DIETZEL, Wolfgang
GKSS-Forschungszentrum Geesthacht GmbH
Institute for Materials Research
Geesthacht - Germany

HAIDEMENOPOULOS, Gregory
University of Thessaly
School of Engineering
Volos - Greece

MORGAN, Michael
Westinghouse Savannah River Company
Savannah River Technology Center
Aiken - USA

SCHWARZ, Ricardo B
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos
New Mexico - USA

SOFRONIS, Petros
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois - USA
sofronis@uiuc.edu

SOMERDAY, Brian
Sandia National Laboratories
Livermore - USA

Abstract
The proposed theme of this mini-symposium is the environmental degradation of materials by solute impurities and in particular by hydrogen. The purpose is to bring together leading researchers in the field and discuss and debate the outstanding issues. The presentations will address both experimental and theoretical aspects of the phenomena with a special emphasis on the status of our understanding of the mechanisms involved. Several sessions will be organized to examine the specific issues in a more focused way. A session will be devoted on trapping of hydrogen at microstructural defects such as dislocations in an effort to understand the role of trapped hydrogen in the degradation process. The interaction of hydrogen with the stress and deformation fields at the crack tip will constitute the subject of another session in order to study the details of the fracture processes taking place in the nano/micro domain surrounding the crack tip. To investigate the interactions of hydrogen at the nano-scale, a special session will focus on the ab-initio/atomistic approach to understanding the potency of solute impurities as embrittling species. How this nanoscale response affects the microscopic response at the grain boundary level or even at the mesoscale will be assessed in relation to experimental observations. A session is planned on the macroscopic fracture response of structural materials in which the topics will range from experimental observations on crack growth in the presence of impurities to the numerical modeling of the mechanisms involved. Presentations are also planned on the role of hydrogen as a deleterious solute impurity in materials for the new hydrogen economy applications.