Modeling Corrosion in Oxygen Controlled LBE Systems with Coupling of Chemical Kinetics and Hydrodynamics

摘要

The corrosion of structural materials is a major concern for the use of lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) systems for nuclear applications such as in transmuter targets or fast reactors. Corrosion in liquid metal systems can occur through various processes, including, for example, dissolution, formation of inter-metallic compounds at the interface, and penetration of liquid metal along grain boundaries. Predicting the rate of these processes depends on numerous system operational factors: temperature, system geometry, thermal gradients, solid and liquid compositions, and velocity of the liquid metal, to name a few. Corrosion, along with mechanical and/or hydraulic factors, often contributes to component failure.There are two subtasks to this research. The first subtask develops the necessary tools to predict the levels of oxygen and corrosion products close to the boundary layer using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling. The second subtask predicts the corrosion process kinetics between the LBE and structural materials by incorporating pertinent information from the first subtask.