On the constitutive relation for thermoirradiation induced creep with application to stress analysis of a fuel rod

Employing an analogy between thermally induced and irradiation induced creep, physical arguments are used first to deduce a one-dimensional constitutive relation for metals under stress in a high temperature and high neutron flux field. This constitutive relation contains modified superposition integrals in which the temperature and flux dependence of the material parameters is included via the use of two reduced time scales; linear elastic, thermal expansion and swelling terms are also included. A systematic development based on thermodynamics, with the stress, temperature increment and defect density increment as independent variables in the Gibbs free energy, is then employed to obtain general three-dimensional memory integrals for strain; the entropy and coupled energy equation are also obtained. Modified superposition integrals similar to those previously obtained by physical argument are then obtained by substituting special functions into the results of the thermodynamic analysis, and the special case of an isotropic stress power law is examined in detail