Polonez BIS – Tymofii Khvan

Dr Timofii Khvan will head the grant Mechanical and structural properties of RAFM steels - impact of radiation damage, 01/2024 – 12/2025. Materials chosen for constructing structural components in nuclear reactors require careful selection and characterization, as their operational conditions presume the constant influence of harmful neutron irradiation, which undesirably degrades their mechanical properties and eventually may lead to the failure of the component. Therefore, we need to ensure that the margin of safety of the material is enough to sustain a certain amount of neutron damage. However, neutron irradiation for research purposes is a costly, lengthy and complicated process, so the possibility of imitating the damage of neutrons by other types of irradiation is of high interest. In this research, we aim to substitute complicated neutron irradiation with relatively cheap, fast, and safe ion irradiation, analyze its impact on mechanical properties, deeply investigate the microstructural changes it does, and compare it with the existing data done with neutrons. We target to establish an experimentally-computational procedure for effectively characterizing the consequences of ion irradiation as a surrogate for neutron irradiation. This will allow us to accelerate the delivery of new research data on structural materials for nuclear applications.