Zirconium and Vanadium Composite as Inter-diffusion barrier between Metallic Fuel and Clad Material

The thickness of the cladding increasingly reduces during the nuclear reactor operation. During the fusion reaction, various rare earth elements such as Nd, Ce, La, Sm and Pr arises from the U-Zr nuclear fuel. As mention above, nuclear cladding is needed to prevent inter-diffusion. In this study, we controlled diffusion behavior in order to prevent this thickness decrease of the cladding. Effective alternative method is inserting a barrier in between cladding and metal fuel. Zirconium (Zr) and vanadium (V) are one of the promising candidates as barrier material which shows better performance than other barrier material to improve durability of the cladding. Even though Zr and V materials carried out significant role, it cannot act as a perfect diffusion barrier. In this study a composite of Zr and V as different micro structure of diffusion barrier in between 420J2(Fe based 12Cr steel) and misch metal (MM) was attempted. The Zr/V thin films were deposited by radio frequency (r. f) magnetron sputtering system. These results indicated that a multilayer of the Cr/V-Zr/Cr/V-Zr thin film act as a better shielding for inter-diffusion. To prevent the inter-diffusion between the nuclear cladding and nuclear fuel, vapor deposited multicomponent as thin film barrier has been studied. As can be observed from the SEM and EDS analysis total prevention of inter-diffusion cannot be achieved by Cr/Zr-V/Cr/Zr-V multi-layer, although it decreases inter-diffusion to an acceptable extent. These results indicate that this multi-component system has the potential to be used as nuclear cladding barrier material