D. Terentyev

The understanding of radiation-induced strengthening in ferritic FeCr-based steels remains an essential issue in the assessment of materials for fusion and fission reactors. Both early and recent experimental works on Fe-Cr alloys reveal Cr segregation on radiation-induced nanostructural features (mainly dislocation loops), whose impact on the modification of the mechanical response of the material might be key for explaining quantitatively the radiation-induced strengthening in these alloys. In this work, we use molecular dynamics to study systematically the interaction of dislocations with 1/2 and loops in all possible orientations, both enriched by Cr atoms and undecorated, for different temperatures, loop sizes and dislocation velocities. The configurations of the enriched loops have been obtained using a non-rigid lattice Monte Carlo method. The study reveals that Cr segregation influences the interaction mechanisms with both 1/2 and loops. The overall effect of Cr enrichment is to penalize the mobility of intrinsically glissile 1/2 loops, modifying the reaction mechanisms as a result. The following three most important effects associated with Cr enrichment have been revealed: (i) absence of dynamic drag; (ii) suppression of complete absorption; (iii) enhanced strength of small dislocation loops (2 nm and smaller). Overall the effect of the Cr enrichment is therefore to increase the unpinning stress, so experimentally 'invisible' nanostructural features may also contribute to radiation-induced strengthening. The reasons for the modification of the mechanisms are explained and the impact of the loading conditions is discussed.

Reduced activation steels are considered as structural materials for future fusion reactors. Besides iron and the main alloying element chromium, these steels contain other minor alloying elements, typically tungsten, vanadium and tantalum. In this work we study the impact of chromium and tungsten, being major alloying elements of ferritic Fe-Cr-W-based steels, on the stability and mobility of vacancy defects, typically formed under irradiation in collision cascades. For this purpose, we perform ab initio calculations, develop a many-body interatomic potential (EAM formalism) for large-scale calculations, validate the potential and apply it using an atomistic kinetic Monte Carlo method to characterize the lifetime and diffusivity of vacancy clusters. To distinguish the role of Cr and W we perform atomistic kinetic Monte Carlo simulations in Fe-Cr, Fe-W and Fe-Cr-W alloys. Within the limitation of transferability of the potentials it is found that both Cr and W enhance the diffusivity of vacancy clusters, while only W strongly reduces their lifetime. The cluster lifetime reduction increases with W concentration and saturates at about 1-2 at.%. The obtained results imply that W acts as an efficient 'breaker' of small migrating vacancy clusters and therefore the short-term annealing process of cascade debris is modified by the presence of W, even in small concentrations.

In this letter, a comprehensive mechanism for the nucleation and growth of bubbles on dislocations under plasma exposure of tungsten is proposed. The mechanism reconciles long-standing experimental observations of hydrogen isotopes retention, essentially defined by material microstructure, and so far not fully explained. Hence, this work provides an important link to unify material's modelling with experimental assessment of W and W-based alloys as candidates for plasma facing components.