Cladding oxidation model development based on diffusion equations and a simulation of the monoclinic-tetragonal phase transformation of zirconia during transient oxidation

Zircaloy cladding oxidation is mostly represented by parabolic rate correlation. But the correlation approach is not suitable for long-term isothermal oxidation [4] or oxidation occurs under steam starvation conditions [5] and cannot obtain the detailed oxygen distribution which impacts the detailed mechanical behavior. To obtain the detailed oxygen distribution, a multi-phase diffusion problem with moving boundaries was introduced to simulate the cladding oxidation [9], [10]. However, the hysteresis phenomenon related to the coexistence of monoclinic-tetragonal phases of zirconia which are very important to model the cladding oxidation during a LOCA, is not analyzed. In this study, a cladding oxidation model based on diffusion equations in the temperature range from 923 K to 2098 K which contains β-Zr, α-Zr, monoclinic-ZrO2, tetragonal-ZrO2, and cubic-ZrO2 is developed and the detailed oxygen distribution in the cladding could be obtained. It showed that the simulations of short-term and long-term isothermal oxidation, transient oxidation, and oxidation under steam starvation conditions were reasonable through comparing with the experimental data. We found that our model can give a reasonable simulation of the hysteresis phenomenon of monoclinic-tetragonal phase transformation during transient oxidation as well as a much better simulation of the hypothetical LOCA transient oxidation experiments [11] in ORNL than that by the code based on the parabolic rate correlation. This indicates that the developed model can accurately simulate the cladding oxidation during a LOCA transient.