| About this Abstract |
| Meeting |
2025 TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition
|
| Symposium
|
Microstructural, Mechanical, and Chemical Behavior of Solid Nuclear Fuel and Fuel-Cladding Interface II
|
| Presentation Title |
Nanostructured U-Mo Based Metallic Fuels for Fast Reactors – Electronic Structure
Calculations and Machine Learning |
| Author(s) |
Yizhou Lu, Samrat Choudhury |
| On-Site Speaker (Planned) |
Yizhou Lu |
| Abstract Scope |
Metallic fuels are excellent candidate fuel for fast reactors due to its high thermal conductivity. However,
these alloys suffer from severe swelling and fuel-cladding chemical interactions (FCCI), both of which
limit the ability to reach high burn-up (~20%). While swelling is caused by bubbles of volatile fission
products (FPs) such as Xe, Kr etc., FCCI occurs when solid FPs (Nd, Ce, La etc.) diffuse and chemically
react with cladding materials. It is our hypothesis that nanostructured UN or UC particles embedded
within the U-Mo matrix, can capture gaseous and solid FPs at the (U-Mo)/(UN or UC) interface. The
segregation energy of the FPs is evaluated by electronic structure calculations to validate the ability of the
(U-Mo)/ (UN or UC) interface to arrest FPs. Moreover, machine learning is applied to analyze the
segregation behavior of the FPs at the (U-Mo)/(UN or UC) interface, limiting the computational cost of
electronic structure calculations. |
| Proceedings Inclusion? |
Planned: |
| Keywords |
Nuclear Materials, Computational Materials Science & Engineering, Machine Learning |