Structural irradiation damage and recovery in nanometric silicon carbide

Silicon carbide is one of the candidate materials for core components of some nuclear reactor projects (Gen-IV). In order to improve their thermo-mechanical properties, materials with nanometric grain size are considered. For such materials, nearly no data concerning their behaviour under irradiatio...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Progress in nuclear energy (New series) 2012-05, Vol.57, p.52-56
Main Authors: Gosset, D., Audren, A., Leconte, Y., Thomé, L., Monnet, I., Herlin-Boime, N.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amorphisation
Annealing
Condensed Matter
Damage
Engineering Sciences
Ion irradiation
Irradiation
Materials
Materials Science
Nanostructure
Nuclear materials
Nuclear reactors
Physics
Recovery
Recrystallization
SiC
Silicon carbide
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Silicon carbide is one of the candidate materials for core components of some nuclear reactor projects (Gen-IV). In order to improve their thermo-mechanical properties, materials with nanometric grain size are considered. For such materials, nearly no data concerning their behaviour under irradiation are available. In this paper, we study the damage and subsequent recovery of a nanostructured 3C–SiC ceramic. Samples were irradiated at room temperature with 4 MeV Au ions and subsequently annealed. Their structural modifications are analysed with a grazing incidence X-ray diffraction method. Results show that these nanoceramic materials present the same damage kinetics during irradiation as conventional micrometric grained SiC, with total amorphisation at the highest fluence. However, while the recrystallisation of a conventional ceramic is expected to occur through an epitaxial recrystallisation from the non-damaged parts of the large grains, the nanometric material is healed only after annealing at 1000 °C through mechanisms that can be attributed to a heterogeneous nucleation and growth of β crystallites in the totally amorphised grains.
ISSN:0149-1970
DOI:10.1016/j.pnucene.2011.12.013