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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The current status of heat pipe R&D
Idaho National Laboratory under the Department of Energy–sponsored Microreactor Program recently conducted a comprehensive phenomena identification and ranking table (PIRT) exercise aimed at advancing heat pipe technology for microreactor applications.
Takuya Nagasaka, Haiying Fu, Nobuyuki Kometani, Takeshi Miyazawa, Takeo Muroga, Hideo Watanabe, Masanori Yamazaki, Takeshi Toyama
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 4 | November 2017 | Pages 645-651
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1352428
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to investigate the effect of post-weld heat treatment (PWHT) and post-irradiation annealing (PIA), electron-beam-weld specimens of the reference low activation vanadium alloy, NIFS-HEAT-2, were neutron-irradiated to a fluence of 7.62 × 1023 neutron m−2 (E > 1 MeV) at 563 K in Belgian Reactor-2. In the present experiments, unexpected oxidation of the surface of the samples occurred during the neutron irradiation, and significantly degraded impact properties of the weld metal, while the degradation was not significant for the base metal. The removal of the oxidized layer by electro-polishing improved the impact properties of the weld metal. Although complete removal of the oxidized layer could not be confirmed, it is revealed that impact absorbed energy of the weld metal with post-weld heat treatment at 1073 K was comparable to that of the base metal after the post-irradiation polishing. In other words, irradiation embrittlement of the weld metal was successfully suppressed by the PWHT. PIA at 773 K and above was effective to recover the irradiation hardening and irradiation embrittlement. Mechanisms of the irradiation hardening, irradiation embrittlement and its recovery were discussed.
