MateriAlZ Seminar: Rishi Pillai
Friday, November 19, 2021, 11:00 am MST
Rishi Pillai
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
"High temperature corrosion: Ignore at your own peril"
Zoom link | Passcode: 724749
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Abstract
A synergetic integration of diverse technologies such as nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind and solar is envisioned in the future to meet the continuously increasing energy demands in the power generation and transportation sectors while simultaneously addressing CO2 reduction targets. High-temperature material solutions for these technologies will be required to withstand higher than usual operating temperatures and harsher environments. Consequently, high-temperature corrosion will be a critical life-limiting degradation mechanism that must be addressed early on in alloy development procedures. From a development standpoint, the lifetimes are too long for experimental verification and meeting the requirements of expected lifetimes at reasonable costs is only possible through accurate and validated computational methodologies. This talk will provide a brief overview of high-temperature corrosion, focus on the applicability of existing computational approaches to predict corrosion-induced degradation and delve into the future of computation-assisted materials development. The practical applicability of the existing physics-based model in describing the microstructural evolution in high-temperature alloys as a function of alloy/coating composition, environment (air, steam, supercritical CO2, molten halide salts), time and temperature will be demonstrated with a few case studies. Long-term experimental data combined with a detailed microstructural characterization using multiple techniques were employed to validate the modeling results. The seminar will conclude with a brief outlook on the essential components of scientific aspirations in developing useful tools to predict corrosion-induced material degradation in the future to stimulate interest across a wide range of scientific disciplines.
Bio
Rishi Pillai is a research staff in the Corrosion Science and Technology group at ORNL since 2018. He received his Ph.D. in materials science from the Aachen Technical University (RWTH), Aachen, Germany in 2014. His previous experience includes working as a research associate in the High-Temperature Corrosion and Corrosion Protection group at the Julich Research Center (Forschungszentrum Julich), Germany between 2013-2018. His main research areas are the experimental and computational evaluation of the high-temperature behavior of ferritic and austenitic steels, Ni-base alloys and high-temperature corrosion/oxidation resistant coatings. The computational work includes the development of modeling methodologies to allow a physics-based prediction of corrosion-induced degradation and residual lifetime assessment.