SYMPOSIA PAPER Published: 01 January 1981
STP28244S

Stress-Enhanced Swelling of Metals During Irradiation

Source

Data are now available which definitively show that stress plays a major role in the development of radiation-induced void growth in AISI 316 and many other alloys. Some earlier experiments which came to the opposite conclusion are shown to have investigated stress levels which inadvertently deformed the material. Stress-affected swelling spans the entire temperature range in fast reactor irradiations and accelerates with increasing irradiation temperature. It also appears to operate in all alloy starting conditions investigated. Two major microstructural mechanisms appear to be causing the enhancement of swelling, which for tensile stress is manifested primarily as a decrease in the incubation period. These mechanisms are stress-induced changes in the interstitial capture efficiency of voids and stress-induced changes in the vacancy emission rate of various microstructural components. There also appears to be an enhancement of intermetallic phase formation with applied stress and this is shown to increase swelling by accelerating the microchemical evolution that precedes void growth at high temperature. This latter consideration complicates the extrapolation of these data to compressive stress states.

Author Information

Garner, FA
Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory, Richland, Wash.
Gilbert, ER
Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory, Richland, Wash.
Porter, DL
EBR-II Project, Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, Idaho
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Details
Developed by Committee: E10
Pages: 680–697
DOI: 10.1520/STP28244S
ISBN-EB: 978-0-8031-4794-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-8031-0755-7