Correlation between crystallographic orientation and surface faceting in UO2

Yinbin Miao, Kun Mo, Tiankai Yao, Jie Lian, Jeffrey Fortner, Laura Jamison, Ruqing Xu, Abdellatif M. Yacout

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Here coordinated experimental efforts to quantitatively correlate crystallographic orientation and surface faceting features in UO2 are reported upon. A sintered polycrystalline UO2 sample was thermally etched to induce the formation of surface faceting features. Synchrotron Laue microdiffraction was used to obtain a precise crystallographic orientation map for the UO2 surface grains. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was utilized to collect the detailed information on the surface morphology of the sample. The surface faceting features were found to be highly dependent on the crystallographic orientation. In most cases, Triple-plane structures containing one {100} plane and two {111} planes were found to dominate the surface of UO2. The orientation-faceting relationship established in this study revealed a practical and efficient method of determining crystallographic orientation based on the surface features captured by SEM images.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)176-184
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Nuclear Materials
Volume478
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1 2016
Externally publishedYes

Funding

This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program and the U.S. DOE’s Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) DE-NE0008440 . This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC-02-06CH11357 between UChicago Argonne, LLC and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Keywords

  • Morphology
  • Scanning electron microscopy
  • Surface faceting
  • Synchrotron diffraction
  • Uranium dioxide

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