Development of a nondestructive testing method and facility for investigation of surface reactions appearing in damage, corrosion, adsorption and catalytic processes encountered in the heat transfer systems of nuclear power plants and the energy storage problems

Studies of corrosion, oxide layer growth, etc., necessitate the investigation of processes which take place at surfaces: adsorption and desorption. Two problems are of major importance: i) initial stages of oxidative attack, e.g. the adsorptive properties of oxygen for a given system and possible synergetic effects of coadsorbed species like CO, H2O, OH, H2, SH2, impurities, and ii) the influence of surface conditions (crystalography, defects, pores, impurities, segregates) on the oxidative attack. An apparatus has been developed with three surface sensitive techniques: a) quartzcrystal micro-balance as a method for measuring the kinetics of deposition of thin metal films and gas adsorption, b) diode probe for the measurement of work function change caused by gas adsorption at metallic surfaces, and c) thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS) which gives information on adsorption/desorption properties of a system studied: activation energy, preexponential factors for desorption, coverage, precursor states, lateral interaction, etc. The system investigated was oxygen/palladium foil (polycrystalline) by means of TDS and the following conclusions have been drawn: 1. Oxygen adsorbs on Pd foil both dissociatively and nondissociatively - depending on the adsorption temperature. 2. Certain amounts of oxygen penetrates into the surface and subsurface region, giving rise to a desorption peak around 1350K. 3. There are two groups of desorption peaks corresponding to atomically adsorbed oxygen (730K and 800K). The analysis of these peaks show the existence of strong lateral interactions between oxygen atoms at high coverages, which is not the case for low coverages. The position of the peaks and the dynamics of their evolution is consistent with the data obtained for Pd(111) and Pd(100) single crystal surfaces