Cr-Ta multilayers as a potential coating material for fuel cladding in Gen III and Gen IV nuclear plants

Mamour Sall (1) , Marie Loyer-Prost (2) , Céline Cabet (2) , Alain Billard , Hicham Khodja (1)

1 LEEL - UMR 3685 - Laboratoire d'Etudes des Eléments Légers
2 SRMP - Service de recherches de métallurgie physique

The development of nuclear energy is dependent on the elaboration of advanced materials tolerant to irradiation by high energy neutrons and to gas accumulation (He and/or H transmutation products under neutron irradiation) at high temperature. In this context, research focused on nanostructured materials with multiple interfaces (grain and phase boundaries) acting as (i) defect sinks that contribute to reduce the effects of accumulated radiation damage; (ii) and as traps for implanted species such as helium. Multilayer systems allow well-controlled high density of interfaces (i.e. smalllayer thickness) to reduce the diffusion distance for defects to move from their original location to the nearest sink, thus considerably limiting their transformation into stable aggregates. Previous studies show high tolerance of multilayer systems to helium implantation-the most performant systems can store helium up to 20 at. %. Nevertheless, their behavior under heavy ion irradiation, representative of nuclear reactor neutron irradiation is very less studied.

Keywords: Ion beam mixing; irradiation; Rutherford backscattering spectrometry; multilayer thin films

Domains: Chemical Sciences; Material chemistry

Mamour Sall, Marie Loyer-Prost, Céline Cabet, Alain Billard, Hicham Khodja. Cr-Ta multilayers as a potential coating material for fuel cladding in Gen III and Gen IV nuclear plants. EMR 2017, Apr 2017, Lisbon, Portugal. ⟨cea-02340852⟩