High-Temperature Steam and Air Oxidation of Chromium-Coated Optimized Zirlo™

Abstract

The presented study focuses on Cr-coated cladding material and its oxidation performance in high-temperature steam and air. As the substrate material, Optimized ZIRLO™ was used which was coated by chromium using unbalanced magnetron sputtering. The experimental methods are described and the presented results focus mainly on weight gain and oxidation kinetic evaluation. The experiments were carried out in the high-temperature range between 1000 and 1300 °C. The test conditions focus mainly on the air oxidation tests that are relevant for some of severe accidents with air ingress and have not yet been studied in detail and are not available in literature. These data are supported with steam oxidation data to directly compare the kinetics in two different oxidizing environments.

Application and Development Progress of Cr-Based Surface Coatings in Nuclear Fuel Element: I. Selection, Preparation, and Characteristics of Coating Materials

“…At present, the most extensively used preparation methods of the Cr-based coatings on Zr alloys are physical vapor deposition (PVD) [14,[18][19][20]22,23,55,[104][105][106]108,109,115,116], cold spraying (CS) [15,24,73,95,107,[117][118][119], and 3D laser melting and coating (3D-LMC) [6,17,25,33,34,69,120]; each are currently used by CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) in France, Westinghouse Electric Corporation in the US, and KAERI in South Korea, respectively. These preparation methods and the characteristics of the prepared coatings are described in the next section.…”