Recent advances in the understanding of damage production and its consequences on void swelling, irradiation creep and growth

Abstract

The consequences of displacement damage produced by energetic particles on physical and mechanical properties of metals and alloys have been investigated both experimentally and theoretically for several decades. Over the years, a number of theoretical models have been proposed to rationalize the rate and magnitude of defect accumulation under different irradiation conditions. In recent years, significant advances have been made in understanding the nature of the damage produced in this form of multi-displacement cascades. The new knowledge regarding the intra-cascade recombination and clustering of self-interstitial atoms and vacancies during the cooling-down phase of cascades makes it necessary to re-examine the appropriateness of the available models for describing the accumulation of damage under cascade damage conditions. In this paper, recent advances in the understanding of damage production and its consequences are reviewed. A historic perspective is adopted. A comprehensive analysis of the effects of temperature, dose rate and particle type on multi-phenomena (swelling, creep, growth, microstructure evolution, RED, RIS) is presented to discuss the strength and weakness of various models, as they have evolved with the understanding of the damage processes. It has been shown that the irradiation damage modeling has progressed from the standard rate theory model to the BEK model to the production bias model with an increasing degree of sophistication as increasingly more realistic features of the irradiation damage production process were incorporated. It is shown that the newly proposed production bias model uniquely includes the necessary features of cascade damage production in its treatment of the damage accumulation.