Atomistic study of radiation damage in advanced SiC grades

Nowdays, SiC/PyC fibers are taken into account for accident tolerant fuel cladding, coatings and even structural components. Presently, many international efforts are focused in the Horizon 2020 IL TROVATORE® project to investigate the radiation tolerance of these classes of materials. In the present thesis, we use atomistic methods to explore the damage production and accumulation in the SiC/PyC composite. Classical molecular statics will be applied to characterize the interaction of point defects near radiation defects and defects inherent to the material. Classical molecular dynamics will be applied to study the effect of the SiC/PyC interface on the primary damage production in SiC. SiC damage results have been collected and compared with those obtained using BCA (Binary Collision approximation) methods, in order to find an analytical correlation which can predict the clustering process in SiC without using MD methods for larger range of PKA energies, reducing the total computational costs. The result of this study will be used to parameterize a higher scale object kinetic Monte Carlo method for direct comparison between the model and the experimentally observed microstructure under irradiation.