Collection 

Hydrogen Embrittlement

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Open
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Hydrogen is the lightest and one of the most abundant elements. Hydrogen is emerging as a globally important energy source and energy carrier, but storage and transportation remain challenging. Hydrogen can lead to catastrophic failures of materials through a process called hydrogen embrittlement. This is a crucial safety issue for nuclear, automotive, aerospace, construction and chemical industries. Although hydrogen embrittlement has been known for many decades, the underlying mechanisms are still under debate, largely due to the difficulty in precisely mapping the distribution of hydrogen with high fidelity and the inability for computational approaches to accurately capture all the complexities of real-world experimental studies. In the last decade, there has been substantial progress in in situ and in operando high spatial resolution 3D characterization techniques ranging from cryogenic atom probe tomography, advanced transmission electron microscopy, in situ environmental transmission electron microscopy, secondary ion mass spectrometry, thermal desorption spectroscopy, in situ synchrotron X-Ray tomography, in situ high energy X-ray, neutron diffraction methods and other novel methods that provide insight into the effect of hydrogen on deformation mechanisms from the atomic to macroscale. In parallel, there has been also extensive progress in computational approaches targeted toward understanding the influence of hydrogen on deformation mechanisms from atomic scale density functional theory, mesoscale molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo methods, and phase-field simulation to continuum scale finite element modeling. This renaissance in both experimental and computational research hass accelerated mechanistic understanding and providing guidelines to discover materials with high resistance to degradation mechanisms. This special issue on hydrogen embrittlement seeks to develop a collection of reviews and original research articles that summarize cutting-edge developments in understanding hydrogen embrittlement mechanisms of materials both experimentally and computationally.

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Quantitative data on hydrogen distribution in an iron alloy can help researchers develop a more accurate picture of hydrogen movement within materials and better understand hydrogen embrittlement mechanisms.

Editors

The Collection will publish original research Articles, Reviews, Perspectives and Comments (full details on content types can be found here). Papers will be published in npj Materials Degradation as soon as they are accepted and then collected together and promoted on the Collection homepage. All Guest Edited Collections are associated with a call for papers and are managed by one or more of our Editorial Board Members and the journal's Editors.

This Collection welcomes submissions from all authors – and not by invitation only – on the condition that the manuscripts fall within the scope of the Collection and of npj Materials Degradation more generally. See our editorial process page for more details. 

All submissions are subject to the same peer review process and editorial standards as regular npj Materials Degradation articles, including the journal’s policy on competing interests. The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions, which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests. See our Collections guidelines for more details. 

This Collection is not supported by sponsorship.