The ageing behavior and the correlation between hardness and coercivity of Cu-rich reactor pressure vessel model steels

Reactor pressure vessels (RPVs) are the heart of nuclear power plants. RPV steels suffer from neutron irradiation, which would introduce irradiation damages into materials, such as dislocation loops, tetrahedrons, precipitations, etc. Due to shortage of monitoring specimens, nondestructive testing (NDT) has been developed for the degradation evaluation of RPV steels. In this paper, the ageing behavior of hardness and coercivity of Cu-rich RPV model steels are studied at 643 K, 673 K, 743 K and 773 K for magnetic NDT. It is found that the hardness and coercivity both exhibit ageing peaks during thermal ageing and there is a good correlation between them. Furthermore, the apparent activation energy of Cu-rich precipitations (CRPs) is estimated at around 160 kJ.mol(-1).

Automated summary

This paper studies the aging behavior of Cu-rich RPV model steels, finding that both hardness and coercivity exhibit aging peaks and there is a good correlation between them. The apparent activation energy of Cu-rich precipitations (CRPs) is estimated to be around 160 kJ·mol(-1).