Abstract
It is important to get fast and quantitative compositional depth profiles for the boundary layer of the corroded specimen in order to understand the corrosion process and mechanism due to liquid lithium induced corrosion problems to structural material of fusion reactors. In this work, calibration-free laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (CF-LIBS) is introduced to investigate the compatibility of CLF-1(China low-activation Ferritic steel) exposed in liquid lithium at 500 °C for 500 h. The results show that CF-LIBS constitutes an effective technique to observe the corrosion layer of specimens which are non-uniform and the elements of matrix show gradient distribution from the boundary to the inner layer. The concentration was 82–95 wt.% Fe, 5–12 wt.% Cr, 0.45–0.85 wt.% Mn, 1.6–1.1 wt.% W, 0.11–0.16 wt.% V, and <0.2 wt.% Li along the longitudinal corrosion depth for the corrode CLF-1. The results reveal the quantitative elemental variation trend of CLF-1 in the lithium corrosion process and indicate that the CF-LIBS approach can be applied to the analysis of composition in multi-element materials.
Highlights
Liquid lithium, as the self-coolant and the tritium breeder applied in Tokamak reactor, has the advantage of high atom density, high heat conductivity
A kind of Chinese reduced activation ferritic-martensitic (RAFM) named CLF-1 fabricated by the Southwestern Institute of Physics (SWIP) has good mechanical properties and low sensitivity to radiation-induced swelling, and is considered the structural material candidate for the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) [7]
The results show that the depth profile includes the distinctive longitudinal variations within the corroded layer from interface to the inner substrate, which explains the quantitative elemental variations in the whole static corrosion process
Summary
As the self-coolant and the tritium breeder applied in Tokamak reactor, has the advantage of high atom density, high heat conductivity. Calibration-free laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (CF-LIBS) has been applied for precious multi-element analysis for various materials, including alloy metal [9], rock analogues, soil [10] and hydrogen isotopes retention at the plasma facing components (PFCs) in the international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER) tiles [11]. This approach is qualified to output accurate and continuous chemical compositions of samples without measuring standard curves through certified reference standard samples and internal standards [12,13,14]. This suggests that CF-LIBS has the capability to demonstrate the relative concentrations of the elements, which could be employed as an efficient approach for the quantitative analysis of lithium corrosion in fusion reactors
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