Interactions between dislocations and irradiation-induced defects in light water reactor pressure vessel steels

The REVE project (REactor for Virtual Experiments) is an international effort aimed at developing tools to simulate irradiation effects in light water reactors materials. In the framework of this project, a European team developed a first tool, called RPV-1 designed for reactor pressure vessel steels. This article is the third of a series dedicated to the presentation of the codes and models used to build RPV-1. It describes the simplified approach adopted to simulate the irradiation-induced hardening. This approach relies on a characterization of the interactions between a screw dislocation and irradiation-induced defects from molecular dynamics simulations. The pinning forces exerted by the defects on the dislocation were estimated from the obtained results and some hypotheses. In RPV-1, these forces are used as input parameters of a Foreman and Makin-type code, called DUPAIR, to simulate the irradiation-induced hardening at 20 °C. The relevance of the proposed approach was validated by the comparison with experimental results. However, this work has to be considered as an initial step to facilitate the development of a first tool to simulate irradiation effects. It can be improved by many ways (e.g. by use of dislocation dynamics code).