scholarly journals The Development of CVR Coatings for PBR Fuels

1993 ◽  
Vol 327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert. E. Barletta ◽  
P. E. Vanier ◽  
M. B. Dowell ◽  
J. A. Lennartz

AbstractParticle bed reactors (PBRs) are being developed for both space power and propulsion applications. These reactors operate with exhaust gas temperatures in the range of 2500 to 3000 K and fuel temperatures which may be hundreds of degrees higher. One fuel design for these reactors consists of uranium carbide encapsulated in either carbon or graphite. This fuel kernel must be protected from the coolant gas, usually H2, both to prevent attack of the kernel and to limit fission product release. Refractory carbide coatings have been proposed for this purpose. The typical coating process used for this is a chemical vapor deposition. Testing of other components have indicated the superiority of refractory carbide coatings applied using a chemical vapor reaction (CVR) process, however technology to apply these coatings to large numbers of fuel particles with diameters on the order of 500 gim were not readily available.A process to deposit these CVR coatings on surrogate fuel consisting of graphite particles is described. Several types of coatings have been applied to the graphite substrate. These include NbC in various thicknesses and a bilayer coating consisting of NbC and TaC with a intermediate layer of pyrolytic graphite. These coated particles have been characterized prior to test and the results of this characterization will be presented.

1993 ◽  
Vol 327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay W. Adams ◽  
R. E. Barletta ◽  
J. Svandrlik ◽  
P. E. Vanier

AbstractAs a part of the component development process for the particle bed reactor (PBR), it is necessary to develop coatings for fuel particles which will be time and temperature stable. These coatings must not only protect the particle from attack by the hydrogen coolant, but must also help to maintain the bed in a coolable geometry and mitigate against fission product release. In order to develop these advanced coatings, a process to produce chemical vapor reaction (CVR) coatings on fuel for PBRs has been developed.The initial screening tests for these coatings consisted of testing in flowing hot hydrogen at one atmosphere. Surrogate fuel particles consisting of pyrolytic graphite coated graphite particles have been heated in flowing hydrogen at constant temperature. The carbon loss from these particles was measured as a function of time. Exposure temperatures ranging from 2500 to 3000 K were used and samples were exposed for up to 14 minutes in a cyclical fashion, cooling to room temperature between exposures. The rate of weight loss measured as a function of time is compared to that from other tests of coated materials under similar conditions. Microscopic examination of the coatings before and after exposure was also conducted and these results are presented.


1992 ◽  
Vol 285 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Veligdan ◽  
D. Branch ◽  
P.E. Vanier ◽  
R.E. Barletta

ABSTRACTGraphite surfaces can be hardened and protected from erosion by hydrogen at high temperatures by refractory metal carbide coatings, which are usually prepared by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) or chemical vapor reaction (CVR) methods. These techniques rely on heating the substrate to a temperature where a volatile metal halide decomposes and reacts with either a hydrocarbon gas or with carbon from the substrate. For CVR techniques, deposition temperatures must be in excess of 2000° C in order to achieve favorable deposition kinetics. In an effort to lower the bulk substrate deposition temperature, the use of laser interactions with both the substrate and the metal halide deposition gas has been employed. Initial testing involved the use of a CO2 laser to heat the surface of a graphite substrate and a KrF excimer laser to accomplish a photodecomposition of TaCI5 gas near the substrate. The results of preliminary experiments using these techniques are described.


2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 1785-1796 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. López-Honorato ◽  
P.J. Meadows ◽  
J. Tan ◽  
P. Xiao

Stoichiometric silicon carbide coatings the same as those used in the formation of TRISO (TRistructural ISOtropic) fuel particles were produced by the decomposition of methyltrichlorosilane in hydrogen. Fluidized bed chemical vapor deposition at around 1500 °C, produced SiC with a Young’s modulus of 362 to 399 GPa. In this paper we demonstrate the deposition of stoichiometric silicon carbide coatings with refined microstructure (grain size between 0.4 and 0.8 μm) and enhanced mechanical properties (Young’s modulus of 448 GPa and hardness of 42 GPa) at 1300 °C by the addition of propene. The addition of ethyne, however, had little effect on the deposition of silicon carbide. The effect of deposition temperature and precursor concentration were correlated to changes in the type of molecules participating in the deposition mechanism.


Author(s):  
George H. N. Riddle ◽  
Benjamin M. Siegel

A routine procedure for growing very thin graphite substrate films has been developed. The films are grown pyrolytically in an ultra-high vacuum chamber by exposing (111) epitaxial nickel films to carbon monoxide gas. The nickel serves as a catalyst for the disproportionation of CO through the reaction 2C0 → C + CO2. The nickel catalyst is prepared by evaporation onto artificial mica at 400°C and annealing for 1/2 hour at 600°C in vacuum. Exposure of the annealed nickel to 1 torr CO for 3 hours at 500°C results in the growth of very thin continuous graphite films. The graphite is stripped from its nickel substrate in acid and mounted on holey formvar support films for use as specimen substrates.The graphite films, self-supporting over formvar holes up to five microns in diameter, have been studied by bright and dark field electron microscopy, by electron diffraction, and have been shadowed to reveal their topography and thickness. The films consist of individual crystallites typically a micron across with their basal planes parallel to the surface but oriented in different, apparently random directions about the normal to the basal plane.


Author(s):  
C. H. Carter ◽  
J. E. Lane ◽  
J. Bentley ◽  
R. F. Davis

Silicon carbide (SiC) is the generic name for a material which is produced and fabricated by a number of processing routes. One of the three SiC materials investigated at NCSU is Norton Company's NC-430, which is produced by reaction-bonding of Si vapor with a porous SiC host which also contains free C. The Si combines with the free C to form additional SiC and a second phase of free Si. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of CH3SiCI3 onto a graphite substrate was employed to produce the second SiC investigated. This process yielded a theoretically dense polycrystalline material with highly oriented grains. The third SiC was a pressureless sintered material (SOHIO Hexoloy) which contains B and excess C as sintering additives. These materials are candidates for applications such as components for gas turbine, adiabatic diesel and sterling engines, recouperators and heat exchangers.


