Assessment of the chemical compatibility between EUROFER and ceramic breeder with respect to fatigue lifetime

Nanoscale insights into the corrosion of EUROFER by lithium ceramics

“…Finally, the engineering community might ask how to tackle this issue in an actual machine. Considering the above analysis as well as the results of the mechanical tests reported by Aktaa et al [5], a direct contact of Li ceramics and EUROFER parts seems not to be an optimum solution. The following paragraph provides some brainstorming especially for the fusion community designers as well as for material scientists in which direction further investigations can be directed.…”

“…The phenomenon is already studied well up to the micrometre scale, also under varying environmental conditions [1,3,4]. In addition, if exposed to neutron irradiation, lithium will be transmuted by nuclear reactions into gases such as for example tritium, which itself leads to swelling as well as to a degradation of mechanical properties if incorporated in EUROFER as recently observed by Aktaa et al [5].…”

“…▪ Lithium causes a reduction in mechanical properties (see for example the study of Aktaa et al. [5]).…”

“…These ceramic pebbles contain potassium an impurity [9]. Further experimental details can be found in [5]. For the actual study only the 64 days aged samples were considered.…”

“…This work aims to elucidate which phases are present in which sample region and which of them do contain Li. We used the 64 days aged sample from Aktaa et al [5] to prepare several TEM lamellae from different regions of the corrosion region. The 64-day aged sample was chosen, because low cycle fatigue test indicated the lowest performance and corrosion effects are expected to be stronger than in samples aged less.…”