Abstract
In this article we present a first part of the results obtained during an irradiation campaign conducted at the Jozef Stefan Institute to observe the behaviour of piezoelectric materials under gamma and neutron flux. Specific instrumentation has been developed and has enabled the monitoring throughout the irradiation of several materials such as lead zirconate titanate (PZT) or modified Bismuth Titanate (BiT) in either massive or thick film form. Various parameters such as resonance frequency, electromechanical coupling coefficient, electrical capacitance, dielectric losses were measured as a function of the flow and dose received. The results obtained confirm that the samples work up to doses of 10 18 n°/cm2 and that the behaviour of the samples varies according to their composition and form.
Highlights
Nuclear fuel rods lifetime optimization helps in increasing combustion rate of nuclear fuel, reducing the volume of waste to be recycled
Since 2011, our researches concern instrumentation for the future RJH reactor and new requirements appeared such as : working temperature up to nearly 400°C, high level of nuclear radiations or minimally invasive measurement devices. Based on this limitation and the need to operate at higher temperatures, a second approach is to use a screen-printing process in order to deposit piezoelectric material as the active element on a dedicated substrate
In previous work we developed a specific sensor based on screen printed lead zirconate titanate (PZT) and we proved the possibility of active element fabrication using material characterization [3] and ultrasonic measurements [4]
Summary
Nuclear fuel rods lifetime optimization helps in increasing combustion rate of nuclear fuel, reducing the volume of waste to be recycled. Since 2011, our researches concern instrumentation for the future RJH reactor (to be used for testing devices for GEN IV reactors) and new requirements appeared such as : working temperature up to nearly 400°C, high level of nuclear radiations or minimally invasive measurement devices. Based on this limitation and the need to operate at higher temperatures, a second approach (which reduces the influence of the parallelism problem) is to use a screen-printing process in order to deposit piezoelectric material as the active element on a dedicated substrate. The piezoelectric screen printing layers will be made from PZ27 type materials as mentioned in [3]
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