NEW METHODOLOGIES FOR ASSESSING CAVITATION LOAD AND RESISTANCE OF STRUCTURAL MATERIALS AND PROTECTIVE COATINGS IN NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY. PART I. MONOFRACTIONAL APPROACH

Abstract

The paper presents a new method for assessing the cavitation load and durability of structural materials and protective coatings. To determine the cavitation load on a rotating disk or other test rig, a new method for extracting erosion loads based on tests of reference materials on a reference cavitation rig is proposed. Direct measurements of the cavitation load in a cavitation tunnel with a slot cavitator, performed using piezoelectric sensors, made it possible to obtain information on the spatial distribution of the impact load. As an analytical function for modeling cumulative erosion curves in the monofractional approach, the logarithmic formula of L. Sitnik is used, assuming that cavitation erosion is a stochastic process described using fatigue theory. Armco iron is chosen as a reference material, in view of the weak dependence of its erosion rate on cavitation qualitative features. Therefore the local load value could have been extracted from the eroded surface profile of the Armco iron sample. Using the example of TiN coating analysis on stainless steel and VT3-1 titanium alloy, the time dependencies and threshold characteristics of their resistance were determined depending on the parameter of the density of the supplied energy.