Comparison of hardness variation of ion irradiated borosilicate glasses with different projected ranges

Highlights: • Hardness of borosilicate glasses irradiated with ions was measured by two modes. • Four data analyzing methods, with which hardness can be accessed, were compared. • Extrapolation method is suggested to analyze the hardness of borosilicate glass. • The hardness variations of the glass were due to nuclear energy deposition. Borosilicate glass has potential application for vitrification of high-level radioactive waste, which attracts extensive interest in studying its radiation durability. In this study, sodium borosilicate glass samples were irradiated with 4 MeV Kr¹⁷⁺ ion, 5 MeV Xe²⁶⁺ ion and 0.3 MeV P⁺ ion, respectively. The hardness of irradiated borosilicate glass samples was measured with nanoindentation in continuous stiffness mode and quasi continuous stiffness mode, separately. Extrapolation method, mean value method, squared extrapolation method and selected point method are used to obtain hardness of irradiated glass and a comparison among these four methods is conducted. The extrapolation method is suggested to analyze the hardness of ion irradiated glass. With increasing irradiation dose, the values of hardness for samples irradiated with Kr, Xe and P ions dropped and then saturated at 0.02 dpa. Besides, both the maximum variations and decay constants for three kinds of ions with different energies are similar indicates the similarity behind the hardness variation in glasses after irradiation. Furthermore, the hardness variation of low energy P ion irradiated samples whose range is much smaller than those of high energy Kr and Xe ions, has the same trend as that of Kr and Xe ions. It suggested that electronic energy loss did not play a significant role in hardness decrease for irradiation of low energy ions.