Surface microstructure and phase structure of zirconia ceramics under intense pulsed ion beam irradiation

Abstract

The surface microstructure and phase structure of zirconia (ZrO2) ceramics under intense pulsed ion beam (IPIB) irradiation were investigated in this work. Experiments were carried out on TEMP-4M accelerator with peak accelerating voltage, current density, and pulse duration of 220 kV, 150 A/cm2, and 80 ns. Micro-cracks with a height of up to 150 nm above the surface were observed and were deduced to be formed by the tensile stress during the shrinking process. The cross-sectional observation indicates that columnar structure thin layer with thickness about 1.23 μm was produced after IPIB irradiation. The GIXRD pattern indicates that obvious preferred orientation in (1 1 0) and (2 0 0) of t-ZrO2 was occurred in near-surface region after IPIB irradiation. Opposite micro-stress in bulk and near-surface region was revealed by W-H plot after Rietveld refinement. The evolution of mass loss and surface roughness of samples with pulse number was also investigated.