Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Owen, Megan W.
• Cooper, Michael W.D.
• Rushton, Michael J.D.
• Claisse, Antoine
• Lee, William E.
• Middleburgh, Simon C.

Titel

Diffusion in undoped and Cr-doped amorphous UO2

Ist Teil von

• Journal of nuclear materials, 2023-04, Vol.576, p.154270, Article 154270

Ort / Verlag

United States: Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• UO2 fuel pellets are often doped with chromium oxide to obtain favourable properties such as higher density, improved thermal stability, large grain sizes, improved pellet-clad interaction margins, and increased fission gas retention during transients. Chromium has a low solubility limit in UO2, with past experimental work reporting solubility limits ranging between 0.004 to 0.06 wt.% Cr. Due to its low solubility, segregation of Cr ions to the grain boundary may occur. Further, the complexity of these boundaries may be high as observed in other ceramics resulting in disordered or amorphous regions along the boundary, affecting a range of material and operational properties of the fuel pellet. To assess these disordered regions, in this work we study amorphous undoped and Cr doped UO2 systems (containing 10–50 at.% Cr3+) that have been modelled using classical molecular dynamics methods incorporating Cr3+ into the well-used CRG potential library. Diffusion coefficients, pre-exponential factors, and activation energies for diffusion were computed for oxygen ions, assessing the impact of structure and extrinsic species on migration. Oxygen diffusion was observed to be much faster in the undoped amorphous system compared to its crystalline counterpart. Oxygen diffusion in doped systems decreased with increasing Cr concentration, highlighting the importance of additives to retain fission products and other migratory species.