Irradiation hardening of reactor pressure vessel steels: crystal plasticity law and polycrystal full-field simulations
Résumé
The context ofthis work is relative to the aging of vessel steels in pressurized water reactors.
Due to irradiation, microstructural changes occur in these reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steels. They are
the key to understand and predict the modification ofthe viscoplastic responses ofthese steels (including
the so-called "irradiation hardening") and their fracture properties with irradiation. Recently, a new physically based crystal plasticity law, derived from [Monnet et al., 2019], has been proposed to describe the
viscoplastic behavior of neutron irradiated RPV steels. The consitutive equations have been developed
from molecular and dislocation dynamics results. To ensure the validity ofthis new crystal plasticity law,
numerical simulations have been carried out on polycrystalline microstructures, for a range of temperatures and irradiation doses. These numerical simulations have been performed using the CraFT computer
code, based on a Fast Fourier Transform method (FFT based method [Moulinec and Suquet, 1998]). The
representative volume element is a polycrystal composed up to 512 grains, whose orientations have been
selected by following a Sobol sequence to mimic an isotropic polycrystal while optimizing the number
of grains. The different results obtained were in good agreement with experimental data.
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Licence : Copyright (Tous droits réservés)