Modelling radiation damage at grain boundaries in fcc nickel and Ni-based alloy using long time scale dynamics techniques

The long timescale evolution of radiation damage near grain boundaries (GB) in fcc Ni and a Ni–Cr alloy has been investigated. Molecular dynamics (MD) combined with the on-the-fly kinetic Monte Carlo (otf-KMC) has been used to study the evolution of defects in bulk, Σ3 and Σ5 GB systems resulting from 1 keV collision cascades. Results show that both interstitials and vacancies are attracted to GBs, that vacancy and interstitial clustering is observed in the bulk and vacancy clustering in the GB systems