Abstract
Irradiated growth and irradiated swelling have been the key factors limiting the technological development of metal fuels. Compared with other types of nuclear fuels, metal fuels have the advantages of high thermal conductivity, high fission atomic density and easy processing, so the technological development of metal fuels has been of great interest to researchers, and there has been uninterrupted research and development over the years to overcome the technical problems of irradiation swelling of metal fuels. In this paper, we take a patent perspective and conduct a global patent search on uranium-zirconium alloys, uranium-molybdenum alloys, uranium-plutonium-zirconium alloys and metal fuels of other compositions in the technical fields of composition ratio, preparation process, preparation devices, fuel performance, fuel testing and back-end treatment of fuels, and analyse in depth the global development history of metal fuels, the patent situation of key applicants, the global sources of metal fuel technologies, the The analysis of the legal status, the analysis of key patent technologies, the technical means to solve the problems of irradiated growth and swelling, and the R&D direction of metal fuels at the present stage, and explore the future technological development path of metal fuels. Through in-depth analysis and research, this paper puts forward reasonable suggestions on how to break through the bottleneck of metal fuel technology and the follow-up development of metal fuel related technologies by designing and manufacturing fuel with special structure, improving the composition of metal fuel, modernizing and controlling processing methods, and improving processing technology.