Corrosion and Ion Irradiation Behavior of Ceramic-Coated Nuclear Fuel Cladding

Recent concern with fuel safety in accident scenarios has motivated research into accident tolerant fuels (ATF), which are defined as fuels that could increase coping time in case of an accident. This study is an attempt to develop an ATF by improving the corrosion performance of nuclear fuel cladding during a hightemperature excursion through the application of a ceramic coating using physical vapor deposition. In this study, ceramic coatings constituted of singlelayer and multi-layer TiN/TiAlN coatings with a titanium bond coat layer to improve adhesion were applied onto ZIRLO sheets using cathodic arc physical vapor deposition. The coating architecture and deposition parameters were systematically optimized to achieve good adhesion and corrosion performance, and an initial evaluation was performed for resistance to radiation damage. The coating performance was highly dependent on coating design architecture, and the best coating architecture was found to be that of eight-layer TiN/TiAlN coatings deposited with optimized parameters. The optimized coatings were Manuscript received March 6, 2019; accepted for publication January 29, 2020. Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA E. A. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0312-6269, A. T. M. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5735-1491 Applied Materials Division, IVEM, Building 212, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL 60439, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1402-5949 Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University, 119 Materials Research Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Dept. of Nuclear Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA ASTM 19th International Symposium on Zirconium in the Nuclear Industry on May 19–23, 2019 in