Assessment of effective elastic constants of U-10Mo fuel microstructures

Monolithic U-10Mo fuel undergoes significant microstructural changes during fuel burnup which degrades its mechanical properties. In this talk, we present results form a numerical method to assess the impact of the various microstructural features--grains, intragranular and intergranular Xe gas bubbles--on the elastic stiffness tensor. Using the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE), phase-field-based microstructures are combined with asymptotic expansion homogenization method to obtain effective elastic constants as a function of porosity and fission density. The results are verified and compared against analytical homogenization models. With this approach, elastic degradation in operating nuclear fuels can be quantified when the distributions of microstructural features are known from experimental characterization or rate-theory based models. We further develop an evolution model based on the virial equation of state for Xe gas and investigate the effect of growth and coalescence of the bubbles at the grain boundary faces and triple junctions.