Modeling the influence of high dose irradiation on the deformation and damage behavior of RAFM steels under low cycle fatigue conditions

A viscoplastic deformation damage model developed for RAFM steels in the reference un-irradiated state was modified taking into account the irradiation influence. The modification mainly consisted in adding an irradiation hardening variable with an appropriate evolution equation including irradiation dose driven terms as well as inelastic deformation and thermal recovery terms. With this approach, the majority of the material and temperature dependent model parameters are no longer dependent on the irradiation dose and only few parameters need to be determined by applying the model to RAFM steels in the irradiated state. The modified model was then applied to describe the behavior of EUROFER 97 observed in the post irradiation examinations of the irradiation programs ARBOR 1, ARBOR 2 and SPICE. The application results will be presented and discussed in addition.