Influence of the specificities of ion irradiation on the nanostructural evolution in Fe alloys: an object kinetic Monte Carlo study

This work investigates the nanostructural evolution under ion irradiation in both a binary Fe-C alloy and an Fe-9%Cr-C alloy at 300°C, using an object kinetic Monte Carlo model originally developed to simulate neutron irradiation in Fe-(Cr)-C alloys. We studied the effect of specificities of ion irradiation that are expected to have an impact on the evolution of radiation-induced defect clusters as compared to neutron irradiation. The most relevant impact is due to the difference in dose-rate between neutron and ion irradiation. Moreover, the effect of two different ion irradiation regimes (continuous versus pulsed) on the nanostructure evolution material was also investigated: the presence of Cr was seen to lead to a different response over accumulated dose, the reason having been identified in the defect cluster recombination mechanism.