Abstract
Ceramic fiber-matrix composites (CFMCs) are exciting materials for engineering applications in extreme environments. By integrating ceramic fibers within a ceramic matrix, CFMCs allow an intrinsically brittle material to exhibit sufficient structural toughness for use in gas turbines and nuclear reactors. Chemical stability under high temperature and irradiation coupled with high specific strength make these materials unique and increasingly popular in extreme settings. This paper first offers a review of the importance and growing body of research on fiber-matrix interfaces as they relate to composite toughening mechanisms. Second, micropillar compression is explored experimentally as a high-fidelity method for extracting interface properties compared with traditional fiber push-out testing. Three significant interface properties that govern composite toughening were extracted. For a 50-nm-pyrolytic carbon interface, the following were observed: a fracture energy release rate of ∼2.5 J/m2, an internal friction coefficient of 0.25 ± 0.04, and a debond shear strength of 266 ± 24 MPa. This research supports micromechanical evaluations as a unique bridge between theoretical physics models for microcrack propagation and empirically driven finite element models for bulk CFMCs.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Nuclear Energy’s Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) program. A portion of this study was also supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Nuclear Energy for the Advanced Fuels Campaign of the Fuel Cycle R&D program under contact DE-AC05-00OR22725 with Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed by UT Battelle, LLC. In addition, we would like to thank the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) fellowship program and the DOE-NEUP program for support. The authors would like to acknowledge the EPSRC for their support through grant number EP/N017110/1. Lastly, we would like to thank those involved with the UC Berkeley BNC facility and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory National Center for Electron Microscopy (LBNL NCEM) for enabling this research through access and expertise to the necessary facilities.
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Kabel, J., Hosemann, P., Zayachuk, Y. et al. Ceramic composites: A review of toughening mechanisms and demonstration of micropillar compression for interface property extraction. Journal of Materials Research 33, 424–439 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2017.473
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2017.473