Study of the fracture behavior of a CuCrZr alloy

Abstract

A previous study concerning the characterization of a CuCrZr alloy, considered as a possible candidate for the construction of passive satellites while highlighting some critical issues such as low hardness and elastic modulus, showed very interesting characteristics of toughness evaluated with preliminary tests on Charpy specimens and tensile tests. Considering that this alloy finds applications within the ITER project, an international program of great interest, it seems important to characterize many aspects of the alloy. For this reason, fatigue crack propagation rate (da/dn vs ΔK) and K IC measurements were performed, too.