| Abstract Scope |
Structural materials in advanced reactor cores experience unprecedented combinations of temperature, radiation dose, and mechanical stress. These coupled extremes, particularly the interplay between radiation and temperature, exacerbate several material deformation and failure mechanisms, including radiation-induced embrittlement, radiation-enhanced creep, and fatigue. Although numerous theories, such as stress-induced preferential nucleation and stress-induced preferential absorption, have been proposed to explain these underlying phenomena, high-fidelity experimental data remain scarce, limiting our understanding of their interactions, individual contributions, and microstructural dependencies. Therefore, novel in-situ irradiation mechanical testing methods are necessary to systematically investigate how complex engineered microstructures respond under such combined extreme conditions. To this end, small-scale mechanical testing has become increasingly vital for evaluating ion- and neutron-irradiated materials. This talk will highlight our recent and ongoing progress in understanding metal plasticity using small-scale mechanical testing under isolated and combined radiation extremes.
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