ESTIMATION OF THE LOW-OXYGEN BOUNDARY OF THE EXISTENCE OF PLUMBOFERRITE PHASES IN THE LEAD MELT

Abstract

At present, installations with heavy liquid metal coolants (HLMC) based on lead melts are considered as promising nuclear power plants, since these coolants have a number of advantages over alkali metals and other coolants. A feature of heavy liquid metals is their rather high corrosivity towards structural materials; however, at present this problem has been partially solved due to the formation of protective oxide coatings on the surfaces of steels based on oxides of metal components of structural steels. This determines the main tasks of modern HLMC technology, which are to provide conditions for the formation and maintenance of oxide layers with optimal protective properties on the surfaces of structural steels. The success of solving these problems in the general case depends on an adequate representation and quantitative description of the properties of the system “liquid metal melt - oxide phase”. In this work, we consider the questions of the possibility of the formation of plumboferrite phases in liquid lead, their composition and thermodynamic properties.