As a special functional and structural material, the rare metal beryllium has been widely applied in many key areas due to its excellent nuclear properties, optical properties and physical properties such as low density, high specific stiffness, high specific strength, and excellent thermal properties. This article systematically reviews application of beryllium in strategic nuclear energy, high-energy physics, inertial navigation systems, aircraft structural components, optical systems and commercial fields. The paper also examines how beryllium promoted technological advances and improved the facilities performance in its applications fields. Beryllium plays an important role in the development of nuclear technology, defense, and aerospace, which make beryllium become a strategic and critical engineering material. The paper provides a reference for scientists and technicians to employ beryllium in more fields.

Using ammonia solution and tin chloride as the precursors: tin oxide nanoparticles with different particle sizes and morphologies were synthesised by varying the concentration, heating temperature and ripening time via hydrothermal method. The particles synthesised were characterised by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The TEM micrographs show that rod-like nanoparticles were synthesised when the SnCl4 solution concentration was less than 1.0 mol/L, which was changed to oval shape when the concentration increased above 2.0 mol/L. Polygonal shaped nanoparticles were observed at 220 °C for 48 hours. It was also found that changing temperature had little effect on the morphology but great influence on the size of the particles, which increased from 10 nm to 120 nm from 160 °C to 220 °C and 12 nm to 55 nm from 6 h to 48 h at 200 °C, respectively. XRD patterns indicated that all of nanoparticles synthesised were tin oxide.

In the case of zero-failure data, we get the new estimation formula about the reliability of double-parameter distribution by using a new modified maximum likelihood estimation method and Bayesian estimation method.Finally calculation is performed concerning practical problem.

For polycrystalline Beryllium (Be) specimens, data of yield strength, ultimate strength, elastic modulus, inelastic secant modulus elongation and grain size were obtained by using of material testing machine and metaloscope. It showed that: elastic modulus, inelastic secant modulus were basically independent with grain size; ultimate strength appeared at the end of tension process; relation between rate of yield strength to ultimate strength and elongation was found to be linear, but this rate had no clear correlation with grain size; relation between strength (yield, ultimate) and grain size was satisfied with Hall-Petch equation. Based on test data and analysis above, a bilinear model was given to simulate stress-strain constitutive behavior; an equation expressing relation between elongation and grain size was also derived.

A physics model was established for describing the particle size distribution of beryllium (Be) powder produced by impact attrition milling. In this model, two factors were considered: the first, the distribution of existing state of particles with different original kinetic energy should obey the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics after impacted, it was that, being at higher energy level made big particles unstable, which were easy to be fractured into smaller pieces in impact attrition process, this influencing factor described as the negative exponential of particles size; the second, the tendency to remain low surface energy needed particles should keep big volume as much as possible, this effect defined as the cube of particles size. The actual particle size distribution of Be powder was resulted from the competition between these two factors. Calculating result from the model was in good agreement with data from measurement.