Environmental Cracking and Irradiation Resistant Stainless Steels by Additive Manufacturing [electronic resource].

Published:: Washington, D.C. : United States. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, 2018.
Oak Ridge, Tenn. : Distributed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Physical Description:: 98 pages : digital, PDF file
Additional Creators:: General Electric Company, United States. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, and United States. Department of Energy. Office of Scientific and Technical Information

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Summary:

Metal additive manufacturing (AM), or metal 3D printing is an emergent advanced manufacturing method that can create near net shape geometries directly from computer models. This technology can provide the capability to rapidly fabricate complex parts that may be required to enhance the integrity of reactor internals components. Such opportunities may be observed during a plant refueling outage and AM parts can be rapidly custom designed, manufactured and deployed within the outage interval. Additive manufacturing of stainless steel (SS) components can add business benefits on fast delivery on repair hardware, installation tooling, new design prototypes tests, etc. For the nuclear industry, the supply chain is always an issue for reactor service. AM can provide through-life supply chain (40-60 years) for high-value low-volume components. In the meantime, the capability of generating complex geometries and functional gradient materials will improve the performance, reduce the overall component cost, plant asset management cost and increase the plant reliability by the improvement in materials performance in nuclear environments. While extensive work has been conducted regarding additively manufacturing of austenitic SS parts, most efforts focused only on basic attributes such as porosity, residual stress, basic tensile properties, along with components yield and process monitoring. Little work has been done to define and evaluate the material requirements for nuclear applications. Technical gaps exist, which limit this technology adoption in the nuclear industry, which includes high manufacturing cost, unknown risks, limited nuclear related data, lack of specification and qualification methods, and no prior business experience. The main objective of this program was to generate research data to address all these technical gaps and establish a commercial practice to use AM technology in the nuclear power industry. The detailed objectives are listed as follows: (1) Evaluate nuclear related properties of AM 316L SS, including microstructure, tensile properties, impact toughness, stress corrosion cracking (SCC), corrosion fatigue (CF), irradiation effects, and irradiation assisted stress corrosion cracking (IASCC). (2) Understand the correlations among laser processing, heat treatment, microstructure and SCC/irradiation properties; (3) Optimize and improve the manufacturing process to achieve enhanced nuclear application properties; (4) Fabricate, evaluate, qualify and test a prototype reactor component to demonstrate the commercial viability and cost benefit; (5) Create regulatory approval path and commercialization plans for the production of a commercial reactor component.

Report Numbers:

E 1.99:ne0008428
ne0008428

Subject(s):

Note:

Published through SciTech Connect.
03/30/2018.
"ne0008428"
Raul B. Rebak; Xiaoyuan Lou.

Type of Report and Period Covered Note:

Final;

Funding Information:

NE0008428

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