyna Stiller and Magnus Hörnqvist Colliander at the Department of Physics at Chalmers recently published new results on microscale fracture of chromia scales in the journal Materialia.
In their paper they present a new micro-mechanical testing method, which has been shown to be highly effective in measuring the properties of these extremely thin oxide films.
"This allows the development of better models for understanding and predicting how and when the protective oxide scales will fail," says Anand H S Iyer, Doctoral Student
at the Department of Physics at Chalmers and lead author of the scientific paper.
The study was performed through a collaboration between the researchers at Chalmers and colleagues in Finland and Switzerland.
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