PKA Energy dependence of defect evolution in ion irradiated Fe-15Ni-15Cr alloy – a successive cascade study using molecular dynamics simulation

Abstract

Molecular dynamics has been used to carry out successive cascade simulations on model alloy Fe-Ni-Cr for three distinct primary knock-on atom (PKA) energies to elucidate the earlier experimentally obtained results of ion irradiation studies on SS316 and its Ti-modified version. The PKA energies used for the simulations were calculated using the stopping and range of ions in matter (SRIM-2013) to represent the irradiation of SS316 using 145 MeV Ne, 35 MeV He and 315 keV Ar ions. The simulation has been carried out successively to emulate the progress of irradiation and obtain results as a function of dose. The results for each PKA energy have been analysed to obtain the evolution of defect clusters in terms of their size, different types of dislocations, stacking fault probabilities, etc., in all three cases. The simulation results have been compared with our earlier experimental studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Ion irradiation
• MD simulation
• Fe-Ni-Cr model alloy
• SS316

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The raw/processed data required to reproduce these findings cannot be shared at this time due to technical or time limitations.

CRediT author statement

Soumita Chakraborty: Methodology, Software, Analysis, Writing-Original draft; Argha Dutta: Software, Santu Dey: Software, N. Gayathri: Conceptualisation, Writing – Review & Editing, Visualisation, P. Mukherjee: Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soumita Chakraborty

Soumita Chakraborty is a young scientific officer at Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata. She is also a doctoral student at Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai. She is mainly engaged in the research of ion irradiation studies of nuclear materials using experiments and MD simulation.

Argha Dutta

Argha Dutta is a scientific officer at Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata. He is also a doctoral student at Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai. He is using detail characterization tools to study the effect of ion irradiation in nuclear materials.

Santu Dey

Santu Dey is a scientific officer at Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata. He is mainly engaged in the research of ion irradiation studies of nuclear materials using various experimental tools and ab-inito calculations.

N. Gayathri

N. Gayathri is a scientific officer at Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata and an Associate Professor at Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai. She is working on nuclear materials and studying effects of ion irradiation on nuclear materials using computational and experimental tools.

P. Mukherjee

P. Mukherjee is a senior scientific officer at Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata and Professor at Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai. She is working on nuclear materials and studying ion irradiation effects in nuclear materials using computational and experimental tools.