Abstract
Due to its excellent resistance to high temperature oxidation and steam corrosion, FeCrAl alloys have received much attention recently as a highly potential candidate cladding material for light water reactors. However, under the effect of thermal aging and neutron irradiation applied in reactor, the nanoscale brittle precipitates will occur in the ferritic FeCrAl alloys after spinodal decomposition due to the presence of Cr, which greatly increase the hardness and reduce the toughness of the material, thus seriously affecting the operation of the nuclear reactor. In this work, the alloy after heat aging was treated by pulsed electric current at room temperature. The micro-hardness and electrical properties of the aged alloy are greatly restored. In addition, compared with the heat treatment at the same temperature, the dissolution time of precipitates in aged alloys into the matrix is reduced by 10 times by electropulsing treatment with higher parameters. In comparison to the ex-situ conventional annealing treatment, this in-situ pulsed treatment can be used as a novel efficient and convenient method to repair the performance degradation of aged materials. Based on the thermodynamic and kinetics, electric pulses reduces the thermodynamic barrier for precipitation dissolution and increases the atomic diffusion rate.
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