The challenges of hydrogen and metals

Abstract

The Royal Society Scientific Discussion Meeting ‘The challenges of hydrogen and metals’ was held in Carlton House Terrace, London, UK, on 16–18 January 2017. This is the introductory article to the discussion meeting issue which includes contributed papers and seven discussion papers. Here, we introduce the motivation to hold the Meeting and give a brief overview of the contents. We conclude with acknowledgements. This article is part of the themed issue ‘The challenges of hydrogen and metals’.

A cracking oxygen story: A new view of stress corrosion cracking in titanium alloys

“…However, the influence of H on embrittlement has been inferred indirectly, often derived from post-mortem observations and/or by analogy to zirconium or to bulk H-charged samples, and is subject to intense debate in the community 10,11 . Kirchheim et al 12 found that hydrogen lowered the energy barrier for the generation of dislocation loops.…”

Numerical Evaluation on Analysis Methods of Trapping Site Density in Steels Based on Hydrogen Permeation Curve

“…In order to reduce resource consumption and improve the ecological environment, the successful development of ultra-high-strength steels, the development of modern zirconium-based, titanium-based and nickel-based alloys—that also face the problem of hydrogen embrittlement—and the implementation hydrogen energy economy to improve the global climate, make the study of hydrogen embrittlement mechanism in metallic materials and the design of anti-hydrogen embrittlement metallic materials (especially steels) a current research hotspot [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]. Hydrogen embrittlement susceptibility of structural steels increases with the yield strength of the steels, in general [ 6 , 7 ], for example, martensitic advanced high-strength steel [ 8 , 9 ].…”

Hydrogen embrittlement I. Analysis of hydrogen-enhanced localized plasticity: Effect of hydrogen on the velocity of screw dislocations inα-Fe

“…Among these are the familiar "hydrogenenhanced decohesion" (HEDE) the subject of the second in this sequence of two papers [1], and the "hydrogen-enhanced localized plasticity" (HELP), which is the subject of the present paper. There are two fundamentally difficult questions that arise when considering these two processes [2]: (i) if the effect of internally supplied hydrogen is to enhance cracking, how is this possible in the case that the crack speed is greater than the speed of hydrogen diffusion to the crack tip in order to feed the decohesion? (ii) If the effect of hydrogen is to enhance plasticity, how can this lead to a propensity for fracture, since plasticity is generally regarded as increasing toughness through crack tip blunting?…”