Using Additive Manufacturing for Making Light Water Reactor Components

Making light water reactor (LWR) components using additive manufacturing (AM) provides a high degree of design freedom to create complex near net shape geometries, with significant reduction in the deployment time. Since most of the current AM research focus on the refining of the fabrication variables, little information exists on the actual corrosion behavior (including general corrosion, localized corrosion and environmentally assisted cracking - EAC) of AM components. The most frequent operational material failure modes in LWR is EAC and debris fretting of fuel rods, therefore the objective of this work was to evaluate the environmental performance of AM type 316L SS in relation to the traditionally melted and forged wrought material. Stress corrosion cracking results show similar behavior between AM and wrought 316L SS in high temperature water. Ambient temperature electrochemical testing showed that the AM 316L SS was slightly more resistant to localized corrosion than the traditional wrought material and that AM material did not suffer sensitization during fabrication or heat treatment processes.