About this Abstract |
| Meeting |
2026 TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition
|
| Symposium
|
Ceramics and Ceramic-Based Composites for Nuclear Applications III
|
| Presentation Title |
Fracture in low-textured pyrolytic carbons: transitioning from homogeneous to heterogeneous bond breaking morphology with increasing microstructural order |
| Author(s) |
Raphaelle David, Yongfeng Zhang |
| On-Site Speaker (Planned) |
Raphaelle David |
| Abstract Scope |
Pyrolytic carbons (PyCs) find a broad range of applications from the medical field to more extreme environments, such as aerospace and nuclear energy. Among them, PyC is used in the TRi-structural ISOtropic (TRISO) particle, a leading fuel form for advanced nuclear reactors. Understanding fundamental mechanisms responsible for its behavior during operation is paramount to predicting the properties evolution of TRISO and its expected lifetime. Here, with the help of molecular dynamics, we first create PyC’s models with increasing crystallite size and decreasing number of defects. Then, we apply tensile deformations until fracture occurs. We find that fracture initiates at defects location for each model. However, fracture homogeneously nucleates across the cell for the most disordered models, while we observe a heterogeneous fracture morphology for more ordered models, resulting in localized clusters of bond breaking. To quantify the transition between homogeneous and heterogeneous fracture, we developed a bond breaking cluster metric. |
| Proceedings Inclusion? |
Planned: |
| Keywords |
Modeling and Simulation, Nuclear Materials, Computational Materials Science & Engineering |