A many-body interatomic potential was developed for hexagonal close-packed -Zr. The repulsive pair part of the potential was constructed so that the model could be used to simulate atomic collisions. The favored self-interstitial configurations were the <11•0> crowdion and split defects, and these were highly mobile in the basal plane. The energy of the surfaces did not depend strongly upon the crystallographic orientation, and the I2 stacking fault on the basal plane was not stable. The displacement threshold energy in a crystal at 0K exhibited a similar orientation dependence to that which had been computed for -Ti. It had the same minimum (27.5eV) along <11•0> directions, but the mean value (55eV), averaged over all orientations, was higher than that (30eV) in Ti.

G.J.Ackland, S.J.Wooding, D.J.Bacon: Philosophical Magazine A, 1995, 71[3], 553-65