A lead bismuth eutectic (LBE) spallation target will be installed in the Target Test Facility (TEF-T) in the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC). The spallation target vessel filled with LBE is made of type 316L stainless steel. However, various damages, such as erosion/corrosion damage and liquid metal embrittlement caused by contact with flowing LBE at high temperature, and irradiation hardening caused by protons and neutrons, may be inflicted on the target vessel, which will deteriorate the steel and might break the vessel. To monitor the target vessel for prevention of an accident, an ultrasonic technique has been proposed to establish off-line evaluation for estimating vessel material status during the target maintenance period. Basic R&D must be carried out to clarify the dependency of ultrasonic wave propagation behavior on material microstructures and obtain fundamental knowledge. As a first step, ultrasonic waves scattered by the grains of type 316L stainless steel are investigated using new experimental and numerical approaches in the present study. The results show that the grain size can be evaluated exactly and quantitatively by calculating the attenuation coefficient of the ultrasonic waves scattered by the grains. The results also show that the scattering regimes of ultrasonic waves depend heavily on the ratio of wavelength to average grain size, and are dominated by grains of extraordinarily large size along the wave propagation path.

Lead–bismuth eutectic (LBE), a heavy liquid metal, is an ideal candidate coolant material for Generation-IV fast reactors and accelerator-driven systems (ADSs), but LBE is also known to pose a considerable corrosive threat to its container. However, the susceptibility of the candidate container material, 316L stainless steel (SS), to flow-accelerated corrosion (FAC) under turbulent LBE flow, is not well understood. In this study, an LBE loop, referred to as JLBL-1, was used to experimentally study the behavior of 316L SS when subjected to FAC for 3000 h under non-isothermal conditions. An orificed tube specimen, consisting of a straight tube that abruptly narrows and widens at each end, was installed in the loop. The specimen temperature was 450 °C, and a temperature difference between the hottest and coldest legs of the loop was 100 °C. The oxygen concentration in the LBE was lower than 10⁻⁸ wt %. The Reynolds number in the test specimen was approximately 5 × 10⁴. The effects of various hydrodynamic parameters on FAC behavior were studied with the assistance of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses, and then a mass transfer study was performed by integrating a corrosion model into the CFD analyses. The results show that the local turbulence level affects the mass concentration distribution in the near-wall region, and therefore, the mass transfer coefficient across the solid/liquid interface. The corrosion depth was predicted on the basis of the mass transfer coefficient obtained in the numerical simulation and was compared with that obtained in the loop. For the abrupt narrow part, the predicted corrosion depth was comparable with the measured corrosion depth, as was the abrupt wide part after involving the wall roughness effects in the prediction; for the straight tube part, the predicted corrosion depth is about 1.3–3.5 times the average experimental corrosion depth, and the possible reason for this discrepancy was provided.

Spallation targets are the key components of accelerator driven systems (ADSs) that are being developed in the world. Erosion damages on the target vessels are anticipated. To prevent accidents occurrence due to erosion of spallation target vessel, the damage evaluation technique is desirable. The excited vibration of LBE target vessel will be monitored remotely to establish the technique. In this study, the basic researches were carried out through experiments and numerical simulations to investigate the interaction between ultrasonic waves and damage to understand the correlation between structural vibration and damage degree. Specimens with distributed erosion damage was irradiated by laser shots, and the vibration was detected by a laser vibrometer subsequently. A technique, Wavelet Differential Analysis (WDA), was developed to quantitatively and clearly indicate the differences caused by damage in the vibration signals. The results illustrated that the developed technique is sensitive to erosion damage with small size and is capable of quantitatively evaluating erosion damage. It is expected that the developed techniques can be applied to monitor the real spallation targets in the future.

Structural material compatibility with lead bismuth eutectic is one of the main challenges for design and operation of the LBE-cooled nuclear systems. To better understand the mechanisms of stainless steel corrosion behavior in LBE flow, the iron mass transfer phenomenon on roughened walls under various LBE pipe flow conditions are numerically investigated in this study. CFD simulations are performed, by applying a low Reynolds number k-ε model, in a range of Reynolds number from 5 × 10³ to 10⁵. Meanwhile, various pipe wall roughness conditions are considered, which are simulated by crests with different depths and periodic lengths. Effects of roughness dimensions and Reynolds numbers on the near-wall mass transfer rate are investigated. Results showed that higher flow velocities and shorter crest length led to higher mass transfer coefficient. On the basis of the results, the mass transfer coefficients are proposed both for smooth wall and roughened walls. The mass transfer enhanced by wall roughness is characterized by the ratio of rough-to-smooth mass transfer coefficient, and this ratio is demonstrated by a regression equation, in which dimensionless roughness number, Reynolds number and geometrical ratio of the roughness are included. Moreover, it is found that the ratio of rough-to-smooth mass transfer coefficient is relatively more dependent on Reynolds number.

To perform basic Research and Development for future Accelerator-driven Systems (ADSs), Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) will construct an ADS target test facility. A Lead–Bismuth Eutectic (LBE) spallation target will be installed in the target test facility and bombarded by pulsed proton beams (250 kW, 400 MeV, 25 Hz, and 0.5 ms pulse duration). To realize the LBE spallation target, cavitation damage due to pressure changes in the liquid metal should be determined, preliminarily, because such damage is considered to be very critical, from the viewpoint of target safety and lifetime. In this study, cavitation damage due to pressure waves caused by pulsed proton beam injection and turbulent liquid metal flow, were studied, numerically, from the viewpoint of single cavitation bubble dynamics. Specifically, the threshold of cavitation and effects of flow speed fluctuation on cavitation bubble dynamics, in an orifice structure, were investigated in the present work. The results showed that the LBE spallation target did not undergo cavitation damage, under normal nominal operation conditions, mainly because of the long pulse duration of the pulsed proton beam and the low liquid metal flow velocity. Nevertheless, the possibility of cavitation damage in the orifice structure, under certain extreme transient LBE flow conditions, cannot be neglected.