Grain growth and pore coarsening in dense nano-crystalline UO2+x fuel pellets

Yao, Tiankai; Mo, Kun; Yun, Di; Nanda, Sonal; Yacout, Abedellatif M.; Lian, Jie

doi:10.1111/jace.14780

Title: Grain growth and pore coarsening in dense nano-crystalline UO_2+x fuel pellets

Journal Article · Sat Mar 25 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · Journal of the American Ceramic Society

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1111/jace.14780· OSTI ID:1373755

Yao, Tiankai ^[1]; Mo, Kun ^[2]; Yun, Di ^[3]; Nanda, Sonal ^[1]; Yacout, Abedellatif M. ^[2]; Lian, Jie ^[1]

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY (United States)
Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States)
Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States); Xi'an Jiaotong Univ., Shaanxi (China)

Abstract Dense nano‐sized UO _{2+ x} pellets are synthesized by spark plasma sintering with controlled stoichiometries (UO _2.03 and UO _2.11 ) and grain sizes (~100 nm), and subsequently isothermally annealed to study their effects on grain growth kinetics and microstructure stability. The grain growth kinetics is determined and analyzed focusing on the interaction between grain boundary migration, pore growth, and coalescence. Grains grow much bigger in nano‐sized UO _2.11 than UO _2.03 upon thermal annealing, consistent with the fact that hyper‐stoichiometric UO _{2+ x} is beneficial for sintering due to enhanced U ion diffusion from excessive O ion interstitials. The activation energies of the grain growth for UO _2.03 and UO _2.11 are determined as ~1.0 and ~2.0 eV, respectively. As compared with the micrometer‐sized UO ₂ in which volumetric diffusion dominates the grain coarsening with an activation energy of ~3.0 eV, the enhanced grain growth kinetics in nano‐sized UO _{2+ x} suggests that grain boundary diffusion controls grain growth. The higher activation energy of more hyper‐stoichiometric nano‐sized UO _2.11 may be attributed to the excessive O interstitials pinning grain boundary migration.

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Research Organization:: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS); USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP); National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE

Grant/Contract Number:: AC02-06CH11357

OSTI ID:: 1373755

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 1401771

Journal Information:: Journal of the American Ceramic Society, Vol. 100, Issue 6; ISSN 0002-7820

Publisher:: American Ceramic SocietyCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Cited by: 21 works

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