Microstructure and Corrosion Characteristics of HANA-alloy with Manufacturing Process

The corrosion resistance of fuel claddings has been considered to be one of the key properties to control the performance and the safety of nuclear reactor. Zr-based alloy such as Zircaloy-4 has been used as fuel cladding materials for the last few decades. Since, the corrosion of fuel claddings is the most critical issues in high burn-up operating condition in PWRs, the development of the advanced Zr-based fuel cladding with an improved corrosion resistance was demanded. The HANA-alloy designed in KAERI was one of the newly developed materials having an improved corrosion resistance. It was reported that the corrosion properties of Zr-based alloys were very sensitive to their microstructural properties such as texture, dislocations and precipitate characteristics. The microstructural characteristics of Zr-based alloy were determined by the performed manufacturing process conditions. Therefore, to obtain the good corrosion resistance, the Zr-based alloy as fuel cladding was applied to the optimized manufacturing process which was found by different parameter studies. The purpose of this investigation is to get the optimized manufacturing process of HANA-alloy