New approach for measuring interconnectivity of fission gas pores in nuclear fuels from 2D micrographs
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New approach for measuring interconnectivity of fission gas pores in nuclear fuels from 2D micrographs Charlyne A. Smith1, Yiming Cui2, Brandon Miller3, Dennis Keiser3, Alina Zare2, and Assel Aitkaliyeva1,* 1
Nuclear Engineering Program, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA 3 Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID 83415, USA 2
Received: 2 July 2020
ABSTRACT
Accepted: 14 September 2020
In this work, we developed a simple and easily reproducible method to measure the interconnectivity of fission gas pore phases in irradiated nuclear fuels. The formation, growth and interconnection of fission gas pores contribute to the release of fission gases from the fuel meat to the fuel cladding resulting in swelling, delamination, pillowing and potential failure. The developed interconnectivity measurement tool can be used to investigate the degree of the interconnectivity of fission gas pores irradiated U–Mo fuels solely using backscattered electron micrographs. The calculated fission gas pore interconnectivity is related to the fission density and fission gas pore size. Between 4.45 9 1021 and 6.23 9 1021 fissions cm-3 inclusive, the rate of increase in the porosity with fission density is almost 4 9 the rate of fission gas pore interconnectivity. This evidence reveals that as the fission gas pores form and grow, they do not become interconnected immediately. These findings can help inform computational models to predict fuel behavior in reactor environments.
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work and its text is not subject to copyright protection in the United States; however, its text may be subject to foreign copyright protection 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-020-05368-x
J Mater Sci
GRAPHIC ABSTRACT
Introduction Interconnectedness is an important phenomenon that influences the transport properties in different fields of science. For example, in biology, highly interconnected pores reduce the rate of membrane fouling by all
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