Swelling and microstructural evolution of nanocrystalline (NC) tungsten are investigated by atomic scale simulations exploring the low temperature, high radiation exposure limit. Statistical analysis of microstructures containing at least a million atoms, with the grain size varying from 5 nm to 20 nm, suggests that their evolution is dominated …
We simulate effects of irradiation on nanocrystalline tungsten in the athermal high dose limit using the creation-relaxation algorithm, where microstructural evolution is driven not by thermally activated diffusion, but by fluctuating stresses resulting from the production and relaxation of defects. Over the entire interval of radiation exposure sp…