Emulating Neutron Irradiation Effects with Ions

Perspectives on multiscale modelling and experiments to accelerate materials development for fusion

“…However, the use of ion beams to understand radiation damage produced by neutrons must be done with a careful analysis of their differences and limitations, as has been recently described by Zinkle and Snead [128] . In certain cases, a fairly good agreement between the microstructure produced by neutron and ion irradiation has been obtained, considering a temperature shift to account for the differences in dose rate [129,130] . However, some controversy still remains.…”

Solute rich cluster formation and Cr precipitation in irradiated Fe-Cr-(Ni,Si,P) alloys: Ion and neutron irradiation

“…Ion irradiation is a powerful and affordable tool to rapidly test a wide range of irradiation conditions and make the link with the corresponding microstructural evolution. However, several issues of transferability of results from ion to neutron irradiation have been evidenced [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Their origin is connected with the charged nature of ions and the possibilities offered by ion irradiation devices.…”

“…Their origin is connected with the charged nature of ions and the possibilities offered by ion irradiation devices. The dose rate is lower in neutron (<10 -7 dpa/s) as compared to ion (> 10 -5 dpa/s) irradiation, in addition ions only penetrate a thin layer of material and produce non-uniform damage within the affected thickness [4,5,7,9]. Besides, self-ion irradiation introduces additional atoms, also according to a nonuniform distribution (injected interstitials) [3].…”

A Model for Dose Dependence of the Void Swelling in Electron-Irradiated Alloys

“…In Equation ( 9), the separated material parameters and irradiation parameters make validating the functional relationship between swelling and dose of the experiments at the same temperature for the same alloy possible. As the energy for electron irradiation is limited to 1 MeV [12], we can only find low dose and intermediate dose data for electron irradiation, thus, we just apply our model to these experiment results. As shown in Figure 2, the void swelling behavior can be well fitted by our model for different kinds of electron-irradiated alloys, where the fitting coefficients of determination (r-squares) are all greater than 97%, as shown in Table 1, where r-square is a statistical measure of how close the data are to the fitted regression line.…”

“…In HVEM, electron beam for irradiation can be used to simultaneously image the damage. Meanwhile, the high dose rate of electron irradiation in HVEM (3-4 orders of magnitude higher than that under nuclear reactor neutron irradiation) allows for a very short irradiation time [12] (several hours) to achieve a high irradiation dose that otherwise requires several years of neutron irradiation in nuclear reactors. Most importantly, in HVEM, the energies of electrons are in the order of 1 MeV, which are sufficient for producing isolated Frenkel pairs which are uniformly distributed in the specimen, but not collision cascades [13,14].…”