PNNL

Abstract

Void swelling is an important phenomenon observed in both nuclear fuels and cladding materials in operating nuclear reactors. In this work we developed a phase-field model to simulate the void nucleation, growth, and the change of void volume fraction. Important material processes including the generation of defects such as vacancies and self-interstitials, their diffusion and annihilation, and void nucleation and evolution have been taken into account in our phase-field model. The thermodynamic and kinetic properties such as chemical free energy, interfacial energy, vacancy mobility, and annihilation rate of vacancies and interstitials are generally expressed as functions of the temperature. The developed model enables one to parametrically study critical void nucleus size, void growth kinetics, and void volume fraction evolutions. Our simulations demonstrated that the volume swelling displays a quasi-bell shape distribution with temperature that was often observed in experiments.