SIMULATION OF LARGE STRAIN BEHAVIOUR OF ZICONIUM-2 ALLOY

Abstract

Zirconium is a widely applied material in nuclear industry and characterized by highly anisotropic mechanical behaviour. With the development of the nuclear industry, zirconium alloys have proven to be very important structural material used as pressure tubes in heavy water reactors, and thin-walled tubing in light water reactors due to improved corrosion resistance. To study the special property of zirconium, this thesis will evaluate different numerical models and will present an overview about the deformation mechanisms for zirconium alloys.

Twinning and De-twinning (TDT) and Predominant Twin Reorientation (PTR) models are both implemented in the EVPSC polycrystal model. Various self-consistent models as well as TDT and PTR twinning models are evaluated by studying large strain behavior of zirconium alloys slab under different deformation processes. The material parameters for those models are determined by virtue of the experimental uniaxial tension and compression along the normal direction (ND) as well as tension along the rolling direction (RD). The predictability of those models is assumed through comparison of macroscopic deformation behavior (stress strain curves and R values) and microscopic mechanical response (texture coefficients and lattice strain) between the predicted and experimental data. Numerical results reveal that, among the various models examined, the VPSC-TDT model with the Affine self-consistent scheme gives the best overall performance for zirconium alloys slab, TDT twinning model gives the better overall performance than the PTR twinning model.