Effect of foil orientation on damage accumulation during irradiation in magnesium and annealing response of dislocation loops

The effect of foil orientation on damage accumulation behavior in commercial purity magnesium is investigated by in situ electron and ion irradiation. Transmission electron microscope has been used to study the dislocation loops formed by the agglomeration of point defects during irradiation. It has been observed that the ratio of prism plane to basal plane defects increases as the foil orientation is changed from basal to the prism foil. The ratio of vacancy to interstitial defects also increases in prism foils as compared to the basal foils. This point defect accumulation behavior is reversed when magnesium is irradiated with 1 MeV Kr2+ ions and the formation of basal plane dislocation loops were only observed in prism foils and did not take place in the basal foils. Analysis showed that all the basal plane dislocation loops have Burgers vector of the type 1/6(2 0 2 3) and are interstitial in nature whereas prism plane dislocation loops have Burgers vector of the type 1/3(1 1 2 0) and are of mixed interstitial/vacancy in character. In situ annealing experiments at different temperatures performed on electron irradiated magnesium foils suggest that those dislocation loops that become thermodynamically unstable anneal out in a matter of few seconds whereas other stable dislocation loops continue to shrink by absorbing surrounding vacancy clusters. The activation energy for the shrinkage of the interstitial dislocation loops has been derived and the results show that the shrinkage of interstitial dislocation loops takes place by the mechanism of vacancy assisted self diffusion. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.