The development of small specimen mechanical test techniques

The current program plan for the development of materials for fusion reactors requires testing candidate materials in both fission reactors and high energy neutron sources. Because of the volume limitations of available facilities, both current and near term, and because of the relatively large number of materials and test conditions that will need to be explored, it is essential that test techniques be developed to extract mechanical property information from small volume specimens. A variety of such test techniques are under development at the University of California, Santa Barbara. These include instrumented microhardness, bulge, shear punch, indentation creep and load relaxation and miniaturized fracture tests for obtaining strength, ductility, time-dependent flow, and fracture behavior information on specimens as small as TEM discs.