The effect of prolonged irradiation on defect production and ordering in Fe–Cr and Fe–Ni alloys

Abstract

The understanding of the primary radiation damage in Fe-based alloys is of interest for the use of advanced steels in future fusion and fission reactors. In this work Fe–Cr alloys (with 5, 6.25, 10 and 15% Cr content) and Fe–Ni alloys (with 10, 40, 50 and 75% Ni content) were used as model materials for studying the features of steels from a radiation damage perspective. The effect of prolonged irradiation (neglecting diffusion), i.e. the overlapping of single 5 keV displacement cascade events, was studied by molecular dynamics simulation. Up to 200 single cascades were simulated, randomly induced in sequence in one simulation cell, to study the difference between fcc and bcc lattices, as well as initially ordered and random crystals. With increasing numbers of cascades we observed a saturation of Frenkel pairs in the bcc alloys. In fcc Fe–Ni, in contrast, we saw a continuous accumulation of defects: the growth of stacking-fault tetrahedra and a larger number of self-interstitial atom clusters were seen in contrast to bcc alloys. For all simulations the defect clusters and the short range order parameter were analysed in detail depending on the number of cascades in the crystal. We also report the modification of the repulsive part of the Fe–Ni interaction potential, which was needed to study the non-equilibrium processes.