Evaluation of the continuous dilatometer method of silicon carbide thermometry for passive irradiation temperature determination

Kevin G. Field, Joel L. McDuffee, Josina W. Geringer, Christian M. Petrie, Yutai Katoh

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

32 Scopus citations

Abstract

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a primary candidate for passive irradiation temperature monitoring, and continuous dilatometry (CD) has been proposed as the key method for extracting irradiation temperatures from SiC thermometry samples. The CD method was evaluated to determine the sensitivity of the technique to the analysis procedure, as well as its accuracy and precision. Analysis found that the CD method had a ±20 °C sensitivity to the algorithm used to determine the irradiation temperatures. Comparison of the CD method with the continuous length change method for SiC thermometry showed CD is a more viable method of extracting irradiation temperatures. A comparison of irradiation temperatures determined by CD with those from active thermocouple measurements further validated the CD method for accurately and precisely determining irradiation temperatures in materials test reactor irradiations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)46-56
Number of pages11
JournalNuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms
Volume445
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 15 2019

Funding

Research performed within was completed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, the National Institute of Natural Sciences (NINS) under the DOE agreement: NFE-13-04478 and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency ( JAEA ) under the DOE agreement: NFE-10-02779. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 for the U.S. Department of Energy. The authors would like to thank T. Koyanagi and L. M. Garrison for supplying additional data to the SiC thermometry database, D. Counce for the exhaustive editing completed on the manuscript, and A. A. Campbell and A. Selby for providing the R source code for the beta and Version 1 Campbell algorithms. The source code was modified for scripting and further optimized by the authors of this work for rapid data analysis.

Keywords

  • Annealing
  • Dilatometry
  • Passive irradiation temperature monitor
  • Silicon carbide (SiC)

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