Abstract
It is well known that nuclear pressure vessel steel shows embrittlement under thermal aging and strong neutron irradiation. We focus on nanoscale copper-rich precipitates and try to clarify the effect of the nanoscale copper-rich precipitates on embrittlement of reactor pressure vessel steels. Our final goal is to evaluate such embrittlement from microscopic viewpoint based on atomistic simulation. In this study, we simulate interaction between motion of an edge dislocation and copper clusters using Molecular Dynamics method with a PBC, where uniform shear strain is applied to the boundaries parallel to the slip plane (1 1 2) in the system. As the results, we clarify the effects of size, distance and pinning of the copper clusters on dislocation motion.
