Irradiation effects on nanocrystalline materials

In recent years, nanocrystalline materials with grain size below 100 nm have attracted much interest due to their excellent chemical, physical, and optical properties. This review focuses on the irradiation effects of nanocrystalline materials. It has been generally believed that nanocrystalline materials have a great potential to increase irradiation resistance in the future reactor because of a large fraction of grain boundaries or interfaces that could absorb and annihilate mobile defects which produced during irradiation. Some calculation results and experiment results revealed that nanocrystalline materials can enhance irradiation resistance, while some reports showed that nanocrystalline materials exhibit worse irradiation resistance, or even amorphous at a lower irradiation dose compared with their bulk materials. During the irradiation process, the grain growth dominated by irradiation dose, thermal effect or defects was also disputed. Irradiation is also an important tool to tailor the grain size, phase structure and physical properties of the materials.