Materials aging at the mesoscale: Kinetics of thermal, stress, radiation activations

• Main Authors: Short, Michael P (Contributor), Yip, Sidney (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (Contributor), Short, Michael (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier, 2017-08-24T20:01:40Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

The complexity of materials aging may be seen as a result of the interplay between several activation processes operating on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Though the disciplines involved may seem disparate at first, material aging fundamentally could be linked by the same set of underlying activations and responses of the system. We examine how recent studies of shear-induced deformation and rheological flow initiated in the soft-matter community can be leveraged to probe the mechanisms of radiation damage in nuclear materials. Bridging these two traditionally separate areas of research demonstrates the emerging notions of mesoscale science as a research frontier concerned with linking macroscale behavior to microscale processes in driven systems. We suggest the combining of microstructure-sensitive measurements with fundamental theories and mechanism-specific simulations is essential to addressing metastable materials responses of strongly activated states.
United States. Department of Energy (Award DE-SC0002633)