Irradiation Induced Defect Clustering in Zircaloy-2

The effect of irradiation temperature and alloying elements on defect clustering behaviour directly from the cascade collapse in Zircaloy-2 is examined. The in-situ ioWn irradiation technique was employed to study the formation of -type dislocation loops by Kr ion irradiation at 573 K and 773 K, while the dependence of dislocation loop formationon the presence of alloying elements was investigated by comparing with the defect microstructures of pure Zr irradiated under similar conditions. The experimentally observed temperature dependence of defect clustering was further investigated using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations near the experimental irradiation temperatures. We particularly concentrate on yield and morphology of small defect clusters formed directly from cascade collapse at very low ion doses. Smaller loop size and higher defect yield (DY) in Zircaloy-2 as compared to pure Zr suggests that the presence of the major alloying element Sn increases the number of nucleation sites for the defect clusters but suppresses the point defect recombination. MD simulations at 600 and 800 K revealed that the production of both vacancy and interstitial clusters drops significantly with an increase of irradiation temperature, which is reflected in experimentally collected DY data.