Molten salt high throughput electrochemistry/corrosion lab
The molten salt high throughput electrochemistry/corrosion lab is managed by Dr. Yafei Wang. In this laboratory, we are working to understand the corrosion of high entropy alloys in molten salt for identifying a corrosion resistant structural material which can be used in molten sat cooled nuclear reactors and solar power plants. All of our experiments are performed inside a glovebox as shown in Fig.1 to avoid the influences of oxygen and moisture on the corrosion.
Due to the urgent needs for molten salt technology deployment, there are tons of structural materials needed to be tested on its corrosion compatibility. To solve that, we use additive manufacturing to print high entropy alloy “chips” with different compositions on a build plate (Fig.2 (a)). Each “chip” with selected composition can be printed in a few minutes which greatly accelerates the alloy manufacturing process. To perform high throughput corrosion test, salt pills with the diameter of about 1 cm and weight of less than 1 g will be placed on the top of each printed chip and melted to be droplets (Fig.2 (b)) by a heating plate (Fig.3). During the corrosion test, a self-designed electrochemical probe will be inserted automatically into the melted salt pills one by one using an auto sampler (Fig.4) every few hours to in-situ monitor the concentrations of dissolved corrosion products. The electrochemical signal will be obtained by a potentiostat purchased from AMETEK (Fig.5).
