Abstract
It is well known that nuclear pressure vessel steel shows embrittlement under thermal aging and strong neutron irradiation. To examine this attention has been paid to copper-rich precipitates how they work to embrittle 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 precipitates using Molecular Dynamics (MD) method with a periodic boundary condition, where uniform shear strain is applied to the boundaries parallel to the slip plane (1 1 2) in the system. As the result, it is clear that a precipitate has an effect on motion of edge dislocation. We was able to confirm a remarkable change of energy and increase of shear stress in a precipitate neighborhood. Even if we consider that it is an effect in a limited part, we think that interaction between dislocartion and precipitate give an effect to embrittlement.
