A Two-Cycle Automated Approach to Electrical Resistivity Measurement of SiC Monitors for Peak Irradiation Temperature

An experimental system was designed and optimized to acquire real-time electrical resistance of the monitors during annealing. The system was then used to anneal irradiated silicon carbide (SiC) monitors. The altered resistance of the SiC monitors between the first heating cycle and the mean of the heating and cooling cycles that followed was found to significantly change when the annealing temperature exceeded the peak irradiation temperature. This was validated using nine irradiated SiC monitors annealed over two heating and cooling cycles. Of these SiC monitors, three were annealed for the first time. The remaining six monitors were already annealed, but four of these were found to contain residual defects that resulted in reasonable estimates of peak irradiation temperatures. Those estimated peak irradiation temperatures were statistically indifferent from the manual isochronal annealing method temperatures. The results demonstrate a preliminary potential for the two-cycle approach to replace or augment the current manual post-irradiation examination (PIE) process for extracting SiC monitor peak irradiation temperature.