1989 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Klein ◽  
Bernard Gallois

AbstractThe early growth of chemically vapor deposited TiN and TiC coatings on pyrolytic graphite was studied in the kinetic- and mass transport-controlled regimes. While steady-state growth of these coatings results in columnar grains, such morphologies do not originate at the substrate/coating interface. Rather, TiC deposition begins on the substrate as fine grains less than 100 nm in diameter. Early TiN growth occurs in layers of 50 nm grains. In both cases, early fine-grained growth occurs at a lower rate than the linear, steady rate observed for columnar growth. A laser scattering technique has been developed as a tool for characterizing early growth through surface roughness. This noncontact method can be used as an in-situ diagnostic to detect changes in the surface of the growing deposit.


1993 ◽  
Vol 327 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Adams ◽  
R. E. Barlettia ◽  
J. Svandrlik ◽  
P. E. Vanier

AbstractAs a part of the component development process for the particle bed reactor (PBR), it is necessary to develop coatings which will be time and temperature stable at extremely high temperatures in flowing hydrogen. These coatings must protect the underlying carbon structure from attack by the hydrogen coolant. Degradation which causes small changes in the reactor component, e.g. hole diameter in the hot frit, can have a profound effect on operation. The ability of a component to withstand repeated temperature cycles is also a coating development issue. Coatings which crack or spall under these conditions would be unacceptable. While refractory carbides appear to be the coating material of choice for carbon substrates being used in PBR components, the method of applying these coatings can have a large effect on their performance. Two deposition processes for these refractory carbides, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and chemical vapor reaction (CVR) have been evaluated.Screening tests for these coatings consisted of testing of coated 2-D and 3-D weave carbon-carbon in flowing hot hydrogen at one atmosphere. Carbon loss from these samples was measured as a function of time. Exposure temperatures up to 3000 K were used and samples were exposed in a cyclical fashion, cooling to room temperature between exposures. The results of these measurements are presented along with an evaluation of the relative merits of CVR and CVD coatings for this application.


1999 ◽  
Vol 585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas H. Lowndes ◽  
Vladimir I. Merkulov ◽  
L. R. Baylor ◽  
G. E. Jellison ◽  
D. B. Poker ◽  
...  

AbstractThe principal interests in this work are energetic-beam control of carbon-film properties and the roles of doping and surface morphology in field emission. Carbon films with variable sp3-bonding fraction were deposited on n-type Si substrates by ArF (193 nm) pulsed-laser ablation (PLA) of a pyrolytic graphite target, and by direct metal ion beam deposition (DMIBD) using a primary Cs+ beam to generate the secondary C- deposition beam. The PLA films are undoped while the DMIBD films are doped with Cs. The kinetic energy (KE) of the incident C atoms/ions was controlled and varied over the range from ∼25 eV to ∼175 eV. Earlier studies have shown that C films' sp3-bonding fraction and diamond-like properties can be maximized by using KE values near 90 eV. The films' surface morphology, sp3–bonding fraction, and Cs-content were determined as a function of KE using atomic force microscopy, TEM/EELS, Rutherford backscattering and nuclear reaction measurements, respectively. Field emission (FE) from these very smooth undoped and Cs-containing films is compared with the FE from two types of deliberately nanostructured carbon films, namely hot-filament chemical vapor deposition (HF-CVD) carbon and carbon nanotubes grown by plasma-enhanced CVD. Electron field emission (FE) characteristics were measured using ∼25-μm, ∼5-μm and ∼1-μm diameter probes that were scanned with ∼75 nm resolution in the x-, y-, and z-directions in a vacuum chamber (∼5 × 10-7 torr base pressure) equipped with a video camera for viewing. The hydrogen-free and very smooth a-D or a-C films (with high or low sp3 content, and with or without ∼1% Cs doping) produced by PLD and DMIBD are not good field emitters. Conditioning accompanied by arcing was required to obtain emission, so that their subsequent FE is characteristic of the arc-produced damage site. However, deliberate surface texturing can eliminate the need for conditioning, apparently by geometrical enhancement of the local electric field. But the most promising approach for producing macroscopically flat FE cathodes is to use materials that are highly nanostructured, either by the deposition process (e.g. HF-CVD carbon) or intrinsically (e.g. carbon nanotubes). HF-CVD films were found to combine a number of desirable properties for FE displays and vacuum microelectronics, including the absence of conditioning, low turn-on fields, high emission site density, and apparent stability and durability during limited long-term testing. Preliminary FE measurements revealed that vertically aligned carbon nanotubes are equally promising.


Shinku ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 429-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shunsuke KAWAKI ◽  
Won-Chul MOON ◽  
Masamichi YOSHIMURA ◽  
Kazuyuki UEDA

2021 ◽  
pp. 100-111
Author(s):  
D.V. Sidorov ◽  
◽  
A.A. Schavnev ◽  
A.A. Melentev ◽  
◽  
...  

The article provides an overview of the scientific and technical literature in the field of the formation of silicon carbide coatings by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). CVD is a complex process, approaches to which vary depending on the tasks being solved. Depending on the technological parameters, the initial reagents, the substrate for deposition, the type and design of the CVD reactors, it is possible to achieve both the deposition of pure silicon carbide and the co-deposition of silicon and/or carbon. In the first part of the article, attention is paid to the study of CVD from the point of view of the mechanisms of chemical reactions, the design of the deposition apparatus, the substrates for deposition.


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