The relationship between hardness and yield stress in irradiated austenitic and ferritic steels

Microhardness testing is an efficient means of assessing the mechanical properties of many materials, and is especially convenient for irradiated samples because of the small sampling volume requirement. This paper provides correlations between hardness and yield stress for both irradiated austenitic and ferritic steels by combining existing data in the open literature. For austenitic stainless steels, seven data sets were assembled and the change in yield stress was determined to simply be the change in hardness times a factor of 3.03. For the pressure vessels steels, five studies containing both hardness and yield stress data were combined. In ferritic steels, the correlation factor between change in yield stress and change in hardness was found to be 3.06. The similarity in correlation factors for austenitic and ferritic steels is consistent with previous theoretical and experimental results. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.