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Plant life management
Nuclear safety
The main objective of this research topic is to contribute to guarantee nuclear safety of the most important nuclear infrastructure in Belgium and abroad, being the commercial nuclear power plants, by ensuring the integrity of structural components of these nuclear reactors through the characterization program of structural materials and understanding and modeling of in-service degradation mechanism.
The reactor pressure vessel and associated internals and primary circuit are structural components that cannot or can hardly be replaced. Moreover, they can be subject to several degradation mechanisms such as neutron irradiation, thermal ageing and corrosion.
The effect of ageing on the behaviour of structural materials
The activities are generally aiming at understanding, quantifying and predicting the effect of ageing on the behaviour of structural materials, as used in critical components of nuclear power plants today.
In particular, the activities focus on the behaviour of the reactor pressure vessel material in terms of (neutron irradiation induced) embrittlement and the behaviour of primary circuit components in contact with their environment. For the former, the mechanical behaviour if of primary importance, while for the second class of materials, effects of stress corrosion as well as neutron irradiation induced effects such as creep and swelling are of importance.
The ageing effects are approached in different ways:
- Through state of the art experimental techniques, generating high quality data on the material behaviour, relevant for the interpretation of plant component behaviour.
- Through advanced material characterisation, addressing the ageing induced changes in the microstructure of the material, offering a link between the physical processes involved in ageing and their effects on the macroscopic behaviour of the material.
- Through modelling of the development of ageing-irradiation effects in a physics based and multi scale approach, in order to be able to predict ageing induced changes in the material and their impact on the material behaviour. This modelling has both a scientific purpose, namely to physically understand better the ageing induced effects on material behaviour, as well as an applied purpose, to be able to make predictions on material behaviour in condictions which are outside the currently available or accessible experimental database.