Impact fracture of ZnSe ceramics

Structurally different ZnSe ceramics prepared by various techniques were subjected to fallingweight impact fracture. Mechanoluminescence (ML) pulses generated during the motion and multiplication of dislocations were detected, as well as acoustic emission (AE) pulses produced predominantly during the growth of macroscopic (on the specimen scale) cracks. The luminescence began immediately at the moment of contact of a striker with the surface of the specimen, whereas the emission of sound occurred within 50–100 $\mu$s after the impact. The emission maxima in the ML and AE time series coincided with each other. The signal series were used to construct energy distributions upon the emission of light and the generation of sound. It was established that the ML amplitude (the number of emitted photons) is proportional to the energy released due to dislocation rearrangements, and the intensity (the square of the amplitude) of AE pulses is proportional to the energy released due to discontinuities of the material. It was found that the ML energy distribution follows a power law, which indicates the self-organization of an ensemble of dislocations during rapid plastic deformation. The AE energy distribution, on the contrary, was found to be random, i.e., typical of the growth of non-interacting cracks. It was shown that the efficiency of the interaction of dislocations depends, to a certain extent, on the technological prehistory of ZnSe ceramics.