Calculation of radiation damage induced by neutrons in compound materials

Many years have been devoted to study the behaviour of solids submitted to impinging particles like ions or neutrons. The nuclear evaluations describe more and more accurately the various neutron–atom interactions. Anisotropic neutron–atom cross-sections are now available for many elements. Moreover, clear mathematical formalism now allows to calculate the number of displacements per atom in polyatomic targets in a realistic way using the binary collision approximation (BCA) framework. Even if these calculations do not take into account relaxation processes at the end of the displacement spike, they can be used to compare damages induced by different facilities like pressurized water reactors (PWR), fast breeder reactors (FBR), high temperature reactors (HTR) and fusion facilities like the European Spallation Source (ESS) and the International Fusion Material Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) on a defined material. In this paper, a formalism is presented to describe the neutron–atom cross-section and primary recoil spectra taking into account the anisotropy of nuclear reactions extracted from nuclear evaluations. Such a formalism permitted to compute displacement per atom production rate, primary and weighted recoil spectra within the BCA. The multigroup approximation has been used to calculate displacement per atom production rate and recoil spectra for a define nuclear reactor. All these informations are useful to compare recoil spectra and displacement per atom production rate produced by particle accelerator and nuclear reactor.