MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF
MATERIALS AT LOW TEMPERATURES
D. A. WIGLEY
Engineering Laboratories, The University, Southampton, UK
Received 11 August 1967
I N a review paper of this nature it is impossible to cover
adequately all aspects of such a large subject as the
mechanical properties of materials at low temperatures,
and any choice of topics must inevitably leave some
areas completely uncovered and others barely indicated.
The selection of topics has been made on personal
preference but it is hoped that this paper will convey
some idea of the present position in the major branches
of this subject.
It has been said that in the early days of low temperature
physics, the most important person in the laboratory was
the glass blower; certainly, to judge from diagrams of
Kammerlingh Onnes' original apparatus, he must have
been kept very busy. Even today it is probable that there
are more glass dewars than metal ones used in the low
temperature laboratories of this country. However, glass
has its limitations, and as the scope of low temperature
physics grew so did the techniques of cryostat con-
struction. Good thermal conductors like copper and
brass, and poor thermal conductors such as german
silver, inconnel, and 18/8 stainless steel were found to be
reliable materials for this purpose.
The first fundamental investigation of the strength and
plasticity of metals at very low temperatures was the
work of Polany, Meissner, and Smidt' in the early 1930s
on cadmium and zinc single crystals. At higher tempera-
tures and on a more practical level, rule of thumb
criteria for selection of materials enabled the successful
construction and operation of large scale liquid air plants
without serious trouble from brittle fracture. It was the
introduction of all-welded Liberty ships in World War 2
that showed how serious a problem cold brittleness can
be, even at temperatures close to ambient. From the
large amount of research which followed these failures
we now have a much clearer understanding of the nature
of the tough-brittle transition in metals and also a new
area of research known as fracture toughness.
The need for tonnage quantities of liquid hydrogen for
rocketry and nuclear uses which arose in the early 1950s
triggered off an avalanche of work on mechanical
properties at 20°K and below, especially in the USA and
USSR. In retrospect, I think it fair to say that some of
this data is now of questionable value, but in view of the
C R Y O G E N I C S • F E B R U A R Y 1968
urgency of the project any data was considered better
than none. In the last 5-10 years, the fundamental
aspects of this work have become more prominent and
there is now a reasonable framework on which to base
the experimental results. As in many fields of research,
the f.c.c. metals were tackled first and then the b.c.c.
metals; the latter proving somewhat more intractable
due to the strong dependence of their properties on very
small levels of impurities. *
Finally, there is increasing use of plastics and com-
posites for structural and other purposes at low tempera-
tures. The high strength/weight and strength/thermal
conductivity ratios of many plastics make them attractive
propositions, while in addition to these two factors
composites can often offer superior fracture toughness
characteristics because of their tendency to fracture
progressively.
Metals
When a metal is stressed, the strain produced is initially
elastic and there is a linear relationship between stress
and strain, the constant of proportionality being the
relevent elastic modulus. When the temperature is
lowered, the elastic modulus increases by approximately
0-03 %/°K, which means that its value at 4°K is about
10% higher than that at room temperature.^ The elastic
strain developed by a metal within its elastic limit ranges
from about 10"^% for some soft single crystals to about
5 % for some whiskers. Further increases in stress result
in plastic deformation and modern theories of solids
explain these deformation processes in terms of the
motion and interactions of dislocations. As these pro-
cesses are temperature dependent we might therefore
expect a decrease in temperature to change the yield and
deformation properties of metals.
Face centred cubic metals
Figure 1 shows-the behaviour of single crystals of copper
and nickel oriented for single slip—i.e. oriented in such a
way that, out of all the possible operative slip systems,
only one, initially, will have the resolved shear stress
greater than the critical value required for slip. Consider