Corrosion and cracking represent critical failure mechanisms for structural materials in many applications. Although a crack can often be seen with the unaided eye, higher resolution imaging techniques are required to understand the nature of the crack tips and underlying degradation processes. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) employ a suite of microscopy techniques and site-specific material sampling to analyze corrosion and crack structures, producing images and compositional analyses with near-atomic spatial resolution. The samples are cracked components removed from commercial light-water reactor service or laboratory samples tested in simulated reactor environments.
Revised: August 15, 2014 |
Published: April 1, 2012