The mechanism involving the effect of disorder/order transformation on the environmental embrittlement in gaseous H2 is summarized. It is shown that there is no hydrogen embrittlement in disordered state of Kurnakov type intermetallics in gaseous H2. However, the H2-induced environmental embrittlement for the ordered alloy having identical chemical composition becomes severer as the degree of the order increases. The results of testing on the ion gage turned on and off during tensile testing show that the more sensitive to H2-induced hydrogen embrittlement for ordered alloy than disordered one is attributed to the fact that atomic ordering may accelerate the kinetics of the catalytic reaction to produce more atomic hydrogen. The results on simultaneous hydrogen charging show that disordered alloys embrittled as hydrogen atoms are forced into the material implying that the embrittlement of ordered alloy in gaseous H2 is also due to the acceleration of the kinetics of catalytic reaction. The above suggestion was further verified by the adsorption tests of Ni3Fe intermetallics powder. It is shown that the amount of chemically adsorbed hydrogen in ordered state is significantly larger than that adsorbed by the disordered alloy, indicating that the more sensitive to H2-induced embrittlement in the ordered state of alloy is essentially due to the accelerated catalytic reaction.
