The role of cold work on the shock response of tantalum

摘要

The effect of prior cold work on the shock response of tantalum has been investigated via plate impact. As-received and 50% cold-rolled material has been studied to determine the Hugoniot Elastic Limit (HEL), shear strength evolution behind the shock front, and spall strength. Results show that there is a significant drop in both HEL and shear strength due to cold-rolling, but as the thickness of the target (or time) increases, results converge between the two states. Results suggest that this is due to the cold-rolling process moving dislocations away from the surrounding interstitial solute atoms that collect there, thus reducing the initial stress to initiate yield. In other words, the main contribution of cold-rolling is to increase the population of mobile dislocations within the microstructure rather that just increase the dislocation density as a whole. In contrast, the spall strength in both states appears almost identical. It is suggested that the high Peierls stress prevents a large increase in dislocation density during rolling and hence reduces any post rolling strengthening that might be observed in the spallation response. Finally, we observe a significant change in spall response below a pulse width of 150?ns. We believe that this represents a change from a nucleation and growth of ductile voids type mechanism to one based on ductile fracture of atomic planes. The fact that at these low pulse durations, results appear to trend towards the theoretical strength of tantalum would lend support to this hypothesis.