Influence of oxide scale on the wettability of LBE on T91 steel

The present work represents an experimental investigation on the wetting behaviour of lead bismuth eutectic (LBE) on corroded T91. Firstly, the T91 samples were exposed to LBE at saturated oxygen concentration for 400 h, 1200 h and 2000 h respectively. Then, the contact angle of LBE on the oxidized T91 steel was measured with the sessile-drop method. In comparison, the contact angle of LBE on bare T91 sample was also measured in the same way. The results showed that corroded T91 steel possess worse surface wettability. The corroded samples were analyzed with scanning electron microscope (SEM). At last, the influence of oxide scale on the wettability was evaluated by analyzing the measuring results of the contact angle and SEM report. The experiment results were discussed in the paper in detail.