Sliding wear behaviors of steam generator tube materials in high temperature water environment

Wear damage of steam generator tubes for nuclear power plants can cause the leakage of radioactive substances. Therefore, the evaluation of the tube integrity is very important in the view point of nuclear safety. In the present study, to investigate the effects of the applied normal load and sliding distance on wear volume in 575 K water environment, sliding wear tests were performed with Inconel 600 and 690 steam generator tube materials mated with 409 stainless steel commonly used as support plate. Based on the accumulated data, the newly modified Archard equation was proposed and then the wear coefficients of tube materials were estimated with both Archard equation and the modified Archard equation. The reliabilities, which are parameters to assess how well a model fits a set of data, for prediction of wear behaviors of Inconel 600 and 690 improved from 20.5% to 65.5% and from 38.5 to 65.3%, respectively.