SELECTING A RADIATION TOLERANT PIEZOELECTRIC MATERIAL FOR NUCLEAR REACTOR APPLICATIONS

Bringing systems for online monitoring of nuclear reactors to fruition has been delayed by the lack of suitable ultrasonic sensors. Recent work has demonstrated the capability of an AlN sensor to perform ultrasonic evaluation in an actual nuclear reactor. Although the AlN demonstrated sustainability, no loss in signal amplitude and d(33) up to a fast and thermal neutron fluence of 1.85X1018 n/cm(2) and 5.8X1018 n/cm(2) respectively, no formal process to selecting a suitable sensor material was made. It would be ideal to use first principles approaches to somehow reduce each candidate piezoelectric material to a simple ranking showing directly which materials one should expect to be most radiation tolerant. However, the complexity of the problem makes such a ranking impractical and one must appeal to experimental observations. This should not be of any surprise to one whom is familiar with material science as most material properties are obtained in this manner. Therefore, this work adopts a similar approach, the mechanisms affecting radiation tolerance are discussed and a good engineering sense is used for material qualification of the candidate piezoelectric materials.