Alpha to omega transition in shock compressed zirconium: crystallographic aspects

Abstract

In the present study, specimens of Zr were subjected to shock compression of 11.6 GPa. TEM examination of the recovered samples revealed that during shock compression the a phase has transformed into the w phase. The orientation relationships (ORs) between the α and ω phase have been determined using both the stereographic projection method and the correspondence matrix method. Our ORs have been found to belong to the Variant I OR given by Usikov and Zilbershtein (UZ) for statically compressed Zr samples. Our ORs are the same as the one reported by Song and Gray (SG) on dynamically compressed samples. In the present paper it has been shown that the OR of SG is a subset of the OR of UZ and is not apart from it. The mechanism of α→ω transition with respect to occurrence of an intermediate β (bcc) structure, during the transition has also been explored. We also show in this study that the amount of the transformed w phase decreases with increasing oxygen content in the samples that were shock loaded to the same peak pressure, as is revealed by both the TEM and XRD results.