Introduction
In nuclear power plants, materials undergo degradation due to severe irradiation conditions that may limit their operational life. Continuous progress in the physical understanding of the phenomena involved in irradiation damage and environmental effects, and continuous progress in computer sciences encroach the development of multi-scale numerical tools able to simulate the materials behaviour in nuclear environment.
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Nature and scope of the project
- The FP7 Collaborative Project PERFORM 60 has been launched recently to pursue the further improvement of the existing tools developed within the FP6-PERFECT project, for reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steels and to initiate the development of similar multi-scale modeling tools to simulate the combined effects of irradiation and corrosion on the RPV internals.
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Activities
- The RPV is the critical component for plant life management, due to the unacceptable consequences of its failure and to the difficulty of its replacement. It is subjected to neutron irradiation which results in irradiation-induced embrittlement. The classical approaches are based on empirical formula that are obtained from fitting the results issued from testing specimens out of the surveillance capsules inserted in each reactor. The resulted empirical formula cannot be used to predict the behaviour of the material especially if the lifetime of the reactors is to be extended.
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Expected results
- The main goal of the project is to develop different mechanistic models at different levels of physics and engineering and to extend the state of knowledge in several scientific fields. The links between these different kinds of model are particularly difficult to deal with and need special techniques, which have yet to be fully realised.
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Societal impact
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