PSI - Issue 80

ScienceDirect

Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2022) 000 – 000

www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

Procedia Structural Integrity 80 (2026) 493–500

© 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Ferri Aliabadi Abstract The prime objective of any safety action in a nuclear power plant is to maintain the structural integrity of nuclear fuel cladding, which encases the radioactive fuel undergoing nuclear fission. Of different acting degradation processes, creep is regarded as one of the life-limiting factors for zirconium nuclear fuel cladding in all light-water reactor systems. However, deformation, fracture, and structural processes in the thermal creep of zirconium nuclear cladding tubes remain poorly understood. This inconvenient situation is due to the relatively limited number of studies published in the open literature. This work mainly carried out uniaxial constant-stress creep tests of the zirconium Zircaloy-4 (Zr-Sn-Fe-Cr) alloy cladding tubes in the power-law and the power-law breakdown creep regimes. Fractographic and metallographic analyses of the crept specimens followed the creep tests. They were used to explain the observed thermal high-temperature creep behavior and to determine acting deformation and fracture processes. The analysis of the creep data indicates close links between creep deformation and fracture. © 202 4 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Professor Ferri Aliabadi Keywords: Zircaloy-4;claddings; creep; deformation processes, fracture; microstructural processes 1. Introduction The reactor components, such as nuclear fuel claddings, are vital for the safety and economics of current and proposed nuclear fission and fusion energy systems. The cladding tubes for the nuclear fuel rods are the first barriers Fracture, Damage and Structural Health Monitoring Thermal creep in Zircaloy-4 nuclear fuel cladding alloy Vaclav Sklenicka a, *, Marie Kvapilova a , Kveta Kucharova a , Petr Kral a , Jiri Dvorak a a Institute of Physics of Materials, Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno 616 00, Czechia

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +420 532 290 454 (V. Sklenicka); E-mail address: sklen@ipm.cz

2452-3216 © 2023 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Professor Ferri Aliabadi

2452-3216 © 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Ferri Aliabadi 10.1016/j.prostr.2026.02.047