Some considerations referring to mechanisms of iron oxides dissolution

Full text: Under nuclear power plant operational conditions, the carbon steel components in a such nuclear station react with high temperature cooling agent forming several iron oxides and oxyhydroxides. These substances forming some randomly located deposits on the piping walls, can result in some damaging consequences such as: tube constrictions, pitting and intergranular corrosion and finally decreasing of heat transfer and the development of a radiation field around the primary circuit. The decontamination process being in fact a descaling process, involves the chemical dissolution of corrosion deposits in diluted acidic reagents containing usually a complexing carboxylic acid, a reductant and a corrosion inhibitor. A comparative survey of our experimental results with those published in literature on the up-mentioned topics is presented in our paper. To evaluate the removing rates of these superficial films two types of methods were used: gravimetric and potentiodynamic techniques. While the gravimetry supplied us the weight losses data necessary to establish the descaling process kinetics, the potentiodynamic method was used to compare the values of descaling rates obtained from electrochemical data. Correlating our experimental data with those from literature, we adopted two models of mechanisms applicable to our specific conditions. (authors)