Department of Materials, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK.
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 3JD, UK.
Int J Mol Sci. 2023 Jul 28;24(15):12120. doi: 10.3390/ijms241512120.
Recent discovery and investigation of the flow of glasses under the electron beams of transmission electron microscopes raised the question of eventual occurrence of such type effects in the vitrified highly radioactive nuclear waste (HLW). In connection to this, we analyse here the flow of glasses and glass-liquid transition in conditions of continuous electron irradiation such as under the e-beam of transmission electron microscopes (TEM) utilising the configuron (broken chemical bond) concept and configuron percolation theory (CPT) methods. It is shown that in such conditions, the fluidity of glasses always increases with a substantial decrease in activation energy of flow at low temperatures and that the main parameter that controls this behaviour is the dose rate of absorbed radiation in the glass. It is revealed that at high dose rates, the temperature of glass-liquid transition sharply drops, and the glass is fully fluidised. Numerical estimations show that the dose rates of TEM e-beams where the silicate glasses were fluidised are many orders of magnitude higher compared to the dose rates characteristic for currently vitrified HLW.
最近在透射电子显微镜（TEM）电子束下发现并研究了玻璃的流动，这引发了一个问题，即在高放射性核废料（HLW）的玻璃固化过程中是否会发生这种类型的效应。有鉴于此，我们利用组态（化学断键）概念和组态渗流理论（CPT）方法，在此分析了在连续电子辐照（如 TEM 电子束）条件下玻璃的流动和玻璃-液体转变。结果表明，在这种条件下，玻璃的流动性总是随着低温下流动活化能的显著降低而增加，而控制这种行为的主要参数是玻璃中吸收辐射的剂量率。结果表明，在高剂量率下，玻璃-液体转变的温度急剧下降，玻璃完全流态化。数值估计表明，硅酸盐玻璃被TEM 电子束流态化的剂量率比目前玻璃固化的 HLW 的剂量率高几个数量级。
