Thermally activated deformation of irradiated reactor pressure vessel steel

Temperature and strain rate change tensile tests were performed on two VVER 1000-type reactor pressure vessel welds with different contents of nickel in unirradiated and irradiated conditions in order to determine the activation parameters of the contribution of the thermally activated deformation. There are no differences of the activation parameters in the unirradiated and the irradiated conditions as well as for the two different materials. This shows that irradiation hardening preferentially results from a friction hardening mechanism by long-range obstacles.