Point defect sink strengths in irradiated materials

Abstract

In the rate theory of irradiation swelling the flow of point defects to sinks is written as the product of the sink strengths and the point defect concentrations remote from the sinks. The sink strengths are determined from the appropriate diffusion equation, for voids this is straightforward since the defect flow is by random diffusion only. However, since there is a strong elastic interaction between point defects and dislocations the point defects experience an attractive force in the neighbourhood of a dislocation and consequently it is necessary to include the effect of drift flow in the diffusion equation. In this paper the dislocation sink strength is determined including a full representation of the drift flow and the dislocation bias for interstitial absorption is calculated to be 30–50% for an edge dislocation in copper.