Simulations of Metal Oxidation in LBE at a Mesoscopic Level

The oxidation process of metals in lead bismuth eutectic (LBE) environment is studied at a mesoscopic scale. An improved stochastic cellular automaton model based on an improved Moore neighborhood is proposed to investigate the development of a continuous oxide layer of metals in LBE. The ionization of metal and the oxidation reaction were simulated with consideration of the transport of oxygen along the grain boundary and the diffusion of metallic ions. The growth of oxide layer in two directions is observed and the volume expansion effect can be realized by changing the volume control parameter. The model was benchmarked with a pure diffusion process, both with the analytical solution and with the previous work. Significant agreement was reached between the data. The developed model is also mapped with the experimental data from an LBE loop. A parametric study was conducted in order to check the importance of the main explicit parameters of the mesoscopic model.