Effect of compressive prestress on the Young's modulus and strength of isotropic graphite

It is well known that properties, such as Young's modulus, strength and so on, change when compressive or tensile prestresses are applied to graphite materials at room temperature. It is important from the designer's standpoint in the sense that it should be taken into consideration for the structural design of the graphite components if there is an effect of prestresses at high temperature on the mechanical properties. In this study compressive prestresses were applied to an isotropic fine-grained graphite at room temperature (RT) and high temperature (2010 deg. C). As a result decrease in Young's modulus due to high temperature prestressing was 56% which was much larger than the 6.4% that was due to RT prestressing. This finding was considered to be due primarily to difference in degree of preferred orientation of crystallites in the graphite on the basis of Bacon anisotropy factor (BAF) from X-ray diffraction measurement of the prestressed specimens. Furthermore, high temperature compressive prestressing produced an increase in the strength of the isotropic graphite, although room temperature prestressing produced no such effect. The results obtained here suggest that isotropic graphite which is subjected to high-temperature compressive stress becomes anisotropic. It is concluded that it should be considered in the design stage of the reactors that the anisotropy may change after long term operation of high temperature gas-cooled reactors. (author). 6 refs, 8 figs, 3 tabs