High-temperature compressive creep tests of U3Si2 with spark plasma sintering: Experiments and finite element modeling

This paper reports a systematic high-temperature creep behavior of dense U ₃Si ₂ pellets using a spark plasma sintering (SPS) apparatus at elevated temperatures and pressures under vacuum conditions. The stress exponent was subsequently derived to be 3.21 at 1173 K and 2.17 at 1223 K, respectively, indicating a grain boundary sliding creep mechanism. The creep activation energy was determined to be 203.6 ± 19.0 kJ/mol, which agrees well with the literature. Finite element modeling was performed using the creep parameters fitted from the strain-time plot. The results suggest an excellent match with the experimental data, confirming the validity of the experiments. Microstructure characterizations indicate that the main phase of the specimens after creep tests remains to be U ₃Si ₂, with a 4 μm thick layer of nano-sized particles induced from the diffusion between U ₃Si ₂ and alumina disc used to avoid electric current passing through the sample. The successful conduct of creep experiments demonstrates the great potential of SPS to perform high-temperature mechanical testing of nuclear fuels under vacuum conditions. The subsequent finite element modeling exhibits excellent capabilities for accurately predicting material performance in the creep tests and provides a practical tool in evaluating nuclear fuels’ performance for a much-extended time scale.