Thermal expansion and transformation behavior of cerium and plutonium alloys: an application of the Aptekar–Ponyatovsky regular solution model

In this paper we apply the Aptekar-Ponyatovsky (AP) regular solution thermodynamic model to the analysis of experimental data for the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) and determine the AP model parameters for unalloyed cerium metal, Ce-Th-La alloys, and Pu-Ga alloys. We find that the high temperature CTE of cerium metal follows the predictions of the AP model based on low temperature, high pressure data. For Ce-Th-La alloys we use the AP parameters to track the suppression of the first-order γ-α cerium transition. We show the AP model accounts for the negative CTE observed for Pu-Ga alloys and is equivalent to an earlier invar model. Finally, we apply the AP parameters obtained for Pu-Ga alloys to rationalize the observed δ-α transformation pressures of these alloys. We show that the anomalous values of the Grüneisen and Grüneisen-Anderson parameters are important features of the thermal properties of plutonium. A strong analogy between the properties of plutonium and cerium is confirmed.