Preferential Cu precipitation at extended defects in bcc Fe: An atomistic study

[Display omitted] •Owing to the high heat of mixing, Cu is attracted by vacancy type defects.•Cu interacts elastically with stress fields generated by dislocations and loops.•The interaction of Cu with prismatic loops depends on the loop size.•The interaction of Cu with lattice defects leads to preferential precipitation. As a starting point to understand Cu precipitation in RPV alloys, molecular dynamics and Metropolis Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out to study the effect of lattice defects on Cu precipitation by taking Fe–Cu system as a model alloy. Molecular dynamics simulations show that owing to the high heat of mixing and positive size mismatch, Cu is attracted by vacancy type defects such as vacancies and voids, and tensile stress fields. In accordance, preferential precipitation of Cu is observed in Metropolis Monte-Carlo simulations at dislocations, prismatic loops and voids. The interaction of Cu with a stress field, e.g., that associated with a dislocation or a prismatic loop, is dominated by elastic effect and can be well described by the linear-elasticity theory. For prismatic loops, the attraction to Cu is found to be size-dependent with opposite trends displayed by vacancy and interstitial loops. The size-dependences can be explained by considering the stress fields produced by these loops. The current results will be useful for understanding the effect of neutron irradiation on Cu precipitation in reactor-pressure-vessel steels.