This article aims to provide possible mechanical causes for the lowered blister temperatures of RERTR-12 and AFIP-4 fuel plates. Recent experimental investigations to determine the blister threshold temperatures have indicated lower thresholds for similar plates with comparable burn-up histories. Measured blister temperatures of roughly 100 °C lower compared to the previously tested plates may not be satisfactory for some plates. The primary differences between recent experiments and previous tests are: (1) An aggressive cold work process involving large thickness reduction ratios without normalization or full annealing (2) Subjecting the plates to a thermal cycling process prior to irradiation, and finally (3) A primarily frontal neutron flux as opposed to a transverse flux profile. It is believed that the stress field has implications to blister behavior. To investigate this claim, the stress-strain states for the fabrication procedure were evaluated. First, the residual stress profile caused by the cold rolling process was calculated. Modeling of the cold rolling process has shown confirmation of residual stresses of considerable magnitude and the existence of stress gradients with respect to foil thickness prior to the HIP process. Once calculated, these stress profiles were used as an initial condition for the fabrication process. Due to the variation in stress fields depending on location at which a foil is cut from the cold rolled plate, three representative regions were selected and implemented in the HIP simulation. Variation in stresses, depending on location of the cold rolled plate as well and variation in the through-thickness, results in a wide range of mechanical stress states. This suggests that inhomogeneous irradiation and thermal cycling behavior will result from the use of cold rolled foils. Additionally, these results suggest that there will be fundamental differences in fuel plate behavior observed between plates fabricated with cold rolled foils versus hot rolled and fully annealed foils.
