Micro-mechanical characterisation of uranium

This paper describes a study measuring the mechanical properties of cast uranium (U) and wrought U–6Nb using micro-indentation. Load-depth curves were generated, which were used to obtain data such as elastic modulus as well as hardness. This work has shown reasonable agreement between the experimental results acquired as part of this study and experimentally-derived mechanical properties obtained via other mechanical tests. However, a wide scatter in the data is evident, thereby necessitating a large number of indents on each specimen in order to ensure confidence in the values obtained